“And he’s gone for the more?”—Pape, rather grimly. “Well, they mustn’t find us here, that police ‘party’ of his, whatever the motive back of his invitation. The sooner we move on the safer. As a matter of fact, I’m headed for another place—a perfect hide-out. If you feel able let’s be stepping lively. If you don’t, I’ll enjoy stepping for you—that is to say, toting you.”
They started up the hillside, keeping in the brush wherever such grew, skulking low-backed across the open spaces. Although the girl scrambled after him, evidently determined not to be a drag upon the hand to which she desperately clung with her two, she lost her footing on the rock when near the top and fell face forward. Her urgent little moan that he go on without her was denied strongly by the pair of arms that gathered her up, and clasped her like a woman, not a baby, against a heart hard-hammering from more than the violent exercise. Thus did he step for her—“tote” her to sortie’s end.
She felt herself deposited upon a wooden step. Looking up, she recognized the stone block-house literally “perched” upon the top of the precipitous granite hump up which they had come.
In the inspirational light of a refuge of to-day Pape had remembered that olden fortress which he had been surveying when detected by the “quail” cop, Pudge O’Shay.
Straightening to the sheet-iron door, he tried the knob, then the comparative strength of his shoulder. But the protection so generously accorded park rovers of earlier wars seemed denied them. Investigating through one of the oblong loopholes, he saw that the door was fastened with a spring lock which could be opened without a key from inside. Straightway he gave his consideration to the fifteen-foot stone wall.
Never had the Westerner aspired to plaudits as a human fly, yet no Hellroaring cliff had been sheer enough to forbid his ascent. Pulling off his boots, he essayed the latest in difficulties stocking-footed; after several slip-backs, went over the top. The door thrown wide, he gathered Jane up and stumbled with her over a slab-like doorsill that wobbled under their weight.
“Odd,” murmured the girl looking about, “that I should be hiding from the law in this favorite relic of Grandfather Lauderdale! One of his foibles as a Grand Army veteran was to come here at sunrise on victory anniversaries and run up a flag on that staff. Some sentimental park commissioner gave him a key and he never missed an occasion.”
“Might have left some furniture scattered about—a few chaises longues and easy chairs,” Pape complained. “Still, you ought to rest easy on the fact that those get-’em specialists will never think to look for us in here.”
After making sure that the door had latched itself, he doffed his coat and spread it for her to sit on, with her back to a cleaner-than-most section of the wall. Although only the cuff of one out-flung sleeve formed his seat, he felt more comfortable, by contrast with recent rigors, than in all the long stretch of his past—or so he claimed to Jane.
The hour was the veribest of the whole twenty-four group, he reminded her. Wouldn’t she enjoy it? Evening was lowering shadows into the park. Didn’t she feel sifting into the roofless block-house the atmosphere of rest-time and peace? Outside the trees were full of birds, as busy about going to bed as the families of any flat-house in the city. Couldn’t she imagine with him that the dulled clatter rising from the streets was the rush of some great waterfall of the wild or of winds through a forest or of hoofed herds pounding over a distant plain?