CHAPTER I: A SCRAP OF PAPER

IT WAS A DISMAL, SODDEN morning, with heavy clouds banked in the western sky. Rain had sloshed down since midnight so that the gutter in front of me was a turbid little river.

A chill wind swept across the city and penetrated to the marrow. From the summit of the hill, three blocks above me, my car was sliding down, but I clung to the curb to postpone until the last moment a plunge into the flowing street.

Since I was five-and-twenty, in tip-top health, and Irish by descent, I whistled while the windswept drops splashed the shine from my shoes. Rain or sun, ‘twas a good little old world, though, faith! I could have wished it a less humdrum one.

For every morning I waited at that same time and place for the same car to take me to my desk in the offices of Kester& Wilcox, and every day I did the same sort of routine grubbing in preparation of cases for more experienced lawyers to handle.

Sometimes it flashed across me that I was a misfit. Nature had cast me for the part of a soldier of fortune, and instead I was giving my services to help a big corporation escape the payment of damages for accidents caused by its cars. I had turned my back on the romance of life. Well, it was the penalty one must pay to win success.

And while I stood on the curb there fluttered down to me from the dun heavens an invitation to the great adventure my soul longed for. It came on a gust of wind and lay on the sidewalk at my feet, a torn sheet of paper yellowed with age.

I had no premonition of what that faded bit of parchment meant, no picture of men in deadly battle, of the fl