Vanderdecken

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
VANDERDECKEN
NEW YORK ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY 1922
Copyright, 1922, by Robert M. McBride & Co.
Printed in the United States of America
Published, 1922

VANDERDECKEN
GEORGE DU CANE was writing a letter in the smoking room of the Bohemian Club, San Francisco.
George was an orphan with guardians. Twenty-four years and five months of age, his property would not be decontrolled for another seven months when, on his twenty-fifth birthday, he would find himself the actual possessor of something over two million, five hundred thousand dollars. Old Harley du Cane, George’s father, had made his money speculating. He had no healthy business to leave to his son and no very healthy reputation. He had ruined thousands of men whom he had never seen and never heard of, he had escaped ruin countless times by the skin of his teeth, he had wrecked railways; his life was, if logic counts, a long disgrace, and in a perfect civilization he would have been hanged. All the same he was a most lovable old man, generous, warm-hearted, hot-tempered, high-coloured, beautifully dressed; always with a cigar in his mouth and a flower in his buttonhole, his hat tilted on one side and his hand in his pocket for any unfortunate.
Only for his great battle with Jay Gould, he might have died worth ten million. He reckoned that he died poor, and, dying, he tied up his property in the hands of two trustees, as I have hinted. “To keep you from the sharks, George.”
George didn’t bother. Wannamaker and Thelusson, the two trustees, gave him all the money he wanted and the world all the fun. A juvenile replica of old Harley on the outside, he was not unlike him on the in; he had something better than wealth, than good looks, even than health, a radium quality inherited from his father that kept him far younger than his years. When Harley du Cane died at the age of seventy-six from a surfeit of ice cream following the excitement of a base-ball match, Cazenove, the broker, reading out the news to his family said the reporters had got the age wrong, for Harley wasn’t more than nine; and he was right. The Great Bear, to give him his name in the Stock Market, in many respects wasn’t more than nine.