The real-estater, who was showing superb riding form, turned in his saddle and leaned to listen, as though he had not heard. But he scarcely could have failed to see the noose over Pape’s head circling rounder and faster with his onward rush. His next move was unaccountable. As the Montanan’s rope slithered suddenly straight ahead from an aim calculated to pick up the steer’s hind hoof for a fall, the Gothamite spurred his mount and cut directly across it. The throw fell short, borne out of line by the body of Harford’s black thoroughbred. In the moment lost to free it from entanglement the steer took to the rocks with the agility of a mountain goat.
At last Pape whipped his gun from its under-coat holster. Infuriated by this second exhibition of what was either extreme stupidity or deliberate malice, he was tempted to throw down on the human rather than the splendid Queer Question specimen, now well up the height, which he had wished to take alive.
But he did not press the trigger. Although a steer more or less was incidental in his life and cruelty to animals was not to be weighed in the same scales with the catastrophes possible in a continuance of the stampede, second thought had advised the improbability of inflicting a vital wound in that huge body with a revolver shot from the rear. Anything short of a coup de grace would serve only to increase potential dangers.
Through the untangling and winding of his rope the Westerner voiced no complaint of Harford’s interference, but his face went chalk-white beneath its burn and his jaw set hard. His one direct glance read triumph in the New Yorker’s grin and decided him to finish the battle begun on the Sturgis front steps whenever and wherever he could spare the time. Just now——
“Wait for me here—all of you,” he commanded the three.
Straightway he put Polkadot to the height.
There is an abruptness and complexity about the upheaval of primary rock marking the park’s center that has been of advantage to renegades since that great playground’s inception in the late 50‘s. Although lately most of the caves have been electric-lighted and railings placed on the more dangerous cliff-edge paths, there remain dribbling recesses and shadowy spaces between trap-rock bowlders which suggest hide-outs. This physical condition now favored the Queer Question outlaw; enabled him to disappear from sight before Pape had resumed the chase.
The painted pony, used to rocky going about the borders of the home ranch, did not hesitate over essay of the goat trail into the park’s rough heart taken by the red. In the upward scramble, his rider shifted weight in the saddle according to the conformation. Ultimately, if by devious ways, they gained the highest point in Manhattan’s eight-hundred-forty acre “paradise”—the snub-nosed pinnacle that lies off Seventy-ninth Street.
Drawing rein, Pape rose in the stirrups and scanned the upturned region. From near to far, until his gaze encompassed the bench-studded walks and auto-crowded roadways on its skirts, he noted all details. So remindful of his own Yellowstone in physical features was this tamed wild-wood—and yet so different!
Within its comparatively cramped quarters more love—as that emotion is known to park-habitués—than he had seen in the whole vast West was on display. The turfed stretches were safety-razored, rather than allowed to grow nature’s full beards. The only furred creatures in evidence—except chipmunks and squirrels—were worn about the shoulders of fair bipeds instead of prowling on four feet, uncured, through the underbrush. From the steel framework of a new sky-scraper that rose like a fire-stripped forest on the east to the turreted peaks of a range of apartment houses on the west, the scene invited comparison in detail.