The Ne'er Do Well

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.