Johnnie stepped down. His
feet slid from under him and he rolled to the curb across the wet
asphalt. Slowly he got up and tested himself for broken bones. He was
sure he had dislocated a few hips and it took him some time to persuade
himself he was all right, except for some bruises.

But Johnnie free had no idea what to do. He was as helpless as Johnnie
imprisoned in the flying cab. Of what Clay's plan had been he had not
the remotest idea. Yet he could not go home and do nothing. He must
keep searching. But where? One thing stuck in his mind. His friend
had mentioned that he would like to get a chance to call the police to
find out whether Kitty had been rescued. He was anxious on that point
himself. At the first cigar-store he stopped and was put on the wire
with headquarters. He learned that a car supposed to be the one wanted
had been driven into Central Park by the police a few minutes earlier.

Johnnie's mind carried him on a straight line to the simplest decision.
He ran across to Fifth Avenue and climbed into a bus going uptown. If
Kitty was in Central Park that was the place to search for her. It did
not occur to him that by the time he reached there the car of the
abductors would be miles away, nor did he stop to think that his
chances of finding her in the wooded recesses of the Park would not be
worth the long end of a hundred to one bet.

At the Seventy-Second Street entrance Johnnie left the bus and plunged
into the Park. He threaded his way along walks beneath the dripping
trees. He took a dozen shower baths under water-laden shrubbery.
Sometimes he stopped to let out the wild war-whoop with which he turned
cattle at the point in the good old days a month or so ago.

The gods are supposed to favor fools, children, and drunken men.
Johnnie had been all of these in his day. To-night he could claim no
more than one at most of these reasons for a special dispensation. He
would be twenty-three "comin' grass," as he would have expressed it,
and he hadn't taken a drink since he came to New York, for Clay had
voted himself dry years ago and just now he carried his follower with
him.

But the impish gods who delight in turning upside down the best-laid
plans of mice and men were working overtime to-night. They arranged it
that a girl cowering among the wet bushes bordering an unfrequented
path heard the "Hi--yi--yi" of Arizona and gave a faint cry for help.
That call reached Johnnie and