In her self-sufficient egoism Irene Sturgis had no mercy. She continued to ravel the thread.

“At times, dar-rling, you get too terribly eccentric for even me to—to swallow.” She gulped at the midway modified metaphor. “If you’d sent me a bunch of orchids now, by way of suggesting your gratitude for last night’s rescue from limbo, or if you’d brought around a pinkie ring with a birthstone set—diamonds are for April, you know—which mother might let me keep if I coaxed her and explained how it humiliates me always to be borrowing jewelry—I’d not have lifted a questioning lash. But to steer up a ton of beef——”

She paused to survey again the bulk of his assumed gift, but not long enough for successful interruption. “Still, one shouldn’t look a gift-cow in the mouth, I suppose. What does one feed her—him, Why-Not, and where will it sleep? His eyes are so wild, poor pretty, she looks as if it hadn’t had a good night in a week. Nice moo-moo—nice bossy!”

Despite her liberty with genders, none of her hearers failed to grasp her meaning.

“Irene” Harford interposed, “have you forgotten what your mother told you to do—rather not to do-regarding——”

His stern tone made the acquisitive little creature’s fingers tighten on Pape’s arm; also made him lean toward her with the sympathy of a shared resentment. So the family had settled it in council—at Harford’s suggestion, doubtless—that Irene, as well as Jane, must cut the Montana ineligible.

His shoulders shrugged for a bit of ignoring on his own account and his speech was all for Irene. “The critter’s too hoofed to take in to your mother, but if you’d ask her to come out on the steps——”

“Aren’t you too cute?” the girl enthused. “I’ve heard about old-time, old-country suitors listing their oxen and asses when asking their lady-love’s hand. I hope mother will get the thought back of the deed. She’s got to, even if she don’t. She’ll be startled to small bits, but I’ll drag her out and——”

Her hand slid up to his shoulder and she stood on tip-toe to confide hurriedly: “It’s all right, their telling me what not to do. When it comes to you, Peter dar-rling, I know what to do. Fortunately I have the courage of my corpuscles and I’m almost as keen about your cow as I am about——”

Before Pape suspected her intention, so all too unaccustomed was he to demonstrations of such sort, she had pressed her ripe-rouged lips against his paling own in a kiss that spoke the perquisitory passion of one young lady of to-day.

Ignore Irene? Not any more than certain other somebodies should ignore him!

As she darted off, he felt moved by the initiative of desperation toward one of the witnesses. He anchored Polkadot by dropping the reins over his head; strode toward the foot of the steps where Jane was leaning against the balustrade; lifted a look straight as a board to hers. Despite the expression of repose-at-all-costs so becoming to her perfect features, despite the frank scowl of the more favored suitor standing literally and figuratively on the same level with her, he spoke from the heart.

“Jane,” said he, “everything I have and everything I am are at your service.”

“Steer and all?” She put the question in a curiously unimpassioned voice that made him ache with its reproach.

“Steer and all—you’ll see,” he declared. “You can’t afford to doubt me, any more than I could afford to doubt the power that beast represents. Look at me with your own eyes and you’ll see that I am as incapable as the red of deceit or double-dealing toward you. Trust me, unless—You don’t want to doubt me, do you, Jane?”

Evidently Mrs. Sturgis was not accustomed to being dragged out on the pavement fronting her town house—at any rate not in negligÉe. The protests which bubbled from her lips and spilled down the steps with this latest caprice of her daughter, however, were of no avail. Irene had a firm grip on her arm and defied any attempt to assert maternal authority with a cluster of long-stemmed red roses which she brandished in her free hand.

Although Jane’s lips had moved twice, as if from desire to make Pape some reply, she was deterred by the outburst from above. He, too, turned to meet the new issue, in this case a conventional matron forced to behave in an unconventional way. Her several glances were directed down at the steer, up at the windows of such fashionable neighbors as might or might not be peering through front blinds, across into the easy, amiable grin of the Westerner voted to be too “wild” in recent family council. Her attempt to discountenance him with a stony stare combined rather pitifully with the outraged decorum and flush of fright on her face.

“Mr. Pape, w-what does this m-menagerie mean?”

“It means, madame—” with his sombrero Pape dusted a section of the pavement cement in his bow—“that I have the honor of fulfilling your urgent request. In yonder bovine I present for your inspection a copy of the Stansbury-Pape escutcheon—verily the fruit of my family tree. I trust he may meet with your approval as a genealogical guarantee.”

“But Irene said—I must say that I—I don’t understand.”

“Ma’am, Irene herself doesn’t understand, therefore cannot explain. Pray allow me to elucidate.”

He included the rest as hearers by a mandatory glance, all except the perquisitory person. She was sidling, fascinated, toward what was to her the latest in love tokens.

Drops of curiosity were wearing away the stone of the matron’s stare.

“By bovine—it’s so long since I studied Latin—are you referring to that wicked-looking cow, young man?” she demanded.

“He don’t look feline or canine or even equine—I ask you, does he, now?” Pape waved a prideful hand toward his fellow Montanan. “You enquired if I had a coat-of-arms. You remember? You seem to set store on the insignia of a fellow’s who, whence and whither. Yonder steer, ma’am, wears my escutcheon.”

“Wears it? I—I don’t seem to begin to understand you.”

“Then it is well that I am here to help you understand. Your necessity is my opportunity.” Pape thoroughly dusted another block of cement. “Note, if you please, the interrogation mark burned into the hair of the red’s right rump and the odd angle at which it is placed. That is the shield of the house of Pape.”

Whether at his words or the hand on her elbow which was inviting her closer to the hang-head exhibit in the street, Mrs. Sturgis laughed with a nervous note.

“But that is absurd! A question-mark a shield?”

“Pardon me—no more absurd than any new idea before demonstration.”

All whimsicality disappeared in the serious set of the Westerner’s face. He straightened; demanded Jane Lauderdale’s attention with a look; continued:

“To take nothing for granted, but to question everything has become my shield. With it before me, the fights I find necessary are forewon. Nobody can take me by surprise or press through my guard. Nothing—positively nothing that I want is impossible to obtain.”

This rather extravagant sounding claim Harford contested—Pape had hoped he would, while fearing he wouldn’t.

“Dear me,” he exclaimed, “you seem to be a sort of natural-born New Thoughter.”

“Not born—made.” The ranchman’s look slashed through the space between him and the Gothamite. “Out in Montana, Harfy, that escutcheon means a lot—to stock rustlers and brand-blotters and oil share fakers. Make a note of the fact that Why-Not Pape queer-questions every man that gets in his way. Few—and I don’t think you—can answer straight.”

“You don’t think—You take that back, you ill-bred bounder or I’ll—I’ll——”

With a spring from step to pavement, Harford squared off to make good his unfinished threat. His face and eyes went as red as his hair. His fingers tightened as if to the curve of a throat.

Pape met him with a well-pleased look.

Forgetful of the metropolitan scene, of those possible eyes and eyes of behind-shutter neighbors and of the fears of their own fair, the two closed in that desire-to-conquer conflict which, from primordial times through the hazy stretch of days-after-to-morrows-and-morrows, ever has been and ever shall be the lust of love. There was no preliminary feinting. From its start the fight promised to go the limit which, in this case, would be the finish.

A suppressed shriek escaped Mrs. Sturgis, then she rushed to her niece and demanded that the two be separated and the scandal of a street brawl before her house averted. Jane did not answer in words, but she threw off the clutch with which her relative was both urging and staying her, and started toward the passion-flaring pair.

Denied his throat hold by queer-question tactics, Harford settled back to a slugging match in which his heavier weight might lend him an advantage. Again, as on the park butte-top in a recent electric-lighted mill, Pape adopted grizzly form.

If any one of the excited group heard, none attended certain regardless utterances with which Irene, the while, had been wooing to win her glare-eyed gift of gratitude. Poised daintily on the curb’s edge, she was endeavoring to regale the steer with a whiff of the long-stemmed red roses which she had brought from the house.

“Here bossy, poor old bossy, see what Rene has brought out for you. My nice moo-moo. Oh, don’t shake your horns! Why not enjoy the little things in life while you may? C’mon, have a sniff on me!”

Leaning far out, she continued to tease his nostrils with her offering as the two punchers steadied the beast with remindful pulls upon the “strings” which they had about his horns.

“Sook, bossy! That’s cow language, if you get me. You’re an absolute dar-rling and I know it. You can’t scare me off with those mean glances. Understand me, I like ’em fierce. The fiercer the fonder.”

Now, it is highly improbable that the beef-brute took her dare or even grasped a word of it; more likely that the fresh scent of the roses rewoke his longing for what he had smelled and striven toward and failed to attain on his first whiff of Central Park. Or perhaps their color was wholly responsible—perhaps it acted as a red flag upon inherited bull instincts.

At any rate, the Stansbury-Pape escutcheon threw up his part with a violent coÖrdination of horns, head and heels. And he let out a bawl that announced to the humans about him and their neighbors all his return in spirit to the wild. The tumult of the moment opened with a wild-eyed charge upon the nearer of the attendant punchers. So sudden was this that it could not be avoided—both mount and man “bit” the asphalt. In falling, the unfortunate had sufficient presence of mind to throw off the hitch of rope about his saddle horn and save himself being burned in the tangle of hemp.

Half free, the red torpedo started in ponderous pursuit of a Fire Department runabout that chanced at the moment to clang a right-of-way for him up the avenue. The puncher still attached braced his cayuse to throw the steer when the slack of his rope was taken up. This proved a tactical error. While he did not over-rate the strength and willingness of his mount, he did that of the lariat. At the severance of its strands, the reddest wearer of the Queer Question Brand was quite free and going strong in the general direction of Harlem. The trailing length of one rope and fragment of the other seemed to urge him into increased efforts to outrun them. His head held high. His horns tossed threateningly. His nostrils snorted acceptance of the invitation of the grass.

At the beginning of the steer’s initiative the issue of East vs. West had been unanimously postponed. Pape had sprung to his thrown aide, dragged him from under the floundering horse and made sure that the leg which had been caught was not seriously injured.

“Jane—Mrs. Sturgis, won’t you——”

His appeal to the New Yorkers, started in words and finished in gesture, consigned the man injured within their gates—had they had any gates—to their mercy. Ordering the puncher of the tactical error to follow, he lofted into his own saddle and was off in pursuit of his imported beef on the hoof.

Scarcely three minutes later—certainly not more—Mrs. Helene Sturgis stood deserted upon her front steps, staring up the world-famed highway after the strangest chase which she, at least, had witnessed in its history. She was all a-tremble from the various and violent protests she had shrilled—to Jane, to Harfy, to Irene. Her hands were clutched together in remonstrance over what had been. Her face was drawn with terror over what was. Keen was her dread of what might be. A prairie steer scarcely could run amuck in the heart of New York without spreading more or less havoc. And the responsibility—would her own innocent child, through participation in the pursuit, be forced to share in that?

On the sidewalk below, the injured puncher was feeling his leg, the pain wincing his weathered face. She heard some one come out the door above.

“Jasper?”

“Yes, madame.”

She had the butler help the man into the house and herself followed up the steps. At the top she turned; shivered in the warm spring air; lifting hand to brow, again strained her gaze up the Avenue.

That her niece, whom she expected always to be dependable, should have caught the epidemic wildness of this Westerner—that Jane should have leaped her horse and started at top speed after him! And that Mills Harford, after following and overtaking her, should prove too afraid of her temper forcefully to stop her! Worst of all that her own Irene should join the disgraceful and dangerous street race and actually outrun the other two!

A hand against a heart heavy with foreboding the matron pressed as she looked.... The cow-creature—it was swerving from the straight-away.... Was it about to—Yes, it did clear the park wall at a bound.... The two hurdling after probably were Pape and the puncher. A mother’s hope that the next horse to top the hazard might be Jane’s died in a groan as she caught the red flash of the roses to which her daughter had clung through all the excitement of the start.... Would she land safely on the other side—this young lady of to-day who once had been her babe-at-breast?

Evidently Jane, too late to save the situation, but in good time to save herself a possible fall, had come into some degree of discretion. She and Mills were turning in at a convenient gate.

What was it the Why-Not person had said? “Nothing—positively nothing is impossible.”... Perhaps it would do no harm to go inside and pray. There was nothing else a woman of yesterday could do. It might help to bring them all back alive and unbroken as to bones. These modern young folks, what were they coming to—more appropriately, where were they going?