Meanwhile, notwithstanding many pleasant meetings with Miss Taft--perhaps because of them--I had my moments of gloomy introspection wherein I cast up accounts in order to determine what I had gained by my six months' vacation in the wilderness. First of all I had become a master trailer--so much was assured, but this acquirement did not promise to be of any practical benefit to me except possibly in the way of a lecture tour. Broadening my hand to the cinch and the axe did not make me any more attractive as a suitor and certainly did not add anything to my capital. My outing had cost me twice what I had calculated upon, and, thus far, I had only syndicated a few letters and a handful of poems. The book which I had in mind to write was still a mass of notes. My horse, whose transportation and tariff had cost me a thousand dollars, was of little use to me, although I hoped to get back a part of his cost by means of a story. My lecture on "The Joys of the Trail" promised to be moderately successful, and yet with all these things conjoined I did not see myself earning enough to warrant me in asking Zulime Taft or any woman to be the daughter which my mother was so eagerly awaiting. It was a time of halting, of transition for me. For six years--even while writing my story of Ulysses Grant I had been absorbing the mountain west in the growing desire to put it into fiction, and now with a burden of Klondike material to be disposed of, I was subconsciously at work upon a story of the plains and the Rocky Mountain foothills. In short, as a cattleman would say, I was "milling" in the midst of a wide landscape. I should have gone on to New York at once, but with the alluring associations of Taft's studio, I lingered on through November and December, excusing myself by saying that I could work out my problem better in my own room on Elm Street than in a hotel in New York, and as a matter of fact I did succeed in writing several chapters of the Colorado novel which I called _The Eagle's Heart_. At last, late in December, I bundled my manuscripts together and set out for the East. Perhaps this decision was hastened by some editorial suggestion--at any rate I arrived, for I find in my diary the record of a luncheon with Brander Matthews who said he liked my Grant book,--a verdict which heartened me wonderfully. I believed it to be a good book then, as I do now, but it was not selling as well as we had confidently expected it to do and my publishers had lost interest in it. The reason for the failure of this book was simple. The war with Spain had thrust between the readers of my generation and the Civil War, new commanders, new slogans and new heroes. To this later younger public "General Grant" meant _Frederick_ Grant, and all hats were off to Dewey, Wood and Roosevelt. "You are precisely two years late with your story of the Great Commander," I was told, and this I was free to acknowledge.