Not a Nondescript
It is assumed that Alvo would have been able to extricate himself from his difficulties and avert the bankruptcy into which he was forced but for the outbreak of war. The fatality lay in the fact that all his investments were in countries with which the Kaiser was or was about to be at war.
But to begin at the beginning, as we find it in an issue of the Canadian Courier of October, 1917, when Alvo’s career came to a conclusion, temporarily at least, by his internment as a spy.
He was not a mere nondescript adventurer. He was the youngest son of Count Werner Alvo von Alvensleben, erstwhile German Ambassador to Russia, when Nicholas was Czar. The young man had a taste for the livelier side of life, gaily dissipated his allowance and seemed to regard college life not so much as an educational purpose as a convenience to the sowing of wild oats. This was not at all to the liking of Papa von Alvensleben and in an hour of unsuppressed wrath and resentment he cast the young man off and bade him shift for himself. This was an unexpected climax to his pleasure quest, and rather shocked Alvo. He remembered that the Kaiser was an intimate friend of his father’s, of the family indeed, and it jarred his pride to be an outcast from a circle of such distinction. He felt under obligation to reëstablish himself in the good graces of his father and the august personage whom he had so often familiarly hoched. So he set out to subdue some fraction of the world to his service and credit. He did not immediately find a field of action.
It was in the rôle of a hobo that he drifted into Western America and began casting about for the horn of plenty from which he hoped to shake substantial advantage. Two inches above six feet in stature, two years under forty years of age, he was typically Prussian, stubborn, unreasonable, of violent temper. But he was a good talker and not without imagination. Behold him arrived in Seattle. The Canadian Courier says: