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 the Riviera, where rank, even if shorn of its prerogatives, is still treated respectfully? But America! Cutty's head went up. Perhaps that was it--to barter his phantom greatness for money, to dazzle some rich fool of an American girl. In that case Karlov would be welcome. But wait a moment. The chap had come in from the west. In that event there should be an Odyssey of some kind tucked away in the affair. Cutty resumed his pacing. The moment his imagination caught the essentials he visualized the Odyssey. Across mountains and deserts, rivers and seas, he followed Two-Hawks in fancy, pursued by an implacable hatred, more or less historical, of which the lad was less a cause than an abstract object. And Karlov--Cutty understood Karlov now--always span near, his hate reenergizing his faltering feet. There was evidently some iron in this Two-Hawks' blood. Fear never would have carried him thus far. Fear would have whispered, “Futility! Futility!” And he would have bent his head to the stroke. So then there was resource and there was courage. And he lay in yonder room, beaten and penniless. The top piece in the grim irony--to have come all these thousands of miles unscathed, to be dropped at the goal. But America? Well, that would be solved later. “By the Lord Harry!” Cutty stopped and struck his hands together. “The drums!”