with him persistently after he had boarded
the rough "accommodation" that carried him to the main line, where he
must wait for the thunderous arrival of the long express train that
was to carry him across the broad and splendid State of Washington.
Idaho and Oregon were left behind. The magnificent wheat belt spread
from horizon to horizon, and harvesters paused to wave their hats at
the travelers. The Western ranges of the Olympics, solid, dignified,
and engraved against the sky with their outline of peak and forest,
came into view, and yet his perturbation continued.

He saw the splendid panorama of Puget Sound open to his view, and the
train, at last, after those weary hours of jolting, rattled into the
long sheds that at that time disgraced the young giant city of the
North-west. It was the first time he had even entered its shadows, and
as he turned its corner he looked curiously at the stump of a tree
that had been hollowed into an ample office, and was assailed by the
strident cries of cabmen.

"The Butler House," he said, relinquishing his bag into the hands of
the first driver who reached him, and settled back into the cushions
with a sense of bewilderment, as if something long forgotten had been
recalled. He knew what it was as he drove along in all that clamor of
sound which issues from a great and hurrying city. It was New York,
and he was in the young New York of the North-west, with great
skeleton structures uprearing and the turmoil of building. Only here
was a difference, for side by side on the streets walked men clad in
the latest fashion, and men bound to or coming from the arctic fields
of gold-bound Alaska. Electric cars tearing along at a reckless speed,
freight wagons heavily laden, newsboys screaming the call of extras,
and emerging from behind log wagons, and everything betokening that
clash of the old and the intensely new.

At the Butler House the man behind the desk twirled the register
toward him, and assigned him a room.

"Sloan?" he replied to Dick's inquiry. "Oh, yes. He's the old chap
from New York who said he was expecting someone, and to send him right
up. I suppose you're the man. Here, boy, show Mr. Townsend to
five-fifty. Right that way, sir."

And before his words were finished he had turned to a new arrival.

The clamor of the streets, busy as is no other city in the world busy
when the season is on, was still in his ears, striking a familiar note
in his memory, and the mo