And not alone had he grown up with the land, for, raw as it was, he had helped to make it.
He had made history and geography, and those that followed wrote of his traverses and charted the trails his feet had broken.
Heroes are seldom given to hero-worship, but among those of that young land, young as he was, he was accounted an elder hero.
In point of time he was before them. In point of deed he was beyond them. In point of endurance it was acknowledged that he could kill the hardiest of them.
Furthermore, he was accounted a nervy man, a square man, and a white man.
In all lands where life is a hazard lightly played with and lightly flung aside, men turn, almost automatically, to gambling for diversion and relaxation.
In the Yukon men gambled their lives for gold, and those that won gold from the ground gambled for it with one another.
Nor was Elam Harnish an exception.
He was a man's man primarily, and the instinct in him to play the game of life was strong.
Environment had determined what form that game should take.
He was born on an Iowa farm, and his father had emigrated to eastern Oregon, in which mining country Elam's boyhood was lived.
He had known nothing but hard knocks for big stakes.
Pluck and endurance counted in the game, but the great god Chance dealt the cards.
Honest work for sure but meagre returns did not count. A man played big.
He risked everything for everything, and anything less than everything meant that he was a loser.
So for twelve Yukon years, Elam Harnish had been a loser.
True, on Moosehide Creek the past summer he had taken out twenty thousand dollars, and what was left in the ground was twenty thousand more.
But, as he himself proclaimed, that was no more than getting his ante back.
He had ante'd his life for a dozen years, and forty thousand was a small pot for such a stake—the price of a drink and a dance at the Tivoli, of a winter's flutter at Circle City, and a grubstake for the year to come.
The men of the Yukon reversed the old maxim till it read: hard come, easy go.
At the end of the reel, Elam Harnish called the house up to drink again.
Drinks were a dollar apiece, gold rated at sixteen dollars an ounce; there were thirty in the house that accepted his invitation, and between every dance the house was Elam's guest.
This was his night, and nobody was to be allowed to pay for anything.
Not that Elam Harnish was a drinking man. Whiskey meant little to him.
He was too vital and robust, too untroubled in mind and body, to incline to the slavery of alcohol.
He spent months at a time on trail and river when he drank nothing stronger than coffee, while he had gone a year at a time without even coffee.
But he was gregarious, and since the sole social expression of the Yukon was the saloon, he expressed himself that way.
When he was a lad in the mining camps of the West, men had always done that.
To him it was the proper way for a man to express himself socially.
He knew no other way.
He was a striking figure of a man, despite his garb being similar to that of all the men in the Tivoli. Soft-tanned moccasins of moose-hide, beaded in Indian designs, covered his feet. His trousers were ordinary overalls, his coat was made from a blanket. Long-gauntleted leather mittens, lined with wool, hung by his side. They were connected in the Yukon fashion, by a leather thong passed around the neck and across the shoulders. On his head was a fur cap, the ear-flaps raised and the tying-cords dangling.
His face, lean and slightly long, with the suggestion of hollows under the cheek-bones, seemed almost Indian. The burnt skin and keen dark eyes contributed to this effect, though the bronze of the skin and the eyes themselves were essentially those of a white man.
He looked older than thirty, and yet, smooth-shaven and without wrinkles, he was almost boyish.
This impression of age was based on no tangible evidence. It came from the abstracter facts of the man, from what he had endured and survived, which was far beyond that of ordinary men.
He had lived life naked and tensely, and something of all this smouldered in his eyes, vibrated in his voice, and seemed forever a-whisper on his lips.
The lips themselves were thin, and prone to close tightly over the even, white teeth. But their harshness was retrieved by the upward curl at the corners of his mouth. This curl gave to him sweetness, as the minute puckers at the corners of the eyes gave him laughter.
These necessary graces saved him from a nature that was essentially savage and that otherwise would have been cruel and bitter.
The nose was lean, full-nostrilled, and delicate, and of a size to fit the face; while the high forehead, as if to atone for its narrowness, was splendidly domed and symmetrical. In line with the Indian effect was his hair, very straight and very black, with a gloss to it that only health could give.
"Burning Daylight's burning candlelight," laughed Dan MacDonald, as an outburst of exclamations and merriment came from the dancers.
"An' he is der boy to do it, eh, Louis?" said Olaf Henderson.
"Yes, by Gar! you bet on dat," said French Louis.
"Dat boy is all gold—"
"And when God Almighty washes Daylight's soul out on the last big slucin' day," MacDonald interrupted, "why, God Almighty'll have to shovel gravel along with him into the sluice-boxes."
"Dot iss goot," Olaf Henderson muttered, regarding the gambler with profound admiration.
"Ver' good," affirmed French Louis.
"I t'ink we take a drink on dat one time, eh?"
CHAPTER II
It was two in the morning when the dancers, bent on getting something to eat, adjourned the dancing for half an hour.
And it was at this moment that Jack Kearns suggested poker.
Jack Kearns was a big, bluff-featured man, who, along with Bettles, had made the disastrous attempt to found a post on the head-reaches of the Koyokuk, far inside the Arctic Circle. After that, Kearns had fallen back on his posts at Forty Mile and Sixty Mile and changed the direction of his ventures by sending out to the States for a small sawmill and a river steamer.