Mr. Somers, the head accountant, with a grave bow, always verified
the sealed delivery slip of the funds, and compared it with the
returned bank books, carefully filing away all these in his own
private safe with Clayton's returned list of Western and Southern
exchange.

On the sunny April morning, Randall Clayton was weary of the confining
life of the silence haunted office rooms, where he patiently bore
the strain of his grave duties, with a cautious avoidance of useless
communication, fencing him even from his fellow employees.

As he strode along the crowded street, his jaded soul yearned for
the wild majesty of the far off Montana mountains, and the untrammeled
life of the Western frontier, given up perforce, when his father's
death had left him, twelve years before, alone in the world.

"The same old daily grind," he murmured. "Oh! For one good long
gallop on the lonely prairies--a day in the forest with the antlered
elk, an afternoon among the gray boulders of the McCloud River."

He sighed as he recalled his drudging rise in business, since his
father's old partner had set his life work out before him, when
the lonely boy had finished with honor his course at Ann Arbor.

Four years at college, two with "the chief," under his own watchful
eye, and then that six years of a dragging upward pull in the New
York office had made a man of him; but, only a self-contained and
prematurely jaded man.