TO those who knew him best and had known him longest, Bonteck Van
Dyck, sometime captain of his university eleven, a ball player with
the highest batting average on the university nine, a large-lettered
star in everything pertaining to athletic accomplishments, and above
and beyond this the fortunate--or unfortunate, as one chooses to view
it--inheritor of the obese Van Dyck fortune, figured, like the dead
kitten discovered on the ash heap by the investigative infant, as "a
perfectly good cat, spoiled."
As was most natural, the spoiling was usually charged in a lump sum
to the exaggerated fortune. In the university Van Dyck was a breezy,
whole-souled, large-hearted man's man, the idol of his set and
fraternity and a pathetically easy mark for the college borrower. Past
the college period, however, there came rumors of a radical change;
sharp-edged hints that the easy mark was becoming an increasingly
hard mark; vague intimations that this prince of good fellows of an
earlier day was attaining a certain stony indifference to suffering on
the part of those who sought to relieve him of some portion of the
money burden. Nay, more; it was whispered that he was not above using
the bloated bank account as a club wherewith to dash out the brains
of his opponents, not only in the market-place, but at the social
fireside, where, as a handsome young Croesus, owning a goodly handful
of Manhattan frontages, sailing his own yacht, and traveling in his
own private car, he was the legitimate quarry of the match-making
mothers--or fathers.
Though we had been reasonably close friends in the university days, it
so chanced that I had seen next to nothing of Van Dyck during the three
years immediately following the doling out of the coveted sheepskins in
Commencement Week; and the echoes of these derogatory stories--echoes
were all that had drifted out to me in the foreign field to which, as
a constructing engineer, I had gone soon after my graduation--were
somehow vastly unconvincing. But on a certain memorable autumn evening
in a New Orleans hotel, when I found myself sitting across a table
for two as Van Dyck's guest, listening while he explained, or tried
to explain, why he had cabled me from Havana to meet him at this
particular time and place, it was disconcertingly evident that the
golden youth of the old university days had really developed into
something different--different, and just a shade puzzling.
"You see, Preble, you are the one man I was most anxious to find,"
he was saying, for the third time since the half-shell oysters had
been served. "By the sheerest good luck I happened to run across
Bertie Witherspoon in Havana, and he told me that you were, or had
been, running the blockade, or something of that sort, down on the
Venezuela coast, and that a wire to the Barcado Brothers' New Orleans
headquarters would probably reach you."
"Running the blockade!" I broke in derisively. "That is about as near
as a New York provincial like Bertie Witherspoon could come to any fact
outside of his native Borough of Manhattan! There is no blockade on the
Venezuelan coast; and I've been building a railroad from Trujillo up
into the Sierra Nevada de Merida. Does this trifling difference make me
any less the man you were anxious to find?"
"Not in the least," he returned, with the old-time, boyish smile
wrinkling at the corners of his fine eyes. "But I do hope you've
got your railroad built and are footloose and free to take another
commission."
"No," I said; "the railroad isn't finished. But as it probably never
will be, under the present Venezuelan administration, we can leave it
out of the question."
"Then you could take a month or so off, if you should feel like it?"
"I could, yes; if the hotel bills wouldn't prove to be too high."
Again the good-natured smile identified the Teck Van Dyck of other days
for me.
"There won't be any hotel bills," he said gently. "You are to be my
guest on the _Andromeda_ for a little cruise."
"On the _Andromeda_?" I exclaimed. "You don't mean to say you've got
that baby Cunarder with you down here in these waters?"
"Yea, verily, and for a fact," was the smiling reply. "I came up the
big river in her this afternoon. Been knocking about a bit among the
islands to dodge the country-house invitations up home."
"Out of tune with the little social gods and goddesses?" I ventured.
"Out of tune with a good many things, Dick. This is a sorry old world,
and the people in it are sorrier--most of 'em. Everything's a bore."