to-day, hunted, penniless, and
forlorn. Cutty sank back in his chair, stunned by the revelation. In
that room yonder!

CHAPTER XIV

For a long time Cutty sat perfectly motionless, his pipe at an upward
angle--a fine commentary on the strength of his jaws--and his gaze
boring into the shadows beyond his desk. What was uppermost in his
thoughts now was the fateful twist of events that had brought the young
man to the assured haven of this towering loft.

All based, singularly enough, upon his wanting to see Molly's girl for
a few moments; and thus he had established himself in Kitty's thoughts.
Instead of turning to the police she had turned to him. Old Cutty,
reaching round vaguely for something to stay the current--age; hoping
by seeing this living link 'twixt the present and the past to stay the
afterglow of youth. As if that could be done! He, who had never paid any
attention to gray hairs and wrinkles and time, all at once found
himself in a position similar to that of the man who supposes he has
an inexhaustible sum at the bank and has just been notified that he has
overdrawn.

Cutty knew that life wasn't really coordination and premeditation so
much as it was coincident. Trivials. Nothing was absolute and dependable
but death; between birth and death a series of accidents and incidents
and coincidents which men called life.

He tapped his pipe on the ash tray and stood up. He gathered the
chrysoprase and restored the stones to the canvas bag. Then he carefully
stacked the photographs and carried them to the portfolio. The green
stones he deposited in a safe, from which he took a considerable
bundle of small notebooks, returning to the desk with these. Denatured
dynamite, these notebooks, full of political secrets, solutions of
mysteries that baffle historians. A truly great journalist never writes
history as a historian; he is afraid to. Sometimes conjecture is safer
than fact. And these little notebooks were the repository of suppressed
facts ranging over twenty-odd years. Gerald Stanley Lee would have
recognized them instantly as coming under the head of what he calls Sh!

An hour later Cutty returned the notebooks to their abiding place,
his memory refreshed. The poor devil! A dissolute father and uncle,
dissolute forbears, corrupt blood weakened by intermarriage, what hope
was there? Only one--the rich, fiery blood of the Calabrian mother.

But why had the chap come to America? Why not England or th