The Midnight Passenger | Page 5

to deposit his bank-book in order to be free to
give the afternoon to his departing friend.
"I've only my office desk to clear up; it's a short horse and soon
curried," laughed Ferris. "I'll run over to my place and then meet you at
our rooms, so you can see the last of me. We can talk things over while
I pack up."
Ferris was busied with the cashier as young Einstein darted into
Taylor's. The lad's face brightened as he saw Clayton.
"I brought you down this telegram marked 'Rush,'" he said, all out of
breath. "I feared that you might go away for the afternoon." He was off
like a shot, before Clayton tore open the yellow envelope.
It was a private despatch from Hugh Worthington announcing his own
impending departure, and then directing all his mail to be forwarded to
the Palace Hotel, San Francisco.
The last words were: "Kindly send me a private letter by Ferris, and
give me any personal suggestions for handling the firm's business in
my absence. Will write you fully on private affairs from San
Francisco."
When Clayton parted with Ferris at the door of Taylor's, the two young
men wended their separate ways, each busied with the vision of a fair

woman.
Arthur Ferris, the dark "Pride of Columbia," as his college-mates
fondly called him, now dreamed of nothing but Alice Worthington's
golden hair and sapphire blue eyes, as the cable-car bore him swiftly
downward to the office of Hatch & Ferris, at 105 Broad Street.
Seven years older than Clayton, the already successful lawyer recalled
on his way the first confidences of the great capitalist, when Clayton
was sent into Manhattan Island business whirlpool.
The silver-haired Detroit widower had forgotten that even New York
City lawyers have hearts, when he had frankly admitted to Ferris the
reasons for detaching Randall Clayton from his own household.
"You see, Ferris," reminiscently said the money magnate, "I owed my
own rise to Clayton's ambitious father. When he retired from the old
firm of Clayton & Worthington, Everett Clayton had a cool million. It
was 'big money' in the days of seventy. But, plunging into a new
railway with an end left hanging out on the wild prairies, the panic of
'72 soon carried Clayton down.
"When he died, out West, I helped the orphan lad along. There was no
trouble until Randall became an inmate of my household, after his
graduation.
"I woke up, however, one day to find that my little Alice had leaped
into womanhood at a bound. And so I have decided to push Clayton's
fortunes from a safe distance. For, the social freedom of the college lad
and the schoolgirl in short frocks cannot be allowed to the man of
twenty-four and the blossoming girl of sixteen."
Hugh Worthington, giving over his protégé to the watchful care of
Arthur Ferris, old beyond his years, never realized the boundless
ambitions of the aspiring New York lawyer.
Ferris, with an eye ambitiously fixed upon the Senate of the United
States, had quickly become a living spirit of boundless energy in the
Western Trading Company's service, and Miss Alice Worthington, on
her New York visits, a girlish tyro, saw only the man, and not the
lawyer, in her accomplished metropolitan cavalier.
And so the coming young advocate's heart bounded with delight at the
six-weeks' future companionship of the woman whose unguarded heart
had silently drifted toward him "along the line of least resistance."
Arthur Ferris burned now to make his calling and election sure, before

this "round the world" trip should present an endless succession of
fortune hunters to the gaze of the Detroit heiress.
Clayton, hastening back toward the office, was only intent upon the
answer to his chief's despatch and he never noticed, across the street,
the progress of Emil Einstein, threading the crowds swiftly, and yet
furtively watching his master's progress. He reached Fourteenth Street
two blocks in advance of his unsuspecting employer, and then paused
for a moment in the shaded corridor of a photographer's atelier.
With a whispered word, the young spy slipped, eel-like, into the crowd
and had regained his desk long before Randall Clayton reentered the
office. The lad's face glowed with a secret triumph.
Clayton's countenance was flushed by some strong emotion as he
absently entered the private office of the head accountant. The sharp
clang of his bell brought the office boy at once to his side, when, ten
minutes later, the young cashier handed to Einstein a telegram.
The doors of the various rooms were now clanging with the snap of the
locks as the boy respectfully said, "Anything else for this afternoon,
sir?" Clayton carelessly nodded for the lad's dismissal and then bowed
his tired head upon his hands, as the nimble