{"product_id":"2940016322612","title":"The Lost Trooper by Talbot Mundy","description":"“Talk about transmuting elements—”\u003cbr\u003eHOW CAN YOU begin a tale at the beginning, when it has as many beginnings as there are people in it? I don’t see that these critics who make literary laws have done much else than shut out two-thirds of the best tales by making it impossible to tell them.\u003cbr\u003eAt any rate, as I’m telling this one; and as nobody need listen if he doesn’t like, I’m going to begin it where I please, which happens to be in Berlin, Germany, which I visited long enough after the Boer War for men who fought all through it, to show themselves there without having to have police protection.\u003cbr\u003eMy business is prospecting, and I hadn’t made my little pile in those days—hadn’t attained, in other words, to that only essential of contentment in this world: the ability as well as the inclination and the right to suit yourself as to what you’ll do next, where you’ll go, and how.\u003cbr\u003eMy particular pet delight is independence. But in those days I was trying to get a syndicate of Prussian von s and zu s to finance an undertaking in what was then known as German East Africa. Looking back through the smoke of adventurous years I should say now that it would have been about as easy to persuade the U.S. Government to finance a claimant to the throne of France. I cooled my heels, spent money in a very bad hotel, and dare say I should have been insulted finally, if it weren’t for my odd inch or so above six feet and the muscle that carries it upright. Even in those days the Prussians weren’t openly rude to any one they weren’t sure they could lick.\u003cbr\u003eBut I made a profit, for I met an Australian named Jeremy Ross. It was worth a trip half around the world to make that man’s acquaintance.\u003cbr\u003eHe was swearing at the methods of the same hotel proprietor and trying to tap the same financial sluices. We had two common grievances, which is sufficient basis for friendship in most circumstances; and, as we both were, comparatively speaking, broke, we walked about together a good deal, seeing what Berliners thought were sights, while the syndicate of von S and zu S considered how to put one over on us—an entirely vain devotion of super-thought on their part, as well as a waste of our time.\u003cbr\u003eEven in those days I had reached the point of tolerating other people’s manners and notions right up to the chalk-line where they trespass on my liberty. But Jeremy Ross hadn’t traveled as much, or met as many weird varieties as I had of the “manners” that “mayketh man.”\u003cbr\u003eHaving served through the Boer War as a trooper in the First Australian Horse, he had a profound contempt for, and enmity against all officers who were not Australians risen from the ranks. But he didn’t include all Australian officers in his catalog of the blessed by any means, having, as he put it, “eaten dirt from twentyfive too many of them.”\u003cbr\u003e“Talk about transmuting elements,” said Jeremy. “Turning iron into gold is nothing to it. Take a chap who’s a good miningmate and a decent trooper, with no more use for the airs of officers than you’ve got, put a couple of imitation bronze stars on his shoulder, and you’ve turned him into a cocky ass, who’ll slate you for fatigue if you tell him as much as where he came from and where he’d go if he’d take advice. Officers ought to be elected, that’s what I think; and I can think as good as any one.”\u003cbr\u003eThe sight of a three-inch red collar with gold lace on it to Jeremy was more irritating than a red flag to a black hull. A monocle acted on him as fulminate of mercury does on dynamite. So a jaunt shoulder-to-shoulder with him through the streets of Berlin was hardly a soporific. He took to imitating the swagger of the Prussian officers, with a silver coin stuck in his eye by way of emphasis.","brand":"WDS Publishing","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47071261262064,"sku":"2940016322612","price":2.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940016322612_p0.jpg?v=1763633147","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940016322612","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}