"I hope I shan't be a nuisance to you," said the younger man. "I'm going to fight it out on the best lines I know how,—if it takes several summers."
"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 the wind used to howl around the little ranch house, and how he rode through the snow among his dying cattle in the great storm that had been his undoing. With his eyes still resting on the map, he recurred to his early school days and to his four years at Harvard. There was a burden of heartache in these recollections. Incidents of the unconscious brutality of playmates came back to him,—the cruel candor with which they had rejected him from sports in which proficiency, and not mere strength or zeal, was essential. He had enjoyed at college no experience of success in any of those ways which mark the undergraduate for brief authority or fame. He had never been accepted for the crew nor for the teams that represented the university on diamond or gridiron, though he had always participated in athletics, and was possessed of unusual strength. None of the professions had appealed to him, and he had not heeded his father's wish that he enter the law. The elder Saxton, who was himself a lawyer of moderate success, died before John's graduation; he had lost his mother in his youth, and his only remaining relative was a sister who married before he left college.
A review of these brief and discouraging annals did not hearten him; but he fell back upon the better mood with which he had begun the morning; he had a new chance, and he proposed to make the best of it. He put aside his coat and hat, lighted the pipe which he had been holding in his hand, and opened his desk. The banker had sent up the combination of the safe, as he had promised, and Saxton began inspecting its contents and putting his office in order.
"I'm in for a long stay," he reflected. "Watson and Terrell and those other fellows are just about reaching Park Street, perhaps with virtuous thoughts of having given me a job, if they haven't forgotten me. It's probably a pleasant day in Boston, with the flowers looking their best in the Gardens; but this is better than my Wyoming pastures, anyhow." The books and papers began to interest him, and he was soon classifying the properties that had fallen to his care. He was one of those fortunate individuals who are endowed with a capacity for complete absorption in the work at hand,—the frequent possession of persons, who, like Saxton, enjoy immunity from visits of the alluring will-o'-the-wisps that beguile geniuses. He was so deeply occupied that he did not mark the flight of time and was surprised when a boy came with a message from Porter that he was ready to go to luncheon.
"Yon mustn't overdo the thing, young man," said the banker amiably, as he closed his desk. "Don't you adopt our Western method of working all the hours there are. I do it now because my neighbors and customers would talk about me if I didn't, and say that I had lost my grip in my old age."
They started up the sloping street, which was intensely hot.
"In my last job I worked twenty hours a day," said Saxton, "and lost money in spite of it."