"Oh, Cutty, I never was so glad to see any one!"

"What in the name of - "

"Come! We'll handle this ourselves. Hurry!" She dragged him along
by the sleeve.

"But - "

"It is life and death! No talk now!"

Cutty, immaculate in his evening clothes, very much perturbed, went
along after her. As she 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.