“And now tell me about the Klondike, and how
you turned San Francisco upside down with that last
raid of yours. You’re a bonny fighter,
you know, and you touch my imagination, though my
cooler reason tells me that you are a lunatic like
the rest. The lust for power! It’s
a dreadful affliction. Why didn’t you stay
in your Klondike? Or why don’t you clear
out and live a natural life, for instance, like mine?
You see, I can ask questions, too. Now you
talk and let me listen for a while.”
It was not until ten o’clock that Daylight parted
from Ferguson. As he rode along through the starlight,
the idea came to him of buying the ranch on the other
side of the valley. There was no thought in
his mind of ever intending to live on it. His
game was in San Francisco. But he liked the
ranch, and as soon as he got back to the office he
would open up negotiations with Hillard. Besides,
the ranch included the clay-pit, and it would give
him the whip-hand over Holdsworthy if he ever tried
to cut up any didoes.
CHAPTER X
The time passed, and Daylight played on at the game.
But the game had entered upon a new phase.
The lust for power in the mere gambling and winning
was metamorphosing into the lust for power in order
to revenge. There were many men in San Francisco
against whom he had registered black marks, and now
and again, with one of his lightning strokes, he erased
such a mark. He asked no quarter; he gave no
quarter. Men feared and hated him, and no one
loved him, except Larry Hegan, his lawyer, who would
have laid down his life for him. But he was the
only man with whom Daylight was really intimate, though
he was on terms of friendliest camaraderie with the
rough and unprincipled following of the bosses who
ruled the Riverside Club.
On the other hand, San Francisco’s attitude
toward Daylight had undergone a change. While
he, with his slashing buccaneer methods, was a distinct
menace to the more orthodox financial gamblers, he
was nevertheless so grave a menace that they were
glad enough to leave him alone. He had already
taught them the excellence of letting a sleeping dog
lie. Many of the men, who knew that they were
in danger of his big bear-paw when it reached out
for the honey vats, even made efforts to placate him,
to get on the friendly side of him. The Alta-Pacific
approached him confidentially with an offer of reinstatement,
which he promptly declined. He was after a number
of men in that club, and, whenever opportunity offered,
he reached out for them and mangled them. Even
the newspapers, with one or two blackmailing exceptions,
ceased abusing him and became respectful. In
short, he was looked upon as a bald-faced grizzly
from the Arctic wilds to whom it was considered expedient
to give the trail. At the time he raided the
steamship companies, they had yapped at him and worried
him, the whole pack of them, only to have him whirl
Copyrights
Burning Daylight from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
