Yes, Kicko was a police dog, the gift of a returned army captain and the only herder of his breed in captivity. The park collie, in active service for years, had been about ready for retirement at the time of the foreigner’s arrival. A short chain attached to the swivel collars on the necks of both had enabled the old Scot to teach the young Belgian the trade of disciplining woolly quadrupeds instead of two-legged humans.
“I, for one, don’t hope to meet a better policer in this world and I sure don’t expect to in the next,” the owner boasted. “He’s got a whole repertory of tricks that he’s worked out for his own amusement, besides knowing by heart all the dog A-B-C’s, such as shaking hands, speaking and fetching things. One of the most useful things he does is going for my lunch noontimes. He brings it nice and hot in a tin pail from my house by the wall yonder. There’s just one trouble about him, though—eh, old side Kick? If he meets up with one of the many friends he’s made, or even if he takes a special shine to somebody new—Kicko’s one fault is his sociability—he’ll like as not present my meal to some one that ain’t half as hungry or as entitled to it as I.”
“We’ll meet again.”
So Pape assured the shepherd pair on continuing his ride. He wished that all the folks he met were as friendly and as easy to understand as they. By comparison, for instance, each and every member of that dressed-up party of Gothamites into whose midst he had insisted himself the other night seemed doubly complex.
His attitude had been plain as day; theirs, both separately and as a whole, incomprehensible. And since that evening, the conduct of all had been as misleading as his had been direct. This was the afternoon of the third ineffectual after day. It was all right for handsome fellows like the traffic cop to advise him to do something that would “make ’em take notice.” He had done it—done it so well that they had noticed him enough to decide not to notice him. To him the situation seemed to call for some deed even more noticeable. Again, what? Leaving the pace to the piebald, he brisked along in review.
At the enthusiastic hour of six a.m. that morning after sighting Society, he had risen and rigged himself to do and dare on the high-seas of adventure. Any idea of adhering to the original “slow and steady” stipulation of his experiment not already quashed by first sight and sound of Miss Lauderdale must have been ruled out by sub-consciousness during his brief sleep. Slow and steady would have been proper enough in almost any other conceivable case of discovering whether a woman was the woman. But as applied to Jane, any method other than gun-fire quick seemed somehow a reflection on her. An excellent rule, no doubt—slow and steady. She, however, was super-excellent—an exception to any rule.
Realization that he was essaying rather an early start had struck him as he steered a course through Mr. ——or Mrs. Astor’s fleet of scrub ladies, tugging at their brush anchors over the seas of Jersey-made marble, evidently about ready to call it a night’s voyage. He had left his berth without any call, as six a.m. long had been and doubtless long would remain his hour for setting sail into the whitecaps of each new day.
So transformed was The Way outside that he scarcely could recall its nocturnal whiteness or gayety. Strict business ruled it. Luggage-laden taxis sped toward or from the ports of early trains. Surface cars demanded blatantly, if unnecessarily, the right o’ way. Motor trucks groaned hither and yon with their miseries of dripping ice, jangling milk cans, bread, vegetables—what not. Only the pavements were empty at that hour. Blocks and blocks of them stretched out, practically uncontested.
A moment he “lay-to” for an upward survey of the greeting he had bought from himself to himself, which last evening had seemed the howdy-doo of Destiny. It wasn’t so conspicuous in daytime with the lights off, although the contractor had been clever about blocking in behind the incandescents so that the letters within the bouquet border still were legible. Even had they not been, he shouldn’t have felt disappointed. To every electric sign its night, as to every dog his day! Wasn’t he now the gayest dog that ever believed in signs? And wasn’t this to be his day?
More often than not breakfast to Pape was a matter of bacon, coffee and buckwheat cakes. Although the more expensive restaurants along The Way were, like the lobby of his hotel, still in process of being scrubbed out, he soon found a chop-house ready to “stack” for him. At table he ate rather abstractedly, his mind and most of his fingers engaged with the sheaf of morning papers collected during his walk.