Pirates' Hope

TO those who knew him best and had known him longest, Bonteck Van Dyck, sometimecaptain of his university eleven, a ball player with the highest batting average on theuniversity 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 ashheap 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 exaggeratedfortune. 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. Pastthe college period, however, there came rumors of a radical change; sharp-edged hints thatthe easy mark was becoming an increasingly hard mark; vague intimations that this princeof good fellows of an earlier day was attaining a certain stony indifference to suffering onthe 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 clubwherewith to dash out the brains of his opponents, not only in the market-place, but at thesocial fireside, where, as a handsome young Croesus, owning a goodly handful ofManhattan frontages, sailing his own yacht, and traveling in his own private car, he was thelegitimate quarry of the match-making mothers-or fathe