A young New England man, his college studies cut short and haunted by his father’s unexplained disappearance, takes a railroad clerkship that propels him west to Colorado. On an overcrowded train bound for a booming silver district he encounters a wide cross-section of frontier life—tight-knit families, weathered prospectors, a priest—and witnesses the rough manners, illness, and opportunism that mark the journey. The narrative follows his search for employment and for traces of his father while portraying the adjustments, moral tests, and everyday hardships that shape outsiders adapting from settled Eastern habits to the unsettled, often harsh realities of the West.