over a small area about the banker's lips, but his cigar only partly revealed it. His eyes rarely betrayed him, and the monotonous drawl of his voice was without humorous intention.

[Pg 5]

"I'll send the combination of the safe up by the boy," he said, moving toward the door, "and you can get a bird's-eye view of the situation before lunch. Mr. Wheaton, our cashier, is away to-day, but he's familiar with these matters and will be glad to help you when he gets home. He'll be back to-night. When you get stuck call on us. And drop down about twelve thirty and go up to the club for lunch. Take it easy; you can't do it all in one day," he added.

"I hope I shan't be a nuisance to you," said the[Pg 6] younger man. "I'm going to fight it out on the best lines I know how,—if it takes several summers."

[Pg 6]

"Well, it'll take them all right," said Porter, sententiously.

Left to himself Saxton examined his new quarters, found a feather duster hanging in a corner and brushed the dirt from the scanty furniture. This done, he drew a pipe from his pocket, filled it from his tobacco pouch and sat down by the open window, through which the breeze came cool out of the great valley; and here he could see, far over the roofs and spires of the town, the bluffs that marked the broad bed of the tawny Missouri. He was not as buoyant as his last words to the banker implied. Here he was, he reflected, a man of good education, as such things go, who had lost his patrimony in a single venture. He had been sent, partly out of compassion, he felt, to take charge of investments that were admitted to be almost hopelessly bad. The salary promised would provide for him comfortably, and that was about all; anything further would depend upon himself, the secretary of the Neponset Trust Company had told him; it would, he felt, depend much more particularly on the making over by benign powers of the considerable part of the earth's surface in which his principals' money lay hidden. As his eyes wandered to one of the office walls, the black trail of a great transcontinental railroad caught and held his attention. On one of its northern prongs lay the region of his first defeat.

"Three years of life are up there," he meditated, "and all my good dollars are scattered along the right of way." Many things came back to him vividly—how[Pg 7] the wind used to howl around the little ranch house, and how he rode through the snow among his dying cattle in the 

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