"Quite possibly. Vanity has its uses. It keeps us in contact with

bathtubs and nice clothes. I imagine that you would make both husband

and comrade; or you would have, twenty years ago"--without intentional

cruelty. Wasn't Cutty fifty-two?

"Kitty, you've touched a vital point. It took those twenty years to make

me companionable. Experience is something we must buy; it isn't left in

somebody's will. Let us say that I possess all the necessary attributes

save one."

"And what is that?"

"Youth, Kitty. And take the word of a senile old dotard, your young man,

when you find him, will lack many of the attributes you require. On the

other hand, there is always the possibility that these will develop as

you jog along. The terrible pity of youth is that it has the habit of

conferring these attributes rather than finding them. You put garlands

on the heads of snow images, and the first glare of sunshine--pouf!"

"Cutty, I'm beginning to like you immensely"--smiling. "Perhaps women

ought to have two husbands--one young and handsome and the other old and

wise like yourself."

Cutty wished he were alone in order to analyze the stab. Old! When

he knew that mentally and physically he could take and break a dozen

Two-Hawks. Old! He had never thought himself that. Fifty-two years;

they had piled up on him without his appreciation of the fullness of the

score. And yet he was more than a match for any ordinary man of thirty

in sinew and brain; and no man met the new morning with more zest than

he himself met it. But to Kitty he was old! Lavender and oak leaves were

being draped on his door knob. He laughed.

"Why do you laugh?"

"Oh, because--Hark!"

The two of them ran to the bedroom door.

"Olga! Olga!" And then a guttural level jumble of sounds.

Kitty's quick brain reached out for a similitude--water rushing over

ragged boulders.

"Olga!" she whispered. "He is a Russian!"

"There are Serbian Olgas and Bulgarian Olgas and Rumanian Olgas.

Probably his sweetheart."

"The poor thing!"

"Sounds like Russian," added Cutty, his conscience pricking him. But

he welcomed that "Olga." It would naturally put a damper on Kitty's

interest. "There's Harrison with the nurse."

Quarter of an hour later the patient was taken down to the ambulance

and conveyed to the private hospital. Cutty had no way of ascertaining

whether they were followed; but he hoped they would be. The knowledge

that their victim was in a near-by hospital would naturally serve to

relax the enemy vigilance temporarily; and this would permit safely and

secretly the second leg of the journey--that to his own apartment.




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