Kitty, at a mental impasse, could only stare into the night beyond the
window. This mesmeric state endured for a minute; then a gentle and
continuous sound dissipated the spell. It was raining. Obliquely she
saw the burnt egg in the pan. The thing had happened; she had not been
dreaming.
Her brain awoke. Thought crowded thought; before one matured another
displaced it; and all as futile as the sparks from the anvil. An
avalanche of conjecture; and out of it all eventually emerged one
concrete fact. The man Was honest. His hunger had been honest; his
laughter. Who was he, what was he? For all his speech, not English; for
all his gestures, not Italian. Moribund perspectives. Somewhere that day
he had fought for his life. John Two-Hawks.
And there was the mysterious evanishment of old Gregory, whose name was
Stefani Gregor. In a humdrum, prosaic old apartment like this!
Kitty had ideas about adventure--an inheritance, though she was not
aware of that. There had to be certain ingredients, principally mystery.
Anything sordid must not be permitted to edge in. She had often gone
forth upon semi-perilous enterprises as a reporter, entered sinister
houses where crimes had been committed, but always calculating how much
copy at eight dollars a column could be squeezed out of the affair. But
this promised to be something like those tales which were always clear
and wonderful in her head but more or less opaque when she attempted to
transfer them to paper. A secret society? Vengeance? An echo of the war?
"Johnny Two-Hawks," she murmured aloud. "And he hopes we'll never meet
again!"
There was a mirror over the sink, and she threw a glance into it. Very
well; if he thought like that about it.
Here the doorbell tinkled. That would be the faithful janitor. She ran
to the door.
"Whadjuh wanta see me about, Miz Conover?"
"What has happened to old Mr. Gregory?"
"Him? Why, some amb'lance fellers carted him off this afternoon. Didn't
know nawthin' was the matter with 'im until I runs into them in the
hall."
"He'd been hurt?"
"Couldn't say, miz. He was on a stretcher when I seen 'im. Under a
sheet."
"But he might have been dead!"
"Nope. I ast 'em, an' they said a shock of some sort."
"What hospital?"
"Gee, I forgot t'ast that!"
"I'll find out. Good-night."
But Kitty did not find out. She called up all the known private and
public hospitals, but no Gregor or Gregory had been received that
afternoon, nor anybody answering his description. The fog had swallowed
up Stefani Gregor.