Mr. Lorry had been dawdling away the months in Mexico and
California. For years he had felt, together with many other
people, that a sea-voyage was the essential beginning of every
journey; he had started round the world soon after leaving
Cambridge; he had fished through Norway and hunted in India, and
shot everything from grouse on the Scottish moors to the rapids
above Assouan. He had run in and out of countless towns and
countries on the coast of South America; he had done Russia and
the Rhone valley and Brittany and Damascus; he had seen them all
--but not until then did it occur to him that there might be
something of interest nearer home. True he had thought of
joining some Englishmen on a hunting tour in the Rockies, but
that had fallen through. When the idea of Mexico did occur to
him he gave orders to pack his things, purchased interminable
green tickets, dined unusually well at his club, and was off in
no time to the unknown West.

There was a theory in his family that it would have been a
decenter thing for him to stop running about and settle down to
work. But his thoughtful father had given him a wealthy mother,
and as earning a living was not a necessity, he failed to see why
it was a duty. "Work is becoming to some men," he once declared,
"like whiskers or red ties, but it does not follow that all men
can stand it." After that the family found him "hopeless," and
the argument dropped.

He was just under thirty years, as good-looking as most men, with
no one dependent upon him and an income that had withstood both
the Maison Doree and a dahabeah on the Nile. He never tired of
seeing things and peoples and places. "There's game to be found