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“Another job for you. Take this nag and see if he’ll go home.”
    The sergeant put Dempsey down and gingerly accepted the reins. “You know, Inspector, I never rode anything except a motorcycle….”
    “You don’t need to ride him, just walk along beside him and we’ll follow,” Miss Withers suggested.
    Burke tugged on the rein. “Come on, Plug!” Siwash rolled his eyes a little and did not move.
    Burke pulled harder. “Gitty ap, Napoleon….”
    “He’s just balky, I guess,” said the inspector. “Go on, you!” And he slapped Siwash smartly on the rump.
    It was a mistake. Siwash seemingly performed the miracle of levitation. He reared with his front feet and almost at the same instant slashed out viciously with his heels. They whizzed past the inspector’s face, neatly knocking the cigar from his mouth.
    Miss Withers vented a surprised scream and Dempsey burst into a furor of barking. But Siwash, who had had too much of the whole affair for his liking, bounded over the prostrate figure of the sergeant and disappeared almost instantly around a bend in the path.
    “Not so balky after all,” observed Miss Withers quietly. “Are you all right, Sergeant?”
    Burke climbed wearily to his feet. “Where is he, the misbegotten …” He stopped and smiled apologetically. “Guess he must of pulled a knife on me, Inspector.”
    “I’d like to get that big red plug alone …” Piper was muttering.
    “Yes, alone in the back room at headquarters, with a bright light to shine in his eyes and a rubber hose to smack in his face,” Miss Withers told him bitterly. “Anyway”—she pointed to the line of clear and definite hoofprints which led southward along the bridle path—“anyway now we can follow the horse and see where he belongs.” Dempsey barked excitedly and tugged at his leash.
    “Okay,” agreed the inspector. “But let’s get rid of the bloodhound. Burke, you know the address—take the pup home, will you?”
    Then the inspector and Miss Withers set off together down the bridle path. They were barely around the second turn when the schoolteacher stopped and grasped her companion’s arm. She was pointing down at the path. “Snakes!” she cried.
    Sure enough, a serpentine trail wound along in the mud. “Oscar, what made it?”
    “Relax, Hildegarde,” he told her wearily. “It’s the track of a bicycle tire, just a common, everyday bicycle.”
    “Oh,” she said. “Odd place for it—one would think the rider’d prefer the roadway.” They went on, trudging wearily along the path. After a while they came upon cinders, which made the going faster. Even here, still clearly marked, were the two lines of dainty hoofprints, going and returning, with the bicycle track between.
    “Observe, my dear Oscar,” pointed out Miss Withers, “that the light rain left the bridle path in excellent shape to give us a record of who—or what—passed here.” She pointed. “First came the horse, running north. Then the bicycle, presumably in the same direction. Finally, superimposed upon the other prints, we have the hoofmarks just made by the beast on his homeward gallop.”
    Piper nodded. “Hildegarde, you should have been a Boy Scout.”
    She took that as a compliment. “But Oscar, how did the bicycle return? We haven’t passed it anywhere….”
    Nor was there any sign of the bicycle as they left the park at the Sixty-sixth Street gate. Piper frowned. “I ought to know what stables are near here—walked this beat once. Thwaite’s is closest, I guess.”
    He led the way one block south. “We’ll ask there anyway….”
    But inquiry was not necessary, for outside the double doors of Thwaite’s stood a big red thoroughbred patiently waiting for someone to let him in. He moved aside as the inspector somewhat warily edged past and pounded on the panel.
    There was a long silence. “Open up, here!” roared Piper. He pounded again, harder.
    Then the top half of the door opened and a round brown