Truxton King | Page 2

the young man's private inclinations
into consideration. Truxton preferred a life of adventure distinctly
separated from steel and velvet; nor was he slow to set his esteemed
parents straight in this respect. He had made up his mind to travel, to
see the world, to be a part of the big round globe on which we, as
ordinary individuals with no personality beyond the next block, are
content to sit and encourage the single ambition to go to Europe at least
once, so that we may not be left out of the general conversation.
Young Mr. King believed in Romance. He had believed in Santa Claus
and the fairies, and he grew up with an ever increasing bump of
imagination, contiguous to which, strange to relate, there was a
properly developed bump of industry and application. Hence, it is not
surprising that he was willing to go far afield in search of the things
that seemed more or less worth while to a young gentleman who had
suffered the ill-fortune to be born in the nineteenth century instead of
the seventeenth. Romance and adventure, politely amorous but
vigorously attractive, came up to him from the seventeenth century,
perhaps through the blood of some swash-buckling ancestor, and he
was held enthralled by the possibilities that lay hidden in some far off
or even nearby corner of this hopelessly unromantic world of the
twentieth century.
To be sure there was war, but war isn't Romance. Besides, he was too
young to fight against Spain; and, later on, he happened to be more

interested in football than he was in the Japs or the Russians. The only
thing left for him to do was to set forth in quest of adventure; adventure
was not likely to apply to him in Fifth Avenue or at the factory or--still,
there was a certain kind of adventure analogous to Broadway, after all.
He thought it over and, after trying it for a year or two, decided that
Broadway and the Tenderloin did not produce the sort of Romance he
could cherish for long as a self-respecting hero, so he put certain small
temptations aside, chastened himself as well as he could, and set out for
less amiable but more productive by-ways in other sections of the
globe.
We come upon him at last--luckily for us we were not actually
following him--after two years of wonderful but rather disillusioning
adventure in mid-Asia and all Africa. He had seen the Congo and the
Euphrates, the Ganges and the Nile, the Yang-tse-kiang and the Yenisei;
he had climbed mountains in Abyssinia, in Siam, in Thibet and
Afghanistan; he had shot big game in more than one jungle, and had
been shot at by small brown men in more than one forest, to say
nothing of the little encounters he had had in most un-Occidental towns
and cities. He had seen women in Morocco and Egypt and Persia
and--But it is a waste of time to enumerate. Strange to say, he was now
drifting back toward the civilisation which we are pleased to call our
own, with a sense of genuine disappointment in his heart. He had found
no sign of Romance.
Adventure in plenty, but Romance--ah, the fairy princesses were in the
story books, after all.
Here he was, twenty-six years old, strong and full of the fire of life,
convincing himself that there was nothing for him to do but to drift
back to dear old New York and talk to his father about going into the
offices; to let his mother tell him over and over again of the nice girls
she knew who did not have to be rescued from ogres and all that sort of
thing in order to settle down to domestic obsolescence; to tell his sister
and all of their mutual friends the whole truth and nothing but the truth
concerning his adventures in the wilds, and to feel that the friends, at
least, were predestined to look upon him as a fearless liar, nothing

more.
For twenty days he had travelled by caravan across the Persian uplands,
through Herat, and Meshed and Bokhara, striking off with his guide
alone toward the Sea of Aral and the eastern shores of the Caspian,
thence through the Ural foothills to the old Roman highway that led
down into the sweet green valleys of a land he had thought of as
nothing more than the creation of a hairbrained fictionist.
Somewhere out in the shimmering east he had learned, to his honest
amazement, that there was such a land as Graustark. At first he would
not believe. But the English bank in Meshed assured him that he would
come to it if he travelled long enough and far enough into the north and
west and if he were