Page:MacGrath--The drums of jeopardy.djvu/82

74 passed through the kitchen window and beckoned him to follow he demurred.

"Kitty, what the deuce is going on here?"

"I'll answer your questions when we get him into my apartment. They tried to murder him; left him there to die!"

Cutty possessed a great art, an art highly developed only in explorers and newspaper reporters of the first order—adaptability; of being able to cast aside instantly the conventions of civilization and let down the bars to the primordial, the instinctive, and the natural. Thus the Cutty who stepped out beside Kitty into the drizzle was not the Cutty she had admitted into the apartment. She did not recognize this remarkable transition until later; and then she discovered that Cutty, the suave and lackadaisical in idleness, was a tremendous animal hibernating behind a crackle shell.

Ordinarily Cutty would have declined to come through this shell, thin as it was; he liked these catnaps between great activities. But this lovely creature was Conover's daughter, and she would have the seventh sense—divination—of the born reporter. Something big was in the air. "Go on!" he said, briskly. "I'm at your heels. And stoop as you pass those hall windows. No use throwing a silhouette for somebody in those rear houses to see." … Old Tommy Conover's daughter, sure pop! … There you go, under