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.

George, having finished his letter, touched an electric bell. A waiter approached.

“Waiter,” said George, “bring me an—Oh, damn it!” Egg flip had been on his tongue and prohibition had risen in his mind. The waiter waited. He was used to orders like this of late. “Lemonade,” said George.

He got up and moved to where some men were seated near one of the windows. Cyrus Reid, the poet; Carolus, the musician; Abrahams, the artist. A few months ago these three would have been fighting, no doubt, over the merits of Henri, Matisse or the possibilities of Cubist music. Today they were just talking about how dry they were and of the great drought that had struck San Francisco. Reid was mostly a coffee drinker, an occasional glass of beer satisfied Carolus, and Abrahams was all but teetotal, yet they were filled with discontent. George sat down with them and listened to them and drank his lemonade and absorbed their gloom. Prohibition may be good or it may be bad, but there is one undoubted fact about it, it doesn’t improve the social life of a club. Whilst they were talking, Hank Fisher came in. Hank was twenty-three or so; thin, tanned, hollow-cheeked, he looked like the mixture of a red Indian and an East coast Yankee.

He had been born in New Hampshire, served in a whaler, driven an engine, waited in a cafÉ, hoboed, stoked a Stockton river boat, canned in a cannery. He had educated himself, in a wild sort of way that produced flowers of the mind in an extraordinary pattern; he was both a Socialist and an individualist. There was nothing that the hands of men could do that the hands of Hank couldn’t. He could make boots or a fishing-net or mend a watch, he had invented and patented a rat trap that brought him in a small income, and he had the specifications in hand of a clock that would go for forty-eight years without winding. He had, also, in the last year or two, made quite a sum of money speculating in real estate. But the crowning point of Hank, and the thing that had secured his entry to the Bohemian Club and endeared him to all imaginative people, was the fact that he was a little bit mad. Not crazy mad, but pleasantly mad. A madness so mixed with cold sanity and streaks of genius that you could scarcely call it madness.

“You can’t tell what he’ll do next,” was the best description of him, given by Cedarquist, barring Reid’s “He’s an opal.”

The opal sat down with scarcely a word and listened to Abrahams, who was holding forth. Said Abrahams:

“Yes, sir, you may talk and talk, but you haven’t got to the bed-rock of the subject. The fact is the world never struck universal unrest till it struck universal lime-juice. If you could dig up the Czar and make him talk, I’ll bet he’d back me. Talk of crime waves, when has crime ever waved before as it’s waving now? Look at the hold-ups, look at New York, look at Chicago, look at this town. Look at the things that are done in the broad light of day. Milligan’s raided yesterday by two gunmen and the place cleared of fifty thousand dollars’ worth of stuff in fifteen minutes. Look at this chap Vanderdecken.”

“What’s he been doing?” asked Carolus.

“Doing! Don’t you read the papers?”

“No,” said Carolus.

“Doing. Why this chap’s been on the job for the last six months and there’s twenty-five thousand dollars reward out for him. Yacht raiding, that’s what he’s been doing, down the coast. Holding up pleasure yachts, comes along in a high power motor boat sometimes and sometimes he uses a fishing boat and no one knows where he changes ship or how he does it or how many are working with him.”

“Oh,” said Carolus. “Well he’s doing nothing new. If you were as old as I am, you’d remember Mullins, away back in the middle ’nineties, he used to do the same thing. Got caught and I forget what they gave him. There’s nothing new under the sun.”

“Well, they hadn’t wireless in the middle ’nineties,” said Abrahams, “and wireless doesn’t hold Vanderdecken, he skips over it or gets under it. Dutch Pete is his real name, they say, but someone labeled him Vanderdecken from the ‘Flying Dutchman’.”

“I know all about the fellow,” cut in Hank Fisher, “know him from his toe-nails up. He’s precious small potatoes, too. Lord, what a lot of misinformation manages to get about. Dutch Pete wasn’t his name to start with, either. Amsterdam Joe was his name. He came from Hamburg and started here loading grain at Brookland Creek, then he got loose on the front—in with McKay and that lot—managed a whisky joint and got in trouble over something or other, and squared it and got into the Fish Patrol and got fired for colluding with the Greeks in setting Chinese sturgeon lines. Then, after the war, he managed to get some sort of an old boat and cleared out of here. He’s down south and I could put my finger on him if I wanted to. Shark fishing is what he started on and he’s held up a two cent yacht or two, there’s no doubt about that, but as for motor boats and Flying Dutchmen, that’s all the newspaper talk. They’ve embroidered on him till he looks like a king. Dutch Pete was a different chap altogether, but he’s not about now. I saw him shot. It was in a dust-up at San Leandro.”

“Have you seen the papers this morning?” asked Abrahams.

“Nope.”

“Well, Vanderdecken, or Amsterdam Joe, or whatever you call him, has held up the Satanita as she was coming up from Avalon. She’s no two cent yacht, she’s all of eight hundred tons. He went through her and skipped with ten thousand dollars’ worth of stuff.”

“Give us the yarn,” said Hank.

“Oh, it was as easy as pie. Connart was coming up in the Satanita—got his wife with him too—and somewhere off St. Luis Obispo they sighted a yawl. She wasn’t more than forty or fifty tons and was lying hove to with her flag half masted. They stopped the engines, like fools, and the yawl sent a boat on board. Two fellows came over the side. One fellow put an automatic pistol to Connart’s head and the other man with another automatic covered the officer on the bridge. There was nothing on board the Satanita but a deck gun and a nickel plated revolver, so she was helpless. Then two more fellows came on board from the boat and went through her. They smashed up the wireless first. Then they skipped and that old broken-down looking yawl went off to the south under an auxiliary engine.”

“And why the blazes didn’t they chase and ram her?” asked Hank.

“Couldn’t. The rudder was jammed. The fellows in the boat had done some tinkering work to it. It took them two days to get it right, and they can’t even give a full description of the men, for they wore caps with slits in them. Pulled the caps over their faces as they came aboard and looked through the slits.”

“I expect the Navy will take it in hand,” said George du Cane. “A couple of destroyers will soon run them down wherever they are hidden.”

Hank Fisher laughed. “You might as well go hunting for an honest man in Market Street with a couple of rat terriers,” said Hank. “First, you wouldn’t find him, second he wouldn’t be a rat. Why, that auxiliary yawl is either at the bottom by now, or converted into something else—and the guys on board her, do you think they’re traveling about the Pacific with their slit caps over their faces waiting for a destroyer to fetch them home? What did you say the reward was—twenty-five thousand? You wait one minute.”

He rose up and left the room.

“What’s the matter with Hank now?” asked George.

“Search me,” replied Abrahams, “unless he’s gone off to ’phone the police all about Vanderdecken being Amsterdam Joe and his description.”

“He’d never do that,” said Carolus. “He’s too chivalrous; you fellows don’t know Hank. I don’t rightly know him myself. He’s a contradiction, something as new as wireless and as old as Don Quixote, but the Don’s there all the time. I saw him giving his arm to an old woman in Market Street the other day; looked like a washerwoman. She’d tumbled down and hurt her leg or something and there was Hank handing her like a duchess on to a car. He believes in the sanctity of womanhood—told me so once.”

“And he believes in the rights of man,” said Abrahams, “but he’d beat you out of your back teeth in one of his infernal land speculations.”

“And then buy you a new set,” said Carolus, “and swindle the dentist out of a commission on the deal. Not that he cares for money.”

“Oh, no, he doesn’t care for money,” said Abrahams. “I’ll admit that, but he’s a pirate all the same. It’s his romantic temperament, maybe, mixed up with his New England ancestry. Here he is.”

“Boys,” said Hank, as he approached the group, “it’s true enough, I’ve been on the ’phone; there’s twenty-five thousand dollars reward out for the Dutchman, half put up by the Yacht Clubs. I’m out.”

“What do you mean?” asked Abrahams.

“To catch him,” said Hank.