Daily Arizona silver belt., 1910-02-13
CHAPTER I.
TAUNTON KING.

@@ 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. His clothes fitted him loosely and yet were graciously devoid of the bagginess which char aCterizes the appearance of extremely young men whose frames are not fully set and whose joints are still parading through the last stages of college de- veiopment.
 This tall young man in the panama hat and gray fannels was Truxton King, embryo globe trotter and search CT 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 fathers father before nina home which Truxton had not seen in two years or more. It is worthy of pass ing notice, and that is all, that his father was manufacturer; more than that, he was something of power in the financial world. His mother was not strictly social queen in the great metropolis, but she was what we might safely call one of the first "la- dies in waiting" which Is quite good enough for the wife of a manufactur- CT, 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 diplo- matic service.
 But neither Truxton's father, who wanted him to be manufacturing Croesus, nor TruXton's mother, who expected him to become social Solo mon, appears to have taken the young mans private inclinations into con- Sideration.
 Young Mir. King believed in TO- nance. He grew up with an ever in- creasing bump of imagination, con- tiguous 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 afleld in search of the things that seemed more or less worth while to a young gentleman who had sui fered the i'll fortune to be born in the nineteenth century instead of the sev- enteenth.
 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 KongO and the Euphrates, the Ganges and the Nile, the Yangtsekiang and the Yenisei; he had climbed noun tains in Abyssinia, in Siam, in Tibet 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 unoccidental towns and cities.
 For twenty days he had travelled by caravan across the Persian uplands, through Herat and Meshhed and Bo- khara, striking off with his guide alone toward the sea of Aral and the east ern shores of the Caspian, thence through the Ural foothills to the old Roman highway that led down into the sweet green valleys of land he had thought of as nothing more than the creation of harebrained flctionist
 Somewhere out in the shimmering cast he had learned, to his honest amazement that there was such a