men.
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This laughter aroused him. He joined in it at first, and then
his face slowly grew grave. He leaned toward the hammer-thrower.
“Son,” he said, “let me whisper a secret. Get out of here and
quit drinking before you begin.”
The young fellow flushed angrily, but Daylight held steadily on.
“You listen to your dad, and let him say a few. I’m a young man
myself, only I ain’t. Let me tell you, several years ago for me
to turn your hand down would have been like committing assault
and battery on a kindergarten.”
Slosson looked his incredulity, while the others grinned and
clustered around Daylight encouragingly.
“Son, I ain’t given to preaching. This is the first time I ever
come to the penitent form, and you put me there yourself–hard.
I’ve seen a few in my time, and I ain’t fastidious so as you can
notice it. But let me tell you right not that I’m worth the
devil alone knows how many millions, and that I’d sure give it
all, right here on the bar, to turn down your hand. Which means
I’d give the whole shooting match just to be back where I was
before I quit sleeping under the stars and come into the
hen-coops
of cities to drink cocktails and lift up my feet and ride.
Son, that’s that’s the matter with me, and that’s the way I feel
about it. The game ain’t worth the candle. You just take care
of
yourself, and roll my advice over once in a while. Good night.”
He turned and lurched out of the place, the moral effect of his
utterance largely spoiled by the fact that he was so patently
full while he uttered it.
Still in a daze, Daylight made to his hotel, accomplished his
dinner, and prepared for bed.
“The damned young whippersnapper!” he muttered. “Put my hand
down easy as you please. My hand!”
He held up the offending member and regarded it with stupid
wonder. The hand that had never been beaten! The hand that had
made the Circle City giants wince! And a kid from college, with
a
laugh on his face, had put it down–twice! Dede was right. He
was not the same man. The situation would bear more serious
looking into than he had ever given it. But this was not the
time. In the morning, after a good sleep, he would give it
consideration.
CHAPTER XXII
Burning Daylight
209
Daylight awoke with the familiar parched mouth and lips and
throat, took a long drink of water from the pitcher beside his
bed, and gathered up the train of thought where he had left it
the night before. He reviewed the easement of the financial
strain. Things were mending at last. While the going was still
rough, the greatest dangers were already past. As he had told
Hegan, a tight rein and careful playing were all that was needed
now. Flurries and dangers were bound to come, but not so grave
as the ones they had already weathered. He had been hit hard,
but he was coming through without broken bones, which was more
than Simon Dolliver and many another could say. And not one of
his business friends had been ruined. He had compelled them to
stay in line to save himself, and they had been saved as well.
His mind moved on to the incident at the corner of the bar of the
Parthenon, when the young athlete had turned his hand down. He
was no longer stunned by the event, but he was shocked and
grieved, as only a strong man can be, at this passing of his
strength. And the issue was too clear for him to dodge, even
with himself. He knew why his hand had gone down. Not because
he was an old man. He was just in the first flush of his prime,
and, by rights, it was the hand of the hammer-thrower which
should have gone down. Daylight knew that he had taken liberties
with himself. He had always looked upon this strength of his as
permanent, and here, for years, it had been steadily oozing from
him. As he had diagnosed it, he had come in from under the stars
to roost in the coops of cities. He had almost forgotten how to
walk. He had lifted up his feet and been ridden around in
automobiles, cabs and carriages, and electric cars. He had not
exercised, and he had dry-rotted his muscles with alcohol.
And was it worth it? What did all his money mean after all?
Dede was right. It could buy him no more than one bed at a time,
and at the same time it made him the abjectest of slaves. It
tied him fast. He was tied by it right now. Even if he so
desired, he could not lie abed this very day. His money called
him. The office whistle would soon blow, and he must answer it.
The early sunshine was streaming through his window–a fine day
for a ride in the hills on Bob, with Dede beside him on her Mab.
Yet all his millions could not buy him this one day. One of
those flurries might come along, and he had to be on the spot to
meet it. Thirty millions! And they were powerless to persuade
Dede to ride on Mab–Mab, whom he had bought, and who was unused
and growing fat on pasture. What were thirty millions when they
could not buy a man a ride with the girl he loved? Thirty
millions!–that made him come here and go there, that rode upon
him like so many millstones, that destroyed him while they grew,
that put their foot down and prevented him from winning this girl
who worked for ninety dollars a month.
Which was better? he asked himself. All this was Dede’s own
thought. It was what she had meant when she prayed he would go
Burning Daylight
210
broke. He held up his offending right arm. It wasn’t the same
old arm. Of course she could not love that arm and that body as
she had loved the strong, clean arm and body of years before. He
didn’t like that arm and body himself. A young whippersnapper
had been able to take liberties with it. It had gone back on
him. He sat up suddenly. No, by God, he had gone back on it!
He had gone back on himself. He had gone back on Dede. She was
right, a thousand times right, and she had sense enough to know
it, sense enough to refuse to marry a money slave with a
whiskey-rotted carcass.
He got out of bed and looked at himself in the long mirror on the
wardrobe door. He wasn’t pretty. The old-time lean cheeks
were gone. These were heavy, seeming to hang down by their own
weight. He looked for the lines of cruelty Dede had spoken of,
and he found them, and he found the harshness in the eyes as
well, the eyes that were muddy now after all the cocktails of the
night before, and of the months and years before. He looked at
the clearly defined pouches that showed under his eyes, and
they’ve shocked him. He rolled up the sleeve of his pajamas. No
wonder the hammer-thrower had put his hand down. Those weren’t
muscles. A rising tide of fat had submerged them. He stripped
off the pajama coat. Again he was shocked, this time but the
bulk of his body. It wasn’t pretty. The lean stomach had become
a paunch. The ridged muscles of chest and shoulders and abdomen
had broken down into rolls of flesh.
He sat down on the bed, and through his mind drifted pictures of
his youthful excellence, of the hardships he had endured over
other men, of the Indians and dogs he had run off their legs in
the heart-breaking days and nights on the Alaskan trail, of the
feats of strength that had made him king over a husky race of
frontiersmen.
And this was age. Then there drifted across the field of vision
of his mind’s eye the old man he had encountered at Glen Ellen,
corning up the hillside through the fires of sunset, white-headed
and white-bearded, eighty-four, in his hand the pail of foaming
milk and in his face all the warm glow and content of the passing
summer day. That had been age. “Yes siree, eighty-four, and
spryer than most,” he could hear the old man say. “And I ain’t
loafed none. I walked across the Plains with an ox-team and fit
Injuns in ’51, and I was a family man then with seven
youngsters.”
Next he remembered the old woman of the chaparral, pressing
grapes in her mountain clearing; and Ferguson, the little man who
had scuttled into the road like a rabbit, the one-time managing
editor of a great newspaper, who was content to live in the