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RUNAWAY’S WILD FLIGHT
DASHES INTO CAR—POLICEMAN SAVES WOMAN—COAL MAN HURT ON BIRTHDAY.
The frightening of a horse by an automobile at Twenty-first-st. and Gramercy Park yesterday caused a runaway that ended in the injuring of a man and the narrow escape of a woman, who was saved by the courageous act of a policeman. The horse ran through Twenty-first-st. to Third-ave., and then on to Avenue A, where it ran into a Belt Line car full of passengers, who were thrown into a panic.
Edward Dougherty, who owns a coal and wood yard at No. 601 East Sixteenth-st., was sixty-one years old yesterday. Before he left the house in the morning his wife told him that she had arranged for a party at the house that night to celebrate his birthday. Dougherty set out with a light heart to deliver coal and wood to his customers in the Gramercy Park district.
He was coming out of a house at Twenty-first-st. and Gramercy Park, after delivering an order, when he saw his big white horse Jack, which he had left standing, with the wagon, at the curb, rear up on his hind legs, snorting with fear at the puffpuff of a passing automobile. Before Dougherty could get to the horse he had turned and dashed down the street across Third-ave. Dougherty managed to grab the dashboard of the wagon and climb into it. The reins were dragging in the street, and the only way that he could gain control of the horse was to crawl along the shafts and grab the bridle.
This Dougherty attempted to do, but was thrown to the ground. His face was badly cut and his right shoulder dislocated. A policeman carried him into the Post Graduate Hospital.
A big crowd had gathered in the street by this time. Suddenly the horse made a dash across the tracks of the Second-ave. road. Mrs. Josephine Stillman, of No. 271 West One-hundred-and-thirty-eighth-st., who had alighted from a car, was standing in the middle of the crossing. She was right in the way of the runaway horse and the crowd shouted at her. She gazed at the coming horse, apparently unable to move. Suddenly Policeman Max Hofer, of the East Twenty-second-st. station, dashed through the crowd, grabbed the woman around the waist and carried her to one side, just as the horse dashed by. The policeman was cheered by the crowd.
Meanwhile the runaway had reached First-ave., but there a big crowd had gathered to head it off. The horse stopped before it reached the end of the block and galloped back again. When it reached Third-ave. the wagon struck an elevated road pillar and was smashed to pieces. The horse continued on to Avenue A.
A Belt Line car, containing about fifteen passengers, was just passing the crossing, and the horse ran headlong into the side of the car. Nearly every window in the car was broken by the impact.
The horse was knocked down by the collision, but rose to its feet and ran toward the river. Jean Ackerman, a driver for the Adams Express Company, and Joseph Maloney, a longshoreman, who were standing in the middle of the block, made a grab for the horse, and Ackerman succeeded in getting hold of its bridle. After being dragged several feet he managed to bring the horse to a standstill, and the animal was taken back to the woodyard uninjured, except for a few cuts.
