Frost’s hand flew to his ear. The howl deepened to an angry animal roar, and he emptied the rail dick’s revolver in Bell’s direction. As the bullets whistled past, Bell fired again. Frost threw down his empty gun and ran toward the stockyards. Wild-eyed steers edged away. Frost vaulted a rail fence into their midst, and the animals stampeded from him, smashing into one another.

A steer jumped over the back of another and landed on the fence, knocking over a section. As fencing fell, animals crowded through the opening, leveling another section and then another, streaming in every direction, into the rail yard, onto a road to Weehawken, and toward the piers behind Bell. In seconds, hundreds of beef cattle were milling between him and Frost. Frost shoved through them, shouting and firing a gun he had pulled from his coat.

Bell was surrounded by horn-clashing, galloping animals. He attempted to clear a space by firing in the air. But for every fear-maddened creature that shied from the gunfire, another charged straight at him. He slipped on the dung-slicked cobblestones. A heel went out from under him, and he almost lost his footing. If he went down, he would be trampled to a pulp. An enormous whiteface steer came at him—a Texas Longhorn–Hereford crossbreed he knew well from his years in the West. Ordinarily more docile than they looked, this one was knocking smaller cows out of its way like bowling pins.

Bell holstered his pistol to free his hands. Seeing nothing to lose and his life to gain if he could only get out of the herd, he jumped with lightning speed, grabbing the whiteface’s horns with both hands and twisting himself over its head and onto its back. He clamped his knees with all his strength, grabbed the shaggy tuft between its horns with a steel fist, whipped off his flying helmet, and waved it like a bronco rider’s.

The frightened bucking steer kicked its legs into a frantic gallop, shoved through the writhing mob, leaped a tumbled length of fence, and thundered back into the now empty stockyard. Bell tumbled off and staggered to his feet. Harry Frost was nowhere to be seen.

He scoured the acres of cobblestoned corrals for Frost’s trampled body, peered into sheds and under the elevated office. He had no illusions about his own escape: he had been extremely lucky, and it was highly unlikely that Frost had been as fortunate. But he found no body, or even a dropped weapon or a torn coat or a mangled hat. It was as if the murderer had taken wing.