It was Franklin's first night at home since mother went away, and I labored to cheer him with the fiction that she was "on a visit" to some of her old friends and would soon return.
The Junior as I called him, was in a serious mood for another reason. After more than twelve years of life as an actor, he had decided to quit the stage, something the player is traditionally supposed to be incapable of doing, and he had come to me for aid and encouragement. "I have a good opportunity to go into the management of a rubber plantation," he explained, "and I'd like to have you buy out my share in the Homestead in order to give me a little money to work on."
To this I agreed, although I had grave doubts of the rubber business. To have him give up the stage I considered a gain, for while he was a capable player of middle-aged character parts, I saw no lasting success ahead of him—on the contrary I imagined him getting into a more and more precarious condition. Nothing is more hopeless than an elderly actor out of a job and subject to the curt dismissals of contemptuous managers. Frank had always been gayly unconcerned about the future and he was not greatly troubled now; he was merely desirous of a fixed home and a place to vote. With the promise of my cash for his share of the Homestead, and my support in his Mexican venture, he cheered up markedly and went away almost as carefree as a boy.
In the quiet of the days which followed I worked each morning, sometimes on The Steadfast Widow Delaney, and sometimes on a revision of the novel which I had variously and from time to time called On Special Duty, and The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop. Having been accepted by Lorimer, this story was about to be printed under this latter title as a serial in the Post.
Each afternoon I saddled my Klondike horse who was in need of exercise, and galloped about over the hills for an hour or two. We were familiar figures by this time, and the farmers when they saw me leaping a pasture fence or climbing a hill, would smile (I assume that they smiled), and say, there goes that literary cuss, or words to that general effect. I took a boyish delight in showing that Ladrone would walk a log or leap a ditch at the mere touch of my heel.
Occasionally I went to LaCrosse with Zulime to visit our good friends the Eastons, and it was on one of these visits that I had my first long ride in an automobile. Incredible as it may seem now, there were very few motor cars in the county in 1901, and Easton's machine would excite laughter to-day. It was dumpy of form and noisy and uncertain of temper, but it made the trip to Winona and almost home again. It broke down helplessly in the last mile, a treachery which caused its owner the deepest chagrin, although it gave me the final touch for a humorous story of our outing, a sketch which I sold to Harper's Weekly. The editor had a fine illustration made for it, one which gave further force to my description of the terrific speed with which we whirled through the landscape. As I recall it we rose to nearly seventeen miles an hour!
As The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop, actually began to appear in The Post, I became sharply concerned with the question of preparing it for book publication. I decided to go to New York and look the ground over very carefully before making selection of another publisher.
My life in the Homestead was comfortable, almost too comfortable. It lacked stimulus. Riding my horse, gathering hickory nuts, and playing tennis or "rummy," were all very well in their way, but they left me dissatisfied, and after the cold winds began to blow and my afternoons were confined to the house, I stagnated. Like Prudden, Grinnell and other of my trailer friends, I was disposed to pitch my winter camp somewhere on Manhattan Island. The Rocky Mountains for four months in summer and the rest of the year in New York City appeared an ideal division of my life for a western novelist.
I had some reason to think this arrangement was also satisfactory to my wife. To her the Wilderness was a strange and wonderful place in which to try her powers of endurance, but the trail had none of the charms of association which it possessed for me. She was quite ready to accompany me to the city although she professed to be content with Neshonoc. She was entirely urban whereas I was an absurd mixture of pioneer and trailer, fictionist and farmer.
We left West Salem in late October and in less than three days were settled in the little hotel in Fifteenth Street where we had lived during two previous winters. My confidence in my new novel was not sufficient to warrant me in paying more than twenty dollars per week for our little apartment, and as for Zulime—she professed to wonder how I dared to pay as much as seventeen.