Chapter 2

Four o’clock drew near—an orderly, decorous evening quitting time. Mechanically Officer Corcoran passed off the first twenty minutes of his final half hour on duty.

At the beginning of the concluding ten minutes, however, his spirit perked up. He gave his badge a furtive rub. He wiped his humid brow and straightened his cap. Soon, very soon now, it would be time to roll up those obstructive lines of east and west traffic.

All afternoon Corcoran had been anathematizing his lamentably inferior birth, breeding, and ancestry. At the high noon moments he had resolved to be bespeaking the little lady this same evening; but as four o’clock approached he was merely a uniformed Irish peasant with humility clogging his initiative.

At ten minutes to four an attenuated rural truck driver with ragged chin whiskers and an untrustworthy foot on the gas got into a traffic jam some four blocks from Officer Corcoran’s post. His foot reached for the brake, found the accelerator, and pushed. He cried “Whoa!” and “Gee-haw!” in a panicky voice, but the nose of his battered truck kept right on ascending the slanting guy wire attached to a telephone pole.

The crated animal in the body of the truck remained penned until the truck attained an angle of sixty degrees. Then she went crashing over and out of the broken crate into the narrow, shut-in spaces of urban office buildings and four-alarm fires.

When the driver’s chin whiskers had been untangled from the remnants of a shattered radiator and the guy wire, their owner did not for some time take an active interest in his smashed crate. He was probably the only individual among the polyglot population of that immediate neighborhood who was familiar with the personal habits of the escaped animal; so the cow caused mild consternation as she wound her way over the hard-paved lea of Eighty-Fourth Street.

At that moment the silky little roadster came to a stop with its front wheels exactly on the sidewalk dead line. A tired little quirk at the corner of the girl’s mouth made her evening smile more wistful than ever before.

Corcoran let east and west traffic flow along far beyond its rightful time. South-bound motorists alongside and behind the red roadster honked profane horns. Corcoran looked them blandly in the eye and told them where to stay.

Now or never, he decided. The girl’s musical siren joined the raucous insult; but its tone was melody in Corcoran’s ears.

“Come on—come on—come on!” it said.

Behind him east and west traffic was tangling. Suddenly a new sound crept through the squawk and grind—something utterly alien to that metropolitan atmosphere.

“Moo-oo!” bawled a deep, insistent voice.

Corcoran glanced over his shoulder.

With her forefeet braced wide apart and bewilderment in her great brown eyes, the wandering cow had arrived at one of the world’s four thousand, four hundred and forty-four busiest corners. (Figures supplied by any chamber of commerce.)

Officer Corcoran swallowed his Don Juan impulse, choked, grew red in the face, and lost his poise. A torrent of Gaelic Americanese flooded to his lips. He waved his arms.

“Shoo-oo, ye domned baste!” he yelled.

The cow only braced her forefeet more firmly and eyed the abusing policeman with mild surprise.

“Moo-oo-oo-oo!” she said with doleful emphasis.

A two-ton truck attempted to get by on the wrong side and ripped the fender off a Lincoln. The swarthy driver got down.

“Ita happen lika dis, you domba-headed—”

A choleric fat man climbed from behind the wheel of the Lincoln and waddled toward the truck driver. The truck and the Lincoln made a perfect block.

“Moo-oo-oo-oo-oo!” pleaded the cow, addressing Officer Corcoran.

“Gwan! Git! Ye’re blockin’ the strate, ye slab-sided moo-ron, ye!” shouted Corcoran, frantically waving ineffectual arms.

He saw a piece of rope dangling from the offside crumpled horn. He seized the rope and tugged. Nothing came of it.

“Moo-oo-oo-oo-oo!” repeated the cow, putting upon Officer Corcoran’s broad shoulders the burden of the world, or at least of six blocks in four directions of jumbled traffic, which perhaps is worse.

“Git ’er some hay!” squealed the high-pitched voice of an anemic-looking taxi driver.

“I’ll be afther gittin’ ye some——”

Corcoran remembered too late. The girl’s roadster had sneaked over the dead line. For a desperate minute all he could see was the liquid depths of a pair of brown eyes framed by wisps of golden red.

Hanging on to the rope, Corcoran got to one side of the cow and shoved. A mighty man was the policeman. The cow’s hoofs slid along the hard pavement. He drew her head close to his traffic signal post and half-hitched the rope around it.

“Moo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo!”

The cow was getting into full voice. Long drawn and plaintive, her cry of distress fell upon the heedless ears of the unrighteous urbanites.

With one hand Corcoran held the rope around the iron standard. With the other he gesticulated the Lincoln and the two-ton truck out of their jam, and got east and west traffic moving past him.

Somewhere to the northward a fire siren split the air.

“Ye’d have made of a airyplane to be crossin’ here!” groaned Corcoran.

Jeers and jests, advice and what-not, were being hurled at him by passing motorists. All the time the silver-winged figure on the radiator of the silky roadster was poked as close to the flowing stream of cross travel as the girl dared.

Corcoran wondered vaguely how it would seem to go back to pavement pounding on some outlying beat.

“Moo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo!”

In the distance the fire sirens were circling the jam.

“Moo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo!”

A woman driver, from whom emanated a musky perfume strong enough to overcome almost any barnyard odor, stopped her car between the traffic signal and the roadster. Then she tried to strip three sets of gears, but the auto maker knew his lady drivers. The gears stood the strain and killed the engine.

“Moo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo!”

Officer Corcoran hung on. A low-browed hawker, piloting a tin boiler, reached from his hip and extended a long brown twist of tobacco toward the policeman.

“Here, youse!” he offered. “Dey chews a cud, mister!”

Officer Corcoran could not hold the rope and kill him. That alone saved the hawker’s life.