The philanthropic traveler left his native land with ideals presaging a universal brotherhood of nations—perhaps under the leadership of our great Republic—but admits that, under present circumstances, our popular policy of expansion is, at best, only an attempt to widen the ring-walls of our slave-pen, before its gates are closed by a syndicate of bloodsuckers and boodle legislators. _The King’s Image_ BY WALTER E. GROGAN _Author of “The Dregs of Wrath,” “The King’s Sceptre,” “The Curse of the Fultons,” etc._ I knew him at once. He was grayer, he was grimmer, he was more than ever like a man of granite, hard and immobile, but I knew him. The sight of him gravely unfolding his table napkin and covering his thin knees at luncheon in the little hotel set my thoughts back over ten years. I was then a lad of sixteen. I had seen him constantly in the queer medieval streets of Tsalburg, the little capital of Ertaria in the Balkans. Gray and grim, he was then the General Commandant of the army, the iron right hand of the Wolf King Peter XII. He was grayer and grimmer now, but undoubtedly the man. For a while I racked my memory for his name. It came suddenly. General Hartzel! Undoubtedly the man. The _Times_ supplied me with many conjectures. The senile old King was dead; his heir, the Prince Paul, had lived his own life in Europe incognito, and the heir was not forthcoming. Rumor said he was in Paris. For three days I watched the General. He knew no one at the hotel, he spoke to no one, but I saw him more than once in earnest conversation with a young man about my own age, about my own height, about my own color, but—for the sake of my own vanity—alike in no other particular. This was—the information was easily come by—the Comte de Troisétoilles, a young Frenchman of position, now considerably taken with the beautiful singer, Mlle. Aimée Bergeaux. That was the story noised about, and in proof thereof her little steam yacht rode in the harbor, he was constantly with her, and a rumor was essential to the place. A companion, large, fat, unmistakably German and delightfully placid, cast a broad, complacent smile of propriety over the romance. My General, I noted, snarled at the soprano for whose smiles princes competed. He was thorough, was my General, dear man of stone. Venus herself would have been baffled by him. But he spoke earnestly and vehemently to the Count, he who was so taciturn. On the evening of the third day I met my General on the south cliff by the absurd little fort. There was a streak of smoke on the horizon. He was shaking a fist at it, a violent, tempestuous fist. I have been a prey to sudden impulses all my life. I had maintained an Englishman’s reserve for three days. I broke it suddenly on the cliff. I accosted the General in Ertarian. “You are disturbed, General Hartzel,” I said.