The Man from Brodneys | Page 9

$4,000 drawing three
per cent. interest while he picked his blithe way through the world on
$2,500 a year, more or less, as chance ordained.
"When I'm forty," Chase was wont to remark to envious spendthrifts
who couldn't understand his philosophy, "I'll have over a hundred
thousand there, and if I live to be ninety, just think what I'll have! And
it will be like finding the money, don't you see? Of course, I won't live
to be ninety. Moreover, I may get married and have to maintain a poor
wife with rich relatives, which is a terrible strain, you know. You have
to live up to your wife's relatives, if you don't do anything else."
He did not refer to the chance that he was quite sure to come in for a
large legacy at the death of his maternal grandfather, a millionaire
ranch owner in the Far West. Chase never counted on probabilities; he
took what came and was satisfied.
After leaving college, he drifted pretty much over the world, taking pot
luck with fortune and clasping the hand of circumstance, to be led into
the highways and byways, through good times and ill times, in love and
out, always coming safely into port with a smiling wind behind. There
had been hard roads to travel as well as easy ones, but he never
complained; he swung on through life with the heart of a soldier and
the confidence of a Pagan. He loathed business and he abhorred trade.

"That little old trust fund is making more money for me by lying idle
than I could accumulate in a century by hard work as a grocer or an
undertaker," he was prone to philosophise when his uncles, who were
merchants, urged him to settle down and "do something." Not that there
were grocers or undertakers among them; it was his way of impressing
his sense of freedom upon them.
He was an orphan and bounden to no man. No one had the right to
question his actions after his twenty-first anniversary. It was fortunate
for him that he was a level-headed as well as a wild-hearted chap, else
he might have sunk to the perdition his worthy uncles prescribed for
him. He went in for law at Yale, and then practised restlessly, vaguely
for two years in Baltimore, under the patronage of his father's oldest
friend, a lawyer of distinction.
"If I fail at everything else, I'll go back to the practice of law," he said
cheerfully. "Uncle Henry is mean enough to say that he has forgotten
more law than I ever knew, but he has none the better of me. 'Gad, I am
confident that I've forgotten more law, myself, than I ever knew."
Tiring of the law books and reports in the old judge's office, he
suddenly abandoned his calling and set forth to see the world. Almost
before his friends knew that he had left he was heard of in Turkestan. In
course of time he served as a war correspondent for one of the great
newspapers, acted as agent for great hemp dealers in the Philippines,
carried a rifle with the Boers in South Africa, hunted wild beasts in
Asia and in Hottentot land, took snapshots in St. Petersburg, and almost
got to the North Pole with one of the expeditions. To do and be all of
these he had to be a manly man. Not in a month's journey would you
meet a truer thoroughbred, a more agreeable chap, a more polished
vagabond, than Hollingsworth Chase, first lieutenant in Dame Fortune's
army. Tall, good looking, rawboned, cheerful, gallant, he was the true
comrade of those merry, reckless volunteers from all lands who find
commissions in Fortune's army and serve her faithfully. He had shared
pot luck in odd parts of the world with English lords, German barons
and French counts--all serving under the common flag. His heart had
withstood the importunate batterings of many a love siege; the wounds

had been pleasant ones and the recovery quick. He left no dead behind
him.
He was nearly thirty when the diplomatic service began to appeal to
him as a pleasing variation from the rigorous occupations he had
followed heretofore. A British lordling put it into his head, away out in
Delhi. It took root, and he hurried home to attend to its growth. One of
his uncles was a congressman and another was in some way connected
with railroads. He first sought the influence of the latter and then the
recommendation of the former. In less than six weeks after his arrival
in Washington he was off for the city of Thorberg in the Grand Duchy
of Rapp-Thorberg, carrying with him an appointment as consul and
supplied with the proper stamps and seal of office.