The chauffeur paid not the least attention to him.  He skidded round a corner, grazing the curb, and put his foot on the accelerator.  The car jumped forward.

The passenger, about to drop from the running-board, changed his mind.  He did not want to break a bone or two in the process of alighting.

“’F you don’t lemme off right away I’ll not pay you a cent for the ride,” Johnnie shouted.  “You got no right to pack me off thisaway.”

The car was sweeping down the wet street, now and again skidding dangerously.  The puncher felt homesick for the security of an outlaw bronco’s back.  This wild East was no place for him.  He had been brought up in a country where life is safe and sane and its inhabitants have a respect for law.  Tame old Arizona just now made a big appeal to one of its sons.

The machine went drunkenly up the street, zigzagging like a homeward-bound reveler.  It swung into Fourth Avenue, slowing to take the curve.  At the widest sweep of the arc 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.