Burning Daylight eBook

Her one possible chance had been that he, too, should have caught it.  And he had failed to catch it.  Most likely, if he had, it would have been from Freda or some other woman.  There was Dartworthy, the college man who had staked the rich fraction on Bonanza above Discovery.  Everybody knew that old Doolittle’s daughter, Bertha, was madly in love with him.  Yet, when he contracted the disease, of all women, it had been with the wife of Colonel Walthstone, the great Guggenhammer mining expert.  Result, three lunacy cases:  Dartworthy selling out his mine for one-tenth its value; the poor woman sacrificing her respectability and sheltered nook in society to flee with him in an open boat down the Yukon; and Colonel Walthstone, breathing murder and destruction, taking out after them in another open boat.  The whole impending tragedy had moved on down the muddy Yukon, passing Forty Mile and Circle and losing itself in the wilderness beyond.  But there it was, love, disorganizing men’s and women’s lives, driving toward destruction and death, turning topsy-turvy everything that was sensible and considerate, making bawds or suicides out of virtuous women, and scoundrels and murderers out of men who had always been clean and square.

For the first time in his life Daylight lost his nerve.  He was badly and avowedly frightened.  Women were terrible creatures, and the love-germ was especially plentiful in their neighborhood.

And they were so reckless, so devoid of fear.  They were not frightened by what had happened to the Virgin.  They held out their arms to him more seductively than ever.  Even without his fortune, reckoned as a mere man, just past thirty, magnificently strong and equally good-looking and good-natured, he was a prize for most normal women.  But when to his natural excellences were added the romance that linked with his name and the enormous wealth that was his, practically every free woman he encountered measured him with an appraising and delighted eye, to say nothing of more than one woman who was not free.  Other men might have been spoiled by this and led to lose their heads; but the only effect on him was to increase his fright.  As a result he refused most invitations to houses where women might be met, and frequented bachelor boards and the Moosehorn Saloon, which had no dance-hall attached.

CHAPTER XIII

Six thousand spent the winter of 1897 in Dawson, work on the creeks went on apace, while beyond the passes it was reported that one hundred thousand more were waiting for the spring.  Late one brief afternoon, Daylight, on the benches between French Hill and Skookum Hill, caught a wider vision of things.  Beneath him lay the richest part of Eldorado Creek, while up and down Bonanza he could see for miles.  It was a scene of a vast devastation.  The hills, to their tops, had been shorn of trees, and their naked sides showed signs of goring and perforating