While she spoke his memory was busy with the associations
she recalled. He saw the deserted flat on the
river bank by the Klondike, and he saw the log cabins
and warehouses spring up, and all the log structures
he had built, and his sawmills working night and day
on three shifts.
“Why, dog-gone it, Miss Mason, you’re
right—in a way. I’ve built
hundreds of houses up there, and I remember I was proud
and glad to see them go up. I’m proud
now, when I remember them. And there was Ophir—the
most God-forsaken moose-pasture of a creek you ever
laid eyes on. I made that into the big Ophir.
Why, I ran the water in there from the Rinkabilly,
eighty miles away. They all said I couldn’t,
but I did it, and I did it by myself. The dam
and the flume cost me four million. But you
should have seen that Ophir—power plants,
electric lights, and hundreds of men on the pay-roll,
working night and day. I guess I do get an inkling
of what you mean by making a thing. I made Ophir,
and by God, she was a sure hummer—I beg
your pardon. I didn’t mean to cuss.
But that Ophir!—I sure am proud of her
now, just as the last time I laid eyes on her.”
“And you won something there that was more than
mere money,” Dede encouraged. “Now
do you know what I would do if I had lots of money
and simply had to go on playing at business?
Take all the southerly and westerly slopes of these
bare hills. I’d buy them in and plant
eucalyptus on them. I’d do it for the joy
of doing it anyway; but suppose I had that gambling
twist in me which you talk about, why, I’d do
it just the same and make money out of the trees.
And there’s my other point again. Instead
of raising the price of coal without adding an ounce
of coal to the market supply, I’d be making
thousands and thousands of cords of firewood—making
something where nothing was before. And everybody
who ever crossed on the ferries would look up at these
forested hills and be made glad. Who was made
glad by your adding four dollars a ton to Rock Wells?”
It was Daylight’s turn to be silent for a time
while she waited an answer.
“Would you rather I did things like that?”
he asked at last.
“It would be better for the world, and better
for you,” she answered noncommittally.
CHAPTER XVI
All week every one in the office knew that something
new and big was afoot in Daylight’s mind.
Beyond some deals of no importance, he had not been
interested in anything for several months. But
now he went about in an almost unbroken brown study,
made unexpected and lengthy trips across the bay to
Oakland, or sat at his desk silent and motionless
for hours. He seemed particularly happy with
what occupied his mind. At times men came in
and conferred with him—and with new faces
and differing in type from those that usually came
to see him.
Copyrights
Burning Daylight from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
