The Ne'er Do Well
Summary
A gridiron demigod, Kirk Anthony, spurns the gilded shackles of a railroad dynasty, preferring the salt-sweet sweat of the practice field and the midnight froth of campus revelry; one Dionysian bacchanal later, a grinning embezzler slips him a mickey, spirits him aboard a steamer suffused with coal-dust and destiny, and swaps identities like a card-sharp palming an ace. On that slow hemorrhage of ocean toward Panama, he becomes the unwitting axis around whom Mrs. Edith Cortlandt—her marriage a diplomatic ledger entry—spins into consuming desire. Isthmian heat, serrated by colonial rifles, greets the traveler; his Yankee firefighting zeal detonates a riot, shackling him and his Jamaican comrade Allan Allan in a Spanish-speaking calaboose. The lady’s influence plucks Kirk from the cage and props him inside a company uniform, where the scent of creosote mingles with the gardenia breath of Chiquita Garavel, daughter of vanished grandee blood. A clandestine wedding, a husband’s public humiliation, a pistol crack in a mahogany study, and a suicide note—its paper trembling like a hummingbird—form the crucible; only paternal tycoon muscle drags our tarnished hero back into daylight.
Synopsis
Former college football hero Kirk Anthony, to the disappointment of his father, a railroad magnate, refuses to enter the business world. Kirk prefers to coach the university team and carouse, until he is drugged during a drunken victory party and put aboard a steamer bound for Panama by an embezzler who switches clothes with him. During the trip, Mrs. Edith Cortlandt, who has married her diplomat husband for convenience, falls in love with Kirk. In Panama, Kirk and Allan Allan, a Jamaican friend, are arrested when Kirk's efforts to use American firefighting methods cause a riot. After Mrs. Cortlandt's influence gets Kirk out of jail and into a job, he falls in love with Chiquita Garavel, the daughter of a Spanish grandee. When Mrs. Cortlandt warns Kirk not to marry Chiquita, her husband overhears. He insults Kirk in public, and Kirk vows revenge. After Cortlandt commits suicide, and Kirk, who has secretly married Chiquita, is arrested, Mrs. Cortlandt withholds Cortlandt's suicide note, but Kirk's father arrives and convinces her to help arrange Kirk's release.
