She was silenced, if not wholly convinced; and a few minutes later the train drew into the Forty-second Street Station.  When the parting time came, Ford dutifully gathered her belongings, said good-by, and put her on a north-bound subway; all this without remembering that he did not know her name.  The recollection came, however, when the subway train shot away into the tunnel.

“Of all the blockheads!” he growled, apostrophizing his own unreadiness.  “But I’ll find her again.  She said she’d send her brother to the hotel with the dinner money, and when I get hold of him it will go hard with me if I don’t manage some way to get an introduction.”

This was what was in his mind when he sought the down-town hotel whose name he had written on his card for her; it was his latest waking thought when he went to sleep that night, and his earliest when he awoke the following morning.

But when he went to the clerk’s desk, after a leisurely breakfast, to get his mail, he found that the sure thread of identification had broken in his fingers.  There was a square envelope among the other letters in his key-box containing the exact amount of the young woman’s indebtedness to him; this, with a brief note of thanks—­unsigned.

IV

COLD STORAGE

If courage, of the kind fitted to lead forlorn hopes, or marchings undaunted up to the muzzles of loaded cannon, be a matter of gifts and temperament, it is also in some degree a matter of environment.

Stuart Ford was Western born and bred; a product of the wider breathing spaces.  Given his proper battle-field, where the obstacles were elemental and the foes to be overcome were mere men of flesh and blood fighting freely in the open, he was a match for the lustiest.  But New York, with its submerging, jostling multitudes, its thickly crowding human vastness, and, more than all, its atmosphere of dollar-chasing, apparent and oppressive even to the transient passer-by, disheartened him curiously.

It was not that he was more provincial than he had to be; for that matter, there is no provincialism so rampant as that of the thronging, striving, self-sufficient city.  But isolation in any sort is a thing to be reckoned with.  The two pioneering years in the Rockies had done their work,—­of narrowing, as well as of broadening,—­and the plunge into the chilling sea of the money-mad metropolis made him shiver and wish he were out.

This feeling was really at the bottom of the late rising and the leisurely breakfast, making him temporize where he had meant to be prompt, energetic and vigorously aggressive.  Having pocketed the young woman’s unsigned note, he glanced at his watch and decided that it was still too early to go in search of President Colbrith.