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CHAPTER I—SOME PLACE LIKE HOME

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The trail spilled into a pool of shadows at the bottom of the gorge. As if doubtful of following it, the lone rider in chaps and a flannel shirt drew up for a “breathing.” This was gratefully advantaged by his mount. Evidently they had come at speed, whatever the distance, for the reins were lathered and foam flecked the bit corners.

The man removed his white sombrero and mopped his brow with a purple bandanna. The fingers with which he combed back his moist thatch nicely matched the hair in color—sunburn brown. His head bulged slightly at the back, but was balanced on a neck and shoulders splendidly proportioned. His rather plain face was not covered with stubble or mustache—cheek bones high, jaw sloping in at an angle, nose straight, lips thin by contrast with their width.

While he rests in his saddle, every pore of him exuding healthfully to the midsummer heat of an unusual spring, meet “Why-Not” Pape, of Hellroaring Valley, Montana. But don’t expect to understand—not at first hand grasp—how one christened Peter Stansbury Pape some thirty-odd years before, had come by his interrogatory sobriquet. No more could you have seen in his expression excuse for the pace to which he had put his horse. His eyes—the best of his features—looked pleased and told of peace with the world; gray, with dark lashes and irises, they scanned the granite wall rising sheer from the trail-side. Sighting a bull snake that peered down at him from its crevasse, both of them smiled and one amiably winked.

You must have been something of a psychoanalyst—able to go below the surface of day-time and sleep-time dreams—to have realized the unreliability in this case of surface indications. Only by such super-sight could you have seen that Why-Not Pape merely appeared to be peaceful and pleased. As a matter of fact, his head and his heart were heavy with disappointment. But then, a subject so deep and personal shouldn’t be broached at this first formal introduction.

Meet also, if you please, Polkadot Pape, a cross-bred cow-pony who soon could quip the interest of any horse-worthy he-man and who, by virtue of his weird and wicked style of beauty, could command the admiration of the fair. Had you stood on the trail before him and made the slightest friendly overture, he would have bent a foreleg—the right one—and offered you a hoof-shake without so much as a nudge from the rider who most times was his master-mind. Contrary to the suggestion of his given name, his coat was not dotted; rather, was splotched with three colors—sorrel and black on a background of white. The extra splotch took him out of the pinto class and made him a horse apart. And always he gaited himself with the distinctive style of the bold, black spot beneath his left eye. This late afternoon, however, despite the toss of his head and swish of his long white tail, his manner, like his man’s, was superficial—the mere reflex from a habit of keeping up appearances. Circumstances over which he had no control darkened around him like a swarm of horse-flies.

Below a shadow pool lured. Beyond, the thin trail beckoned. Pape glanced upward. A white circle upon a dying elm—one of a group that struggled for their lives up over the rocks forming the east side of the gorge—caught his eye. Above he saw a second white circle upon a half-withered red birch; still higher, a third upon a bald cypress. Aware that no elm, birch, or cypress, alive or half alive or dead, reproduced perfect white circles on its trunk, he decided that these had been painted there with a purpose by the hand of man.

His desire to follow a trail so oddly blazed was indulged as quickly as born. The caress of one knee against saddle leather and the lightest lift of rein notified his tricolored steed. Polkadot sprang from the beaten path into an upward scramble over the rocks. The going would have advised the least astute of mountain goats to watch its step. But Dot was sure-footed from long practice over the boundary barriers of Hellroaring Valley.

When the white blaze faded out—when the trees ceased to be circle-marked—neither man nor mount would have considered a stop. From appearances, no one ahorse had left that gorge before by that route; probably no one would again. On and up they moved, enticed by the mystery of what might or might not be lurking at the top.

Across a flat bristling with rhododendrons and so small as to be accounted scarce more than a ledge, trotted the cow-pony; insinuated his way through a fringe of Forsythia brush just beginning to yellow; dug his shoe-prongs into the earth of a steep, but easier slope. Pape, looking back, could see through the tree tips a mountainous range of turreted peaks and flat-topped buttes, terminating on the north in a massive green copper dome. The height gained, he was interested by the discovery of an unroofed blockhouse of rough stone that literally perched upon a precipitous granite hump. Was it a relic of Indian war-path days? Had the flintlocks of pioneers spit defiance through the oblong loopholes inserted at intervals in its walls? He wondered.

“You wouldn’t be homesick at all, Dot, if your imagination had the speed of your hoofs,” he leaned down to adjure his horse, after a habit formed on many a lonelier trail. “Can’t you just hear those old-fashioned pop-guns popping? No? Well, at least you can hear the dogwood yapping? Look around you, horse-alive! Don’t this scene remind you of home? Of course you’ve got to concentrate on things near at hand. But trust me, that’s the secret of living to-day—concentration. Look far afield and you’ll lose the illusion, just as you bark your shins when you mix gaits.”

A shrill trill startled both; centered Pape’s attention on the brush that edged the mesa to his right. But the quail he suspected was too expert in the art of camouflage to betray its presence except by a repetition of his call, closer and more imperative than the first.

“That bird-benedict must be sized like a sage hen to toot all that. Maybe he’s a Mormon and obliged to get noisy to assemble his wives.”

This sanguinary illusion, along with varied others which had preceded it, was dissipated a moment after its inception and rather rudely. The trill sounded next from their immediate rear. Both horse and rider turned, to see pounding toward them a man uniformed in blue, between his lips a nickel-bright whistle, in his right hand a short, but official-looking club. Of the pair of Westerners who awaited the approach, one at least remembered that he was two-thousand-odd miles away from the Hellroaring home range of his over-worked imagination; appreciated that he was in for a set-to with a “sparrow cop” of America’s most metropolitan police.

Gasping from the effort of hoisting his considerable avoirdupois up the height and sputtering with offended dignity, the officer stamped to a stand alongside and glared fearsomely.

“What you mean, leaving the bridle path? Say, I’m asking you!”

“Horse bolted.” Pape parried with a half-truth—Dot had sort of bolted up the rocks.

The official eye fixed derisively on the angora chaps; lifted to the blue flannel shirt; stopped at the stiff-brimmed white Stetson. “One of them film heroes, eh?”

“Film? Not me. You’ll be asking my pardon, brother, when you know who——”

The officer interrupted with increasing belligerence: “Trying to play wild and woolly and never been acrost the Hudson River, like as not! You take an out-and-outer’s advice. Put away them Bill Hart clothes and ride a rocking-chair until you learn to bridle a hoss. I’ve a good mind to run you in. Why didn’t you mind my whistle?”

“Honest, Mr. Policeman, I thought you were a quail. You sounded just like——”

“A quail—me? I’ll learn you to kid a member of the Force. You climb down offen that horse, now, and come along with me over to the Arsenal.”

“Why Arsenal? Do you think I’m a big gun or a keg of powder?”

“The Arsenal’s the 33d Precinct Station House. Fresh bird yourself!”

The officer’s look told Pape even louder than his words that the time for persiflage had passed, unless he really wished a police court interval. He had indulged his humor too far in likening this overgrown, formidable “sparrow” to the most succulent tidbit of the fowl species. He brought into play the smooth smile that had oiled troubled waters of his past.

“No offense meant, I assure you. It happens that my hoss and I are from exceeding far across the river you mention—Montana. We’ve found your big town lonesome as a sheep range. Fact, we only feel comfortable when we’re sloping around in this park. Parts of it are so like Hellroaring that——”

“I can pinch you again for cussin’, young feller!”

“You can’t pinch a citizen for merely mentioning the geographical name of his home valley, which same you can find on any map. As I was about to say, there are spots in this stone-fenced ranch that make us think of God’s country. Just now, when we saw a trail blazed with white circles, we plumb forgot where we were and bolted.”

The guardian of law and order continued to look the part of an indignant butt of banter.

“A blazed trail in Central Park, New York?” he scoffed. “You’ll show me or you’ll come along to the station!”

“Why not a blazed trail—why not anything in Central Park?”

Peter Pape put the question with that grin, half ironic and wholly serious, with which he had faced other such posers in his past. To him, the West come East, this park was the heart of the town—Gotham’s great, green heart. By its moods it controlled the pulse of rich and poor alike; showed to all, sans price or prejudice, that beauty which is the love of nature made visible; inspired the most uncouth and unlearned with the responses of the cultured and the erudite.

The human heart was capable of any emotion, from small to great. Any deed, then, might be done within the people’s park.