PHANTOM ADVENTURE
By FLOYD DELL
From Century
I. A Secret. He was not a banker by temperament. But nobody in New York, nobody east of the Rockies, knew that. It was his secret.
When he graduated from college, instead of preparing himself seriously for life by cleaning the inkwells in some Wall Street institution, as an ambitious young man should, he got a job on a Western ranch. He did this for no better reason than that he had been fond of reading about cowboys. He learned many things about horses and cattle, and made friends with every cowboy within a hundred miles. Nevertheless, he was not satisfied; for cowboy life, while interesting enough in fact, is less romantically adventurous than in fiction. Yet he stayed there for five years, dreaming now of the sea and reading stories of sailor adventures.
Then an uncle died, leaving him a legacy of a little more than five thousand dollars. With five thousand dollars a young man could get started in business, and it was high time for him to do so. He went to San Francisco and looked about for an opening.
In a café he met a man who had just come back from incredible adventures in the South Seas. To this man’s tales he listened all evening, and then went back to his lodging, where he could not sleep, but walked back and forth for hours in a little garden, dreaming, awake, of strange birds and strange trees and slim, brown, laughing girls with flowers in their hair.
Next morning he went down to the waterfront, and looked out thoughtfully in the direction of the South Seas. With his five thousand dollars he could buy or build a little boat and, with some congenial companion, set sail for those islands of incredible adventure. But he knew that this was mere romantic folly, more worthy of a boy than of a man. He must begin to take life seriously. He shook his head and frowned, and went on to the café.
Every morning—sometimes it was noon—for a whole year he went down to the waterfront and looked out over the bay. And every afternoon and evening he sat in some café. At the end of the year he had made many friends and heard many curious tales, and his money was all gone.
He began to look for a job. He had an extensive convivial acquaintance among the business men of the town; but they did not seem to have any job for him, though they were willing to lend him a few dollars.
So he borrowed a little money and came to New York, where no one knew, as he expressed it, what a damn fool he was.
He took care that no one should know. He got a job in a Fifth Avenue bank, and when he was barely forty he was one of its vice-presidents. He had an apartment in town and a house in the country and a car and a wife and four lovely children, and he was proud of them all.