and retained most of his big enterprises of his own. Among the
companies in which he reluctantly allowed the investing public to
join were the Golden Gate Dock Company, and Recreation Parks
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Company, the United Water Company, the Uncial Shipbuilding
Company, and the Sierra and Salvador Power Company.
Nevertheless, between himself and Hegan, he retained the
controlling share in each of these enterprises.
His affair with Dede Mason only seemed to languish. While
delaying to grapple with the strange problem it presented, his
desire for her continued to grow. In his gambling simile, his
conclusion was that Luck had dealt him the most remarkable card
in the deck, and that for years he had overlooked it. Love was
the card, and it beat them all. Love was the king card of
trumps, the fifth ace, the joker in a game of tenderfoot poker.
It was the card of cards, and play it he would, to the limit,
when the opening came. He could not see that opening yet. The
present game would have to play to some sort of a conclusion
first.
Yet he could not shake from his brain and vision the warm
recollection of those bronze slippers, that clinging gown, and
all the feminine softness and pliancy of Dede in her pretty
Berkeley rooms. Once again, on a rainy Sunday, he telephoned
that he was coming. And, as has happened ever since man first
looked upon woman and called her good, again he played the blind
force of male compulsion against the woman’s secret weakness to
yield. Not that it was Daylight’s way abjectly to beg and
entreat. On the contrary, he was masterful in whatever he did,
but he had a trick of whimsical wheedling that Dede found harder
to resist than the pleas of a suppliant lover. It was not a
happy scene in its outcome, for Dede, in the throes of her own
desire, desperate with weakness and at the same time with her
better judgment hating her weakness cried out:–
“You urge me to try a chance, to marry you now and trust to luck
for it to come out right. And life is a gamble say. Very well,
let us gamble. Take a coin and toss it in the air. If it comes
heads, I’ll marry you. If it doesn’t, you are forever to leave
me alone and never mention marriage again.”
A fire of mingled love and the passion of gambling came into
Daylight’s eyes. Involuntarily his hand started for his pocket
for the coin. Then it stopped, and the light in his eyes was
troubled.
“Go on,” she ordered sharply. “Don’t delay, or I may change my
mind, and you will lose the chance.”
“Little woman.” His similes were humorous, but there was no
humor in their meaning. His thought was as solemn as his voice.
“Little woman, I’d gamble all the way from Creation to the Day of
Judgment; I’d gamble a golden harp against another man’s halo;
I’d toss for pennies on the front steps of the New Jerusalem or
set up a faro layout just outside the Pearly Gates; but I’ll be
everlastingly damned if I’ll gamble on love. Love’s too big to
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me to take a chance on. Love’s got to be a sure thing, and
between you and me it is a sure thing. If the odds was a hundred
to one on my winning this flip, just the same, nary a flip.”
In the spring of the year the Great Panic came on. The first
warning was when the banks began calling in their unprotected
loans. Daylight promptly paid the first several of his personal
notes that were presented; then he divined that these demands but
indicated the way the wind was going to blow, and that one of
those terrific financial storms he had heard about was soon to
sweep over the United States. How terrific this particular storm
was to be he did not anticipate. Nevertheless, he took every
precaution in his power, and had no anxiety about his weathering
it out.
Money grew tighter. Beginning with the crash of several of the
greatest Eastern banking houses, the tightness spread, until
every bank in the country was calling in its credits. Daylight
was caught, and caught because of the fact that for the first
time he had been playing the legitimate business game. In the
old days, such a panic, with the accompanying extreme shrinkage
of values, would have been a golden harvest time for him. As it
was, he watched the gamblers, who had ridden the wave of
prosperity and made preparation for the slump, getting out from
under and safely scurrying to cover or proceeding to reap a
double harvest. Nothing remained for him but to stand fast and
hold up.
He saw the situation clearly. When the banks demanded that he
pay his loans, he knew that the banks were in sore need of the
money. But he was in sorer need. And he knew that the banks did
not want his collateral which they held. It would do them no
good. In such a tumbling of values was no time to sell. His
collateral was good, all of it, eminently sound and worth while;
yet it was worthless at such a moment, when the one unceasing cry
was money, money, money. Finding him obdurate, the banks
demanded more collateral, and as the money pinch tightened they
asked for two and even three times as much as had been originally
accepted. Sometimes Daylight yielded to these demands, but more
often not, and always battling fiercely.
He fought as with clay behind a crumbling wall. All portions of
the wall were menaced, and he went around constantly
strengthening the weakest parts with clay. This clay was money,
and was applied, a sop here and a sop there, as fast as it was
needed, but only when it was directly needed. The strength of
his position lay in the Yerba Buena Ferry Company, the
Consolidated Street Railways, and the United Water Company.
Though people were no longer buying residence lots and factory
and business sites, they were compelled to ride on his cars and
ferry-boats and to consume his water. When all the financial
world was clamoring for money and perishing through lack of it,
the first of each month many thousands of dollars poured into his
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coffers from the water-rates, and each day ten thousand dollars,
in dime and nickels, came in from his street railways and
ferries.
Cash was what was wanted, and had he had the use of all this
steady river of cash, all would have been well with him. As it
was, he had to fight continually for a portion of it.
Improvement work ceased, and only absolutely essential repairs
were made. His fiercest fight was with the operating expenses,
and this was a fight that never ended. There was never any
let-up in his turning the thumb-screws of extended credit and
economy. From the big wholesale suppliers down through the
salary list to office stationery and postage stamps, he kept the
thumb-screws turning. When his superintendents and heads of
departments performed prodigies of cutting down, he patted them
on the back and demanded more. When they threw down their hands
in despair, he showed them how more could be accomplished.
“You are getting eight thousand dollars a year,” he told
Matthewson. “It’s better pay than you ever got in your life
before. Your fortune is in the same sack with mine. You’ve got
to stand for some of the strain and risk. You’ve got personal
credit in this town. Use it. Stand off butcher and baker and
all the rest. Savvee? You’re drawing down something like six
hundred and sixty dollars a month. I want that cash. From now
on, stand everybody off and draw down a hundred. I’ll pay you
interest on the rest till this blows over.”
Two weeks later, with the pay-roll before them, it was:–
“Matthewson, who’s this bookkeeper, Rogers? Your nephew? I
thought so. He’s pulling down eighty-five a month. After–this
let him draw thirty-five. The forty can ride with me at
interest.”
“Impossible! ” Matthewson cried. “He can’t make ends meet on
his salary as it is, and he has a wife and two kids–”
Daylight was upon him with a mighty oath.
“Can’t! Impossible! What in hell do you think I’m running? A
home for feeble-minded? Feeding and dressing and wiping the
little noses of a lot of idiots that can’t take care of
themselves? Not on your life. I’m hustling, and now’s the time
that everybody that works for me has got to hustle. I want no
fair-weather birds holding down my office chairs or anything
else. This is nasty weather, damn nasty weather, and they’ve got
to buck into it just like me. There are ten thousand men out of
work in Oakland right now, and sixty thousand more in San