When the white blaze faded out—when the trees ceased to be circle-marked—neither man nor mount would have considered a stop. From appearances, no one ahorse had left that gorge before by that route; probably no one would again. On and up they moved, enticed by the mystery of what might or might not be lurking at the top.
Across a flat bristling with rhododendrons and so small as to be accounted scarce more than a ledge, trotted the cow-pony; insinuated his way through a fringe of Forsythia brush just beginning to yellow; dug his shoe-prongs into the earth of a steep, but easier slope. Pape, looking back, could see through the tree tips a mountainous range of turreted peaks and flat-topped buttes, terminating on the north in a massive green copper dome. The height gained, he was interested by the discovery of an unroofed blockhouse of rough stone that literally perched upon a precipitous granite hump. Was it a relic of Indian war-path days? Had the flintlocks of pioneers spit defiance through the oblong loopholes inserted at intervals in its walls? He wondered.
“You wouldn’t be homesick at all, Dot, if your imagination had the speed of your hoofs,” he leaned down to adjure his horse, after a habit formed on many a lonelier trail. “Can’t you just hear those old-fashioned pop-guns popping? No? Well, at least you can hear the dogwood yapping? Look around you, horse-alive! Don’t this scene remind you of home? Of course you’ve got to concentrate on things near at hand. But trust me, that’s the secret of living to-day—concentration. Look far afield and you’ll lose the illusion, just as you bark your shins when you mix gaits.”
A shrill trill startled both; centered Pape’s attention on the brush that edged the mesa to his right. But the quail he suspected was too expert in the art of camouflage to betray its presence except by a repetition of his call, closer and more imperative than the first.
“That bird-benedict must be sized like a sage hen to toot all that. Maybe he’s a Mormon and obliged to get noisy to assemble his wives.”
This sanguinary illusion, along with varied others which had preceded it, was dissipated a moment after its inception and rather rudely. The trill sounded next from their immediate rear. Both horse and rider turned, to see pounding toward them a man uniformed in blue, between his lips a nickel-bright whistle, in his right hand a short, but official-looking club. Of the pair of Westerners who awaited the approach, one at least remembered that he was two-thousand-odd miles away from the Hellroaring home range of his over-worked imagination; appreciated that he was in for a set-to with a “sparrow cop” of America’s most metropolitan police.
Gasping from the effort of hoisting his considerable avoirdupois up the height and sputtering with offended dignity, the officer stamped to a stand alongside and glared fearsomely.
“What you mean, leaving the bridle path? Say, I’m asking you!”
“Horse bolted.” Pape parried with a half-truth—Dot had sort of bolted up the rocks.
The official eye fixed derisively on the angora chaps; lifted to the blue flannel shirt; stopped at the stiff-brimmed white Stetson. “One of them film heroes, eh?”
“Film? Not me. You’ll be asking my pardon, brother, when you know who——”
The officer interrupted with increasing belligerence: “Trying to play wild and woolly and never been acrost the Hudson River, like as not! You take an out-and-outer’s advice. Put away them Bill Hart clothes and ride a rocking-chair until you learn to bridle a hoss. I’ve a good mind to run you in. Why didn’t you mind my whistle?”
“Honest, Mr. Policeman, I thought you were a quail. You sounded just like——”
“A quail—me? I’ll learn you to kid a member of the Force. You climb down offen that horse, now, and come along with me over to the Arsenal.”
“Why Arsenal? Do you think I’m a big gun or a keg of powder?”
“The Arsenal’s the 33d Precinct Station House. Fresh bird yourself!”
The officer’s look told Pape even louder than his words that the time for persiflage had passed, unless he really wished a police court interval. He had indulged his humor too far in likening this overgrown, formidable “sparrow” to the most succulent tidbit of the fowl species. He brought into play the smooth smile that had oiled troubled waters of his past.
“No offense meant, I assure you. It happens that my hoss and I are from exceeding far across the river you mention—Montana. We’ve found your big town lonesome as a sheep range. Fact, we only feel comfortable when we’re sloping around in this park. Parts of it are so like Hellroaring that——”
“I can pinch you again for cussin’, young feller!”
“You can’t pinch a citizen for merely mentioning the geographical name of his home valley, which same you can find on any map. As I was about to say, there are spots in this stone-fenced ranch that make us think of God’s country. Just now, when we saw a trail blazed with white circles, we plumb forgot where we were and bolted.”
The guardian of law and order continued to look the part of an indignant butt of banter.
“A blazed trail in Central Park, New York?” he scoffed. “You’ll show me or you’ll come along to the station!”
“Why not a blazed trail—why not anything in Central Park?”
Peter Pape put the question with that grin, half ironic and wholly serious, with which he had faced other such posers in his past. To him, the West come East, this park was the heart of the town—Gotham’s great, green heart. By its moods it controlled the pulse of rich and poor alike; showed to all, sans price or prejudice, that beauty which is the love of nature made visible; inspired the most uncouth and unlearned with the responses of the cultured and the erudite.
The human heart was capable of any emotion, from small to great. Any deed, then, might be done within the people’s park.
CHAPTER II—A TIP FROM THE TOP
Peter Pape swung from the saddle and, pulling the reins over Polkadot’s head, led the law’s “strong arm” down the heights over the way he had ascended on horseback. A glance into the hectic visage beside him offered the assurance that, while not yet under arrest, he soon would be if he failed to find those circle-marked trees.
“The town that owns this park, now, should be the last to blame us for mistaking our locale,” he took occasion to argue amongst their downward stumbles. “It’s like a regular frontier wilderness—almost. There’s nothing much around to break the solitude except people—only about six or seven million of them per day. And there’s nothing to break the silence except——Listen to that never-ending drone! Don’t it sound for all the world like the wind playing through pines?”
“Sounds more like motors to me—Fords and automobiles a-playing over macadam,” grumbled the guard.
But Why-Not Pape was not easily to be diverted from his dream. “And yon green dome to the north of the range—” he lifted eyes and a hand—“just couldn’t look more like the copper stain on a butte within binocular range of my Hellroaring ranch house.”
“Lay off of that irreverence. You can’t cuss at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine—not in my presence, you can’t!”
The topmost of the trail-blazing trees Pape offered as Exhibit “A” for the defense. The line of them, when sighted from below, looked to be leading, he declared.
An off-duty grin humanized the official countenance. “White paint spots tell the tree gang to saw down dying trunks and haul the logs to the saw-mill over in North Meadow. If you was to follow all of them as bridle signs you’d get yourself and that gingham nag of yourn sentenced for life. This once I’m going to try to believe you’re as green as you look. C’mon down to the path.”