“Get them out?” he objected, “Girl-alive, they have a right to be digging in there or they wouldn’t dare to come in force and in daylight. I’d need some authority to object before I could— Will you stay right here?”
Instead of vaulting the park wall, which at first had, seemed to be the one possible response to her demand, Pape lifted his hat and sauntered down the avenue as though bound nowhere in particular.
CHAPTER XIV—THE CREDIT PLAN
The Sheepfold in Central Park is a U-shaped structure of red brick walls and a low roof that is mostly gables. One of the wings is winter quarters for the Dorset flock. The connecting curve, the lower half of which is an archway, houses in the upper Shepherd Tom and his family. The remaining wing, although built for a different purpose, is now used as a garage for the motor cycle police. Within is parking space for all the machines in regular use in the park and some extras.
Into this garage strode Why-Not Pape, a man in a hurry. His only introduction to the policeman in charge was rather extravagant, if wordless—one made in brute Belgian. He returned Kicko’s greeting—the fact that he and the police dog were friends did the rest. It was amazing how easily his coup was carried out as planned, backed by the dog’s infallible memory.
“Which are the spare fire-crackers?” he asked the uniformed garage keeper with bluff authority. “I’m in a gasoline hurry to get up the line.”
His wait had more intensity than length. He counted upon a long-standing claim among safe-workers, of which he had been assured by that piece of human flotsam out at Hellroaring, that the “big box” in the New York Police Headquarters would be the easiest “cracked” in the city were there anything in it worth stealing. He knew it to be a fact that many never-solved robberies and murders have been “pulled” within the shadow of precinct stations; had seen substantiated in the day-by-day news the theory that the best “hide-out” is under the arresting arm of city government. And his act upon deduction meant nothing against the police. He simply wished to profit for once by his knowledge of human nature reduced to the Nth degree. Even unaided by the dog, he had expected to carry through by daring of a first-draft sort.
“What’s the case, sergeant?”
With the question the attendant member of the force waved a hand toward the sheaf of ten machines which are kept unassigned to particular “speed cops”—an emergency motive-power reserve.
Without necessity of an equivocation as to who he was, without flashing the badge of authority which he did not have—merely by using that slang term for the noisiest of motor vehicles which was in common usage in the Yellowstone as well as in New York, Pape had declared himself in his part.