Burning Daylight eBook

There was no justice in the deal.  The little men that came, the little pulpy babies, were not even asked if they wanted to try a flutter at the game.  They had no choice.  Luck jerked them into life, slammed them up against the jostling table, and told them:  “Now play, damn you, play!” And they did their best, poor little devils.  The play of some led to steam yachts and mansions; of others, to the asylum or the pauper’s ward.  Some played the one same card, over and over, and made wine all their days in the chaparral, hoping, at the end, to pull down a set of false teeth and a coffin.  Others quit the game early, having drawn cards that called for violent death, or famine in the Barrens, or loathsome and lingering disease.  The hands of some called for kingship and irresponsible and numerated power; other hands called for ambition, for wealth in untold sums, for disgrace and shame, or for women and wine.

As for himself, he had drawn a lucky hand, though he could not see all the cards.  Somebody or something might get him yet.  The mad god, Luck, might be tricking him along to some such end.  An unfortunate set of circumstances, and in a month’s time the robber gang might be war-dancing around his financial carcass.  This very day a street-car might run him down, or a sign fall from a building and smash in his skull.  Or there was disease, ever rampant, one of Luck’s grimmest whims.  Who could say?  To-morrow, or some other day, a ptomaine bug, or some other of a thousand bugs, might jump out upon him and drag him down.  There was Doctor Bascom, Lee Bascom who had stood beside him a week ago and talked and argued, a picture of magnificent youth, and strength, and health.  And in three days he was dead—­pneumonia, rheumatism of the heart, and heaven knew what else—­at the end screaming in agony that could be heard a block away.  That had been terrible.  It was a fresh, raw stroke in Daylight’s consciousness.  And when would his own turn come?  Who could say?

In the meantime there was nothing to do but play the cards he could see in his hand, and they were battle, revenge, and cocktails.  And Luck sat over all and grinned.

CHAPTER XI

One Sunday, late in the afternoon, found Daylight across the bay in the Piedmont hills back of Oakland.  As usual, he was in a big motor-car, though not his own, the guest of Swiftwater Bill, Luck’s own darling, who had come down to spend the clean-up of the seventh fortune wrung from the frozen Arctic gravel.  A notorious spender, his latest pile was already on the fair road to follow the previous six.  He it was, in the first year of Dawson, who had cracked an ocean of champagne at fifty dollars a quart; who, with the bottom of his gold-sack in sight, had cornered the egg-market, at twenty-four dollars per dozen, to the tune of one hundred and ten dozen, in order to pique the lady-love who had jilted him; and he it was, paying like a prince for speed, who had chartered special trains and broken all records between San Francisco and New York.  And here he was once more, the “luck-pup of hell,” as Daylight called him, throwing his latest fortune away with the same old-time facility.