Burning Daylight eBook

He had the fatal facility for self-advertisement.  Things he did, no matter how adventitious or spontaneous, struck the popular imagination as remarkable.  And the latest thing he had done was always on men’s lips, whether it was being first in the heartbreaking stampede to Danish Creek, in killing the record baldface grizzly over on Sulphur Creek, or in winning the single-paddle canoe race on the Queen’s Birthday, after being forced to participate at the last moment by the failure of the sourdough representative to appear.  Thus, one night in the Moosehorn, he locked horns with Jack Kearns in the long-promised return game of poker.  The sky and eight o’clock in the morning were made the limits, and at the close of the game Daylight’s winnings were two hundred and thirty thousand dollars.  To Jack Kearns, already a several-times millionaire, this loss was not vital.  But the whole community was thrilled by the size of the stakes, and each one of the dozen correspondents in the field sent out a sensational article.

CHAPTER XII

Despite his many sources of revenue, Daylight’s pyramiding kept him pinched for cash throughout the first winter.  The pay-gravel, thawed on bed-rock and hoisted to the surface, immediately froze again.  Thus his dumps, containing several millions of gold, were inaccessible.  Not until the returning sun thawed the dumps and melted the water to wash them was he able to handle the gold they contained.  And then he found himself with a surplus of gold, deposited in the two newly organized banks; and he was promptly besieged by men and groups of men to enlist his capital in their enterprises.

But he elected to play his own game, and he entered combinations only when they were generally defensive or offensive.  Thus, though he had paid the highest wages, he joined the Mine-owners’ Association, engineered the fight, and effectually curbed the growing insubordination of the wage-earners.  Times had changed.  The old days were gone forever.  This was a new era, and Daylight, the wealthy mine-owner, was loyal to his class affiliations.  It was true, the old-timers who worked for him, in order to be saved from the club of the organized owners, were made foremen over the gang of chechaquos; but this, with Daylight, was a matter of heart, not head.  In his heart he could not forget the old days, while with his head he played the economic game according to the latest and most practical methods.

But outside of such group-combinations of exploiters, he refused to bind himself to any man’s game.  He was playing a great lone hand, and he needed all his money for his own backing.  The newly founded stock-exchange interested him keenly.  He had never before seen such an institution, but he was quick to see its virtues and to utilize it.  Most of all, it was gambling, and on many an occasion not necessary for the advancement of his own schemes, he, as he called it, went the stock-exchange a flutter, out of sheer wantonness and fun.