The Midnight Passenger | Page 2

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, afforded him such desultory pleasures as fell in his path.
On his way now to a luncheon engagement with his comrade Ferris, at Taylor's, his mind was busied only with the care of the daily treasure trust.
Serenely confident, he swung along, his two score thousand of dollars being a mere ordinary deposit, in a business which, in holiday seasons, and at times of monthly settlements, often stuffed the portmanteau with sums rising the hundred thousand.
His