outlook, it was all very well to toss an ante away in a night’s
frolic. That was what he had done the night of the poker-game in
Circle City when he lost fifty thousand–all that he possessed.
But he had looked on that fifty thousand as a mere ante. When it
came to millions, it was different. Such a fortune was a stake,
and was not to be sown on bar-room floors, literally sown, flung
broadcast out of the moosehide sacks by drunken millionaires
who had lost all sense of proportion. There was McMann, who ran
up a single bar-room bill of thirty-eight thousand dollars; and
Jimmie the Rough, who spent one hundred thousand a month for four
months in riotous living, and then fell down drunk in the snow
one March night and was frozen to death; and Swiftwater Bill,
who, after spending three valuable claims in an extravagance of
debauchery, borrowed three thousand dollars with which to leave
the country, and who, out of this sum, because the lady-love that
had jilted him liked eggs, cornered the one hundred and ten dozen
eggs on the Dawson market, paying twenty-four dollars a dozen for
them and promptly feeding them to the wolf-dogs.
Champagne sold at from forty to fifty dollars a quart, and
canned oyster stew at fifteen dollars. Daylight indulged in no
such luxuries. He did not mind treating a bar-room of men to
whiskey at fifty cents a drink, but there was somewhere in his
own extravagant nature a sense of fitness and arithmetic that
revolted against paying fifteen dollars for the contents of an
oyster can. On the other hand, he possibly spent more money in
relieving hard-luck cases than did the wildest of the new
millionaires on insane debauchery. Father Judge, of the
hospital, could have told of far more important donations than
that first ten sacks of flour. And old-timers who came to
Daylight invariably went away relieved according to their need.
But fifty dollars for a quart of fizzy champagne! That was
appalling.
And yet he still, on occasion, made one of his old-time
hell-roaring nights. But he did so for different reasons.
First, it was expected of him because it had been his way in the
old days. And second, he could afford it. But he no longer
cared quite so much for that form of diversion. He had
developed, in a new way, the taste for power. It had become a
lust with him. By far the wealthiest miner in Alaska, he wanted
to be still wealthier. It was a big game he was playing in, and
he liked it better than any other game. In a way, the part he
played was creative. He was doing something. And at no time,
striking another chord of his nature, could he take the joy in a
million-dollar Eldorado dump that was at all equivalent to the
joy he took in watching his two sawmills working and the big down
river log-rafts swinging into the bank in the big eddy just above
Moosehide Mountain. Gold, even on the scales, was, after all, an
Burning Daylight
74
abstraction. It represented things and the power to do. But the
sawmills were the things themselves, concrete and tangible, and
they were things that were a means to the doing of more things.
They were dreams come true, hard and indubitable realizations of
fairy gossamers.
With the summer rush from the Outside came special correspondents
for the big newspapers and magazines, and one and all, using
unlimited space, they wrote Daylight up; so that, so far as the
world was concerned, Daylight loomed the largest figure in
Alaska. Of course, after several months, the world became
interested in the Spanish War, and forgot all about him; but in
the Klondike itself Daylight still remained the most prominent
figure. Passing along the streets of Dawson, all heads turned to
follow him, and in the saloons chechaquos watched him awesomely,
scarcely taking their eyes from him as long as he remained in
their range of vision. Not alone was he the richest man in the
country, but he was Burning Daylight, the pioneer, the man who,
almost in the midst of antiquity of that young land, had crossed
the Chilcoot and drifted down the Yukon to meet those elder
giants, Al Mayo and Jack McQuestion. He was the Burning Daylight
of scores of wild adventures, the man who carried word to the
ice-bound whaling fleet across the tundra wilderness to the
Arctic Sea, who raced the mail from Circle to Salt Water and back
again in sixty days, who saved the whole Tanana tribe from
perishing in the winter of ’91–in short, the man who smote the
chechaquos’ imaginations more violently than any other dozen men
rolled into one.
He had the fatal facility for self-advertisement. Things he did,
no matter how adventitious or spontaneous, struck the popular
imagination as remarkable. And the latest thing he had done was
always on men’s lips, whether it was being first in the
heartbreaking stampede to Danish Creek, in killing the record
baldface grizzly over on Sulphur Creek, or in winning the
single-paddle canoe race on the Queen’s Birthday, after being
forced to participate at the last moment by the failure of the
sourdough representative to appear. Thus, one night in the
Moosehorn, he locked horns with Jack Kearns in the long-promised
return game of poker. The sky and eight o’clock in the morning
were made the limits, and at the close of the game Daylight’s
winnings were two hundred and thirty thousand dollars. To Jack
Kearns, already a several-times millionaire, this loss was not
vital. But the whole community was thrilled by the size of the
stakes, and each one of the dozen correspondents in the field
sent out a sensational article.
CHAPTER XII
Despite his many sources of revenue, Daylight’s pyramiding kept
him pinched for cash throughout the first winter. The
pay-gravel, thawed on bed-rock and hoisted to the surface,
immediately froze again. Thus his dumps, containing several
Burning Daylight
75
millions of gold, were inaccessible. Not until the returning sun
thawed the dumps and melted the water to wash them was he able to
handle the gold they contained. And then he found himself with a
surplus of gold, deposited in the two newly organized banks; and
he was promptly besieged by men and groups of men to enlist his
capital in their enterprises.
But he elected to play his own game, and he entered combinations
only when they were generally defensive or offensive. Thus,
though he had paid the highest wages, he joined the Mine-owners’
Association, engineered the fight, and effectually curbed the
growing insubordination of the wage-earners. Times had changed.
The old days were gone forever. This was a new era, and
Daylight, the wealthy mine-owner, was loyal to his class
affiliations. It was true, the old-timers who worked for him, in
order to be saved from the club of the organized owners, were
made foremen over the gang of chechaquos; but this, with
Daylight, was a matter of heart, not head. In his heart he could
not forget the old days, while with his head he played the
economic game according to the latest and most practical methods.
But outside of such group-combinations of exploiters, he refused
to bind himself to any man’s game. He was playing a great lone
hand, and he needed all his money for his own backing. The newly
founded stock-exchange interested him keenly. He had never
before seen such an institution, but he was quick to see its
virtues and to utilize it. Most of all, it was gambling, and on
many an occasion not necessary for the advancement of his own
schemes, he, as he called it, went the stock-exchange a flutter,
out of sheer wantonness and fun.
“It sure beats faro,” was his comment one day, when, after
keeping the Dawson speculators in a fever for a week by alternate
bulling and bearing, he showed his hand and cleaned up what would
have been a fortune to any other man.
Other men, having made their strike, had headed south for the
States, taking a furlough from the grim Arctic battle. But,
asked when he was going Outside, Daylight always laughed and said
when he had finished playing his hand. He also added that a man
was a fool to quit a game just when a winning hand had been dealt
him.
It was held by the thousands of hero-worshipping chechaquos that
Daylight was a man absolutely without fear. But Bettles and Dan
MacDonald and other sourdoughs shook their heads and laughed as
they mentioned women. And they were right. He had always been
afraid of them from the time, himself a lad of seventeen, when
Queen Anne, of Juneau, made open and ridiculous love to him. For
that matter, he never had known women. Born in a mining-camp
where they were rare and mysterious, having no sisters, his
mother dying while he was an infant, he had never been in contact