ady that the
rooms would do, and he would arrange for decorating at his own expense.
There was a living-room, about the size of his shack on the Landson
ranch; a bathroom, and a kitchenette, and the rent was twenty-two
dollars a month. A decorator was called in to repaper the bathroom
and kitchenette, but for the living-room Grant engaged a carpenter.
He ordered that the inside of the room should be boarded up with rough
boards, with exposed scantlings on the walls and ceiling. No doubt the
tradesman thought his patron mad, or nearly so, but his business was to
obey orders, and when the job was completed it presented a very passable
duplicate of Grant's old quarters on the ranch. He had spared the
fireplace, as a concession to comfort. When he had gotten his personal
effects out of storage, when he had hung rifle, saddle and lariat
from spikes in the wall; had built a little book-shelf and set his old
favorites upon it; had installed his bed and the trunk with the big
D. G.; sitting in his arm chair before the fire, with Fidget's nose
snuggled companionably against his foot, he would not have traded his
quarters for the finest suite in the most expensive club in the city.
Here was something at least akin to home.

As he was arranging the books on his shelf the clipping with the account
of Zen's wedding fell to the floor. He sat down in his chair and read it
slowly through. Later he went out for a walk.

It was in his long walks that Grant found the only real comfort of his
new life. To be sure, it was not like roaming the foothills; there was
not the soft breath of the Chinook, nor the deep silence of the mighty
valleys. But there was movement and freedom and a chance to think.
The city offered artificial attractions in which the foothills had not
competed; faultlessly kept parks and lawns; splashes of perfume and
color; spraying fountains and vagrant strains of music. He reflected
that some merciful principle of compensation has made no place quite
perfect and no place entirely undesirable. He remembered also the toll
of his life in the saddle; the physical hardship, the strain of long
hours and broken weather. And here, too, in a different way, he was in
the saddle, and he did not know which strain was the greater. He was
beginning to have a higher regard for the men in the saddle of business.
The world saw only their success, or, it may be, their pretence of
success. But there was a different story from all that, wh