Argosy, Vol. 117, No. 3 — page 87: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

May Wilmoth Even at the early age of ten, Masters had a way with him, which gave a priori I, ‘ASTERS returned from Europe, fed up for the time with adventure, which he had pursued in varying guises since he could remember. In imagination, at the early age of ten he was a pirate bold cruising the seven seas and concealing his plunder upon a famous rock where dwelt a beautiful lady. There was always a lady in Masters’s early dreams—later they all materialized, which was somewhat bewildering to Mas- ters, making it difficult to make a choice of divinities. When he took officers’ training and later sailed for France, it transpired that there was a bevy of fair maidens to wish him safe return! But to gc back to his early dreams. The pirate bold became in the process of evolu- tion a knight of the road, with no will but the wind’s will, to drift here and there in the eternal pursuit of adventure. Then in that chameleonlike way that would be discouraging to any one but a boy, he became, in turn, a policeman, perpetually to assist some fair one from entanglements; an aviator, conductor on a street-car, inter- mittently a soldier—marching up and down the city streets before the houses at the head of a tatterdemalion army—the girls stand- ing upon the sidewalk, watching wistfully, waiting impatiently for the army to dis- band. right to.the prettiest girls. If there was a youth intrepid enough to dispute it, Alec was always anxious to settle the matter. He was not always invincible in his fisti- cuffs; but whether he won or lost the emolu- ments always gravitated toward him. He was the perennial lover, but he had discovered after he began self-analysis that it was love with which he was in love, and no special ‘‘ladye faire,” which somehow only heightened his attractiveness to the other sex since he always confessed and they always forgave, and always remem-~ bered, not with any regrets, be it known! He was not as handsome as a Greek god, far from it. But he was a fine, up- standing, virile figure of a man, in which the good red blood of several nations mingled his hair was thick, straight, turbulent, tow; his eyes blue as the gentian flower, his com- plexion fair and ruddy, until the soldier tan covered him thickly to about the shade of his officer’s uniform. He made a splendid leader of men, and he returned with honors and medals and a weariness and distaste for further adventure, which it took three weeks of the soft winds of the Pacific to fan like chaff out of his brain cells. He had hardly landed in New York, and had barely had time to kiss all the girls with whom he was in love, before his father, a large dealer in motor-cars, 397 Go NOOK (C@