PIRATES' HOPE

CONTENTS

I

INTRODUCING MR. MACHIAVELLI VAN DYCK

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