It was the "short day" of the week's business, and the usual route
for making his bank deposit lay before him. Down University Place
to Eighth Street he was bent, thus avoiding the Broadway crush,
and over to the shaded counting rooms of the Astor Place Bank.

Clayton's mind was concentrated, as usual, upon his important
business. Few of the neighbors in the great office building knew of
the vast interests represented by the modest sign "Western Trading
Company."

Certain gray-bearded bookkeepers, a couple of brisk correspondents,
a stony-faced woman stenographer, with a couple of ferret-eyed
office boys were the office force, besides the travelling manager
and Mr. Randall Clayton, the cashier and personal representative of
the absent "head," who rarely left his Detroit home to interfere
with the well-oiled movements of the "New York end."

But daily, rain or shine, Mr. Randall Clayton himself took his
way to the bank to deposit the funds to meet their never-ceasing
outflow of Western exchange. There was an air of grave prosperity
in the sober offices of the great cattle company which impressed
even the casual wanderer.

Silence and decorum marked all the transactions of the weekly
messengers, paying in the heavy accounts of the hundreds of New York
butchers who drew their daily supplies from these great occidental
cattle handlers. The various departments of the great business were
always kept as sealed books to each other, and only Emil Einstein,
Clayton's own office boy, knew how much treasure was daily packed
away into that innocent looking portmanteau.