OF GRAUSTARK

CHAPTER I

TRUXTON KING

He was a tall, rawboned, rangy young fellow with a face so tanned by
wind and sun you had the impression that his skin would feel like
leather if you could affect the impertinence to test it by the sense of
touch. Not that you would like to encourage this bit of impudence after
a look into his devil-may-care eyes; but you might easily imagine
something much stronger than brown wrapping paper and not quite so
passive as burnt clay. His clothes fit him loosely and yet were
graciously devoid of the bagginess which characterises the appearance of
extremely young men whose frames are not fully set and whose joints are
still parading through the last stages of college development. This
fellow, you could tell by looking at him, had been out of college from
two to five years; you could also tell, beyond doubt or contradiction,
that he had been in college for his full allotted time and had not
escaped the usual number of "conditions" that dismay but do not
discourage the happy-go-lucky undergraduate who makes two or three teams
with comparative ease, but who has a great deal of difficulty with
physics or whatever else he actually is supposed to acquire between the
close of the football season and the opening of baseball practice.

This tall young man in the panama hat and grey flannels was Truxton
King, embryo globe-trotter and searcher after the treasures of Romance.
Somewhere up near Central Park, in one of the fashionable cross
streets, was the home of his father and his father's father before him:
a home which Truxton had not seen in two years or more. It is worthy of
passing notice, and that is all, that his father was a manufacturer;
more than that, he was something of a power in the financial world. His
mother was not strictly a social queen in the great metropolis, but she
was what we might safely call one of the first "ladies in waiting."
Which is quite good enough for the wife of a manufacturer; especially
when one records that her husband was a manufacturer of steel. It is
also a matter of no little consequence that Truxton's mother was more or
less averse to the steel business as a heritage for her son. Be it
understood, here and now, that she intended Truxton for the diplomatic
service: as far removed from sordid steel as the New York post office is
from the Court of St. James.

But neither Truxton's father, who wanted him to be a manufacturing
Croesus, or Truxton