instead it was decided that he should
have a tutor through the summer to help him make up the work he had
lost, and thereby enable him to go on with his class in the fall. This
tutor, however, had to be found, and until he was the boy was free from
duties of every sort. It gave him a strange sense of loneliness to be
with nothing to do. All his friends were in school--there was no one to
play with.

"I think I'll go in to the office with you, father," he suggested one
morning. "It is stupid staying round in Cambridge when all the fellows
are slaving for their exams. I have been so busy while out on the ranch
that now I do not know what to do with myself."

Mr. Clark agreed to the proposal cordially.

In consequence it came about that Donald joined Thornton at the large
Boston warehouse. The store was not new to the boy, for he had often
been there with his father; but to Thornton this part of the wool
business was as novel as the first glimpses of ranching had been to
Donald. The high building of yellow brick with floor after floor of
hurrying men, the offices noisy with the hum of typewriters, the ring of
telephones, the comings and goings of messenger-boys and
mail-carriers--all this little universe of rush and confusion was an
untried world to Thornton. Its strangeness dazed him.

Mr. Clark promptly placed him in the accounting department, but to his
surprise Thornton foundered there helplessly. It was one thing to keep
books amid the quiet and leisure of Crescent Ranch, and quite another to
struggle with columns of figures in the riot of modern business
surroundings. At the end of three days the Westerner looked gray and
tired, and had accomplished nothing.

"I don't know what I am going to do with him, Don," announced Mr. Clark,
much troubled. "I have brought him here from Idaho, and of course I am
bound to look out for him; yet there does not seem to be an earthly
thing he can do. My plan was to set him to keeping books in Cook's
place, and send Cook out to Crescent Ranch to help Sandy. Sandy, you
know, cannot handle accounts. Poor lad--he had little opportunity for
schooling in his youth, and the financial side of his work is his one
weak spot. He realizes this himself, and it was only on the condition
that I send him an assistant that he would undertake the management of
the ranch at all. I expected, as I say, that Cook would go; evidently,
however, Thornton is not going to be able to fill his place. What