The Midnight Passenger | Page 2

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.
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.
"It's too much to lose," he muttered, as he thought of his hardly earned
promotion, his four thousand a year, and--the future prospects. He was
the envy of his limited coterie, even though his few intimates looked
with a certain awe upon a man who was obliged to file a bond of fifty
thousand dollars for his vast pecuniary handlings.
For the great association of Western cattle men were hard taskmasters
and only the head lawyers in Detroit knew that Hugh Worthington had
annually sent in his own personal check to the Fidelity Company to pay
the dues of the bond of the son of a man to whom he had owed his own
first rise.
"It's too hard," mused his patron, "to spy on the lad and then make him
pay for it. But it has to be," he sighed. "There are the snares and
pitfalls."
Many an eye approvingly followed the stalwart young man still in the
flush of his unsapped vigor, at twenty-eight, as the tall form swept on
through the crowds of polyglot women.
There was a healthy tan on Clayton's face, his brown hair crisply curled
upon a well-set head, his keen blue eye and soldierly mustache finely
setting off a frank and engaging countenance.
The grave sense of gratitude, his place of trust, the stern admonitions of
his sententious patron, Worthington, and the counsel of his only

chum--a hard-headed young New York lawyer--had kept him so far
from the prehensile clutches of the Jezebel-infested Tenderloin.
Clay ton had fallen judiciously into the haven of a well-chosen
apartment, sharing his intimacy only with Arthur Ferris, the brisk-eyed
advocate whose curt office missive always enforced the lagging
collections of the New York branch.
Simultaneously with his last promotion, however, there came to
Clayton the knowledge that he was continuously and systematically
watched by the unseen agents of the Fidelity Company.
And, yet strong in his own determination, he bore as a galling chain,
growing heavier with the months, the knowledge that the eye of the
secret agent would surely follow him, in all the "pleasures" incident to
his time of life and rising financial station.
The sword hung over his defenceless head!--too busy for the gad-fly
life of the clubs--a strong, lonely swimmer in the tide of New York life,
he was as yet a comparative stranger to Folly and her motley crew of
merry wantons in gay Gotham.
The theater, some good music, his athletics, and the hastily snatched
pleasures of vacation, together with the limp reading of an overwearied
man,