He shrugged his shoulders.
"Take it or leave it.
Them's my terms."
"It's dog eat dog, and I ain't overlooking any meat that's floating around," Daylight proclaimed that afternoon to Hegan; and Simon Dolliver went the way of the unfortunate in the Great Panic who were caught with plenty of paper and no money.
Daylight's shifts and devices were amazing.
Nothing however large or small, passed his keen sight unobserved.
The strain he was under was terrific.
He no longer ate lunch.
The days were too short, and his noon hours and his office were as crowded as at any other time.
By the end of the day he was exhausted, and, as never before, he sought relief behind his wall of alcoholic inhibition.
Straight to his hotel he was driven, and straight to his rooms he went, where immediately was mixed for him the first of a series of double Martinis.
By dinner, his brain was well clouded and the panic forgotten.
By bedtime, with the assistance of Scotch whiskey, he was full—not violently nor uproariously full, nor stupefied, but merely well under the influence of a pleasant and mild anesthetic.
Next morning he awoke with parched lips and mouth, and with sensations of heaviness in his head which quickly passed away.
By eight o'clock he was at his desk, buckled down to the fight, by ten o'clock on his personal round of the banks, and after that, without a moment's cessation, till nightfall, he was handling the knotty tangles of industry, finance, and human nature that crowded upon him.
And with nightfall it was back to the hotel, the double Martinis and the Scotch; and this was his program day after day until the days ran into weeks.
CHAPTER XXI
Though Daylight appeared among his fellows hearty voiced, inexhaustible, spilling over with energy and vitality, deep down he was a very weary man.
And sometime under the liquor drug, snatches of wisdom came to him far more lucidity than in his sober moments, as, for instance, one night, when he sat on the edge of the bed with one shoe in his hand and meditated on Dede's aphorism to the effect that he could not sleep in more than one bed at a time.
Still holding the shoe, he looked at the array of horsehair bridles on the walls. Then, carrying the shoe, he got up and solemnly counted them, journeying into the two adjoining rooms to complete the tale.
Then he came back to the bed and gravely addressed his shoe:—
"The little woman's right.
Only one bed at a time.
One hundred and forty hair bridles, and nothing doing with ary one of them.
One bridle at a time!
I can't ride one horse at a time.
Poor old Bob.
I'd better be sending you out to pasture.
Thirty million dollars, and a hundred million or nothing in sight, and what have I got to show for it?
There's lots of things money can't buy.
It can't buy the little woman.
It can't buy capacity.
What's the good of thirty millions when I ain't got room for more than a quart of cocktails a day?
If I had a hundred-quart-cocktail thirst, it'd be different.
But one quart—one measly little quart!
Here I am, a thirty times over millionaire, slaving harder every day than any dozen men that work for me, and all I get is two meals that don't taste good, one bed, a quart of Martini, and a hundred and forty hair bridles to look at on the wall."
He stared around at the array disconsolately.
"Mr. Shoe, I'm sizzled.
Good night."
Far worse than the controlled, steady drinker is the solitary drinker, and it was this that Daylight was developing into.
He rarely drank sociably any more, but in his own room, by himself. Returning weary from each day's unremitting effort, he drugged himself to sleep, knowing that on the morrow he would rise up with a dry and burning mouth and repeat the program.
But the country did not recover with its wonted elasticity.
Money did not become freer, though the casual reader of Daylight's newspapers, as well as of all the other owned and subsidised newspapers in the country, could only have concluded that the money tightness was over and that the panic was past history.
All public utterances were cheery and optimistic, but privately many of the utters were in desperate straits.
The scenes enacted in the privacy of Daylight's office, and of the meetings of his boards of directors, would have given the lie to the editorials in his newspapers; as, for instance, when he addressed the big stockholders in the Sierra and Salvador Power Company, the United Water Company, and the several other stock companies:—
"You've got to dig.
You've got a good thing, but you'll have to sacrifice in order to hold on.
There ain't no use spouting hard times explanations.
Don't I know the hard times is on?
Ain't that what you're here for?