Pape decided if possible to draft him into service against the bovine enemy.
“Spread out and turn the steer!” he shouted across the meadow. “Head him this way so I can rope him.”
Harford looked around as though he had heard. Then, instead of following directions, he rode full tilt after the beast, brandishing his hat and shouting in a manner calculated to continue the stampede.
Whether he had misunderstood through ignorance of range practice or was deliberately attempting to make more serious the predicament of one for whom he had that day shown such cordial dislike, Pape had no time to ponder. He swung Polkadot into an oblique course on the chance of preventing the runaway’s escape into that roughest cross-section of the park which begins just north of the Seventy-second-Street “parallel.”
The syncopated patter of hoofs just behind him told that Irene, too, had swerved and was carrying on. Ahead, Jane urged her mount after Harford and his ill-conceived move.
For several minutes the four-party pursuit pounded over the keep-off meadow, whose grass was being held in reserve against the hot waves of next summer, when it would be thrown open to furnish cool green couches for thousands of tenement swelterers. So unseemly was the interruption as to draw gapes of amazement from such onlookers as held the border walks and bellows of command from outraged policemen.
The pinto’s full-speed-ahead was reminiscent in terms of motion of Hellroaring days and deeds. With full realization of what the man-master expected of him, he winged across intervening spaces like a compact tornado. Pape unlimbered his lariat for a throw calculated to bring down the red for hog-tying.
While passing Jane, he shouted an order that she pull up and keep out of the scrimmage likely to attend the fight’s finish. A dozen rods farther on and almost within rope reach, he called to Harford.
“Out of the way—I’m going to hang my string on him!”
“What’s that?”