He swung from saddle with the last panted period, expecting the girl to follow his example. When, on her delay, he hurried to her assistance, he saw that she was leaning upon the nose of her saddle, her lips pale as her cheeks. Bodily he lifted her to the ground and found her a temporary rest against a path-side stump. After turning the horses about, he looped their reins and, with a back-to-stable slap upon Polkadot's splotched rump, started them down-park.
White-circle death sentences painted upon withering elms, poplars and birches pointed the course over which he half-carried the "sweet pardner" exhausted by excitement too long sustained. When they came upon a brush-fringed depression, which at home he would have called an elk bed, he bade her take to cover; himself crawled back to spy out the movements of the pursuit.
At the top of the last rise in the bridlepath, the police riders met the empty saddlers. They sounded greatly disturbed. From such scraps of loud-pitched conversation as carried, Pape pieced together their assumption that the fugitives had abandoned their mounts for a short-cut to the west wall. He saw two of the trio dismount and begin combing the brush in that direction, while the third remained on guard over the five horses.
All of this was fortuitous in that it promised time for them to reach a definite objective which he had in mind--a place where the spent girl might rest and both hide until darkness draped the park for their escape. His sense of semi-security weakened, however, on noticing that a police dog was of the party; that the "mounty" on hostler duty was sending the animal up the brushy hill on the east--their side of the path. Slithering back into the depression, he awaited for several long-drawn minutes the alarm-bay of the canine officer, dreading the worst, yet not wishing to share that dread unnecessarily.
Jane first felt the spell of the two brown eyes focused upon them through a patterned veil of brush. Nervously she caught his arm; pointed. Soon a long, black-tipped nose rent the veil, sniffing through a fountain spray of vine abloom with pale blue, bell-shaped flowers.
The police dog had located them. But why the delay of his bayed alarm? A moment more and he answered for himself. With suppressed whines and insinuating wriggles there broke from the clutch of the vine none other than Kicko of the Sheepfold, his sense of duty evidently overcome by delight at the reunion.