Gold, even on the scales, was, after all, an abstraction.
It represented things and the power to do.
But the sawmills were the things themselves, concrete and tangible, and they were things that were a means to the doing of more things.
They were dreams come true, hard and indubitable realizations of fairy gossamers.
With the summer rush from the Outside came special correspondents for the big newspapers and magazines, and one and all, using unlimited space, they wrote Daylight up; so that, so far as the world was concerned, Daylight loomed the largest figure in Alaska.
Of course, after several months, the world became interested in the Spanish War, and forgot all about him; but in the Klondike itself Daylight still remained the most prominent figure.
Passing along the streets of Dawson, all heads turned to follow him, and in the saloons chechaquos watched him awesomely, scarcely taking their eyes from him as long as he remained in their range of vision.
Not alone was he the richest man in the country, but he was Burning Daylight, the pioneer, the man who, almost in the midst of antiquity of that young land, had crossed the Chilcoot and drifted down the Yukon to meet those elder giants, Al Mayo and Jack McQuestion.
He was the Burning Daylight of scores of wild adventures, the man who carried word to the ice-bound whaling fleet across the tundra wilderness to the Arctic Sea, who raced the mail from Circle to Salt Water and back again in sixty days, who saved the whole Tanana tribe from perishing in the winter of '91—in short, the man who smote the chechaquos' imaginations more violently than any other dozen men rolled into one.
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. [6] To copper: a term in faro, meaning to play a card to lose.
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.
"It sure beats faro," was his comment one day, when, after keeping the Dawson speculators in a fever for a week by alternate bulling and bearing, he showed his hand and cleaned up what would have been a fortune to any other man.
Other men, having made their strike, had headed south for the States, taking a furlough from the grim Arctic battle.
But, asked when he was going Outside, Daylight always laughed and said when he had finished playing his hand.
He also added that a man was a fool to quit a game just when a winning hand had been dealt him.
It was held by the thousands of hero-worshipping chechaquos that Daylight was a man absolutely without fear.
But Bettles and Dan MacDonald and other sourdoughs shook their heads and laughed as they mentioned women.
And they were right.
He had always been afraid of them from the time, himself a lad of seventeen, when Queen Anne, of Juneau, made open and ridiculous love to him.
For that matter, he never had known women. Born in a mining-camp where they were rare and mysterious, having no sisters, his mother dying while he was an infant, he had never been in contact with them.
True, running away from Queen Anne, he had later encountered them on the Yukon and cultivated an acquaintance with them—the pioneer ones who crossed the passes on the trail of the men who had opened up the first diggings.
But no lamb had ever walked with a wolf in greater fear and trembling than had he walked with them.
It was a matter of masculine pride that he should walk with them, and he had done so in fair seeming; but women had remained to him a closed book, and he preferred a game of solo or seven-up any time.
And now, known as the King of the Klondike, carrying several other royal titles, such as Eldorado King, Bonanza King, the Lumber Baron, and the Prince of the Stampeders, not to omit the proudest appellation of all, namely, the Father of the Sourdoughs, he was more afraid of women than ever.
As never before they held out their arms to him, and more women were flocking into the country day by day.
It mattered not whether he sat at dinner in the gold commissioner's house, called for the drinks in a dancehall, or submitted to an interview from the woman representative of the New York Sun, one and all of them held out their arms.
There was one exception, and that was Freda, the girl that danced, and to whom he had given the flour.
She was the only woman in whose company he felt at ease, for she alone never reached out her arms.
And yet it was from her that he was destined to receive next to his severest fright.
It came about in the fall of 1897.
He was returning from one of his dashes, this time to inspect Henderson, a creek that entered the Yukon just below the Stewart.