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