This explained the fifty-thousand-dollar raid on him by Holdsworthy and the ten-million-dollar raid on him by Dowsett, Letton, and Guggenhammer.
And when he raided Panama Mail he had done exactly the same thing.
Well, he concluded, it was finer sport robbing the robbers than robbing the poor stupid workers.
Thus, all unread in philosophy, Daylight preempted for himself the position and vocation of a twentieth-century superman.
He found, with rare and mythical exceptions, that there was no noblesse oblige among the business and financial supermen.
As a clever traveler had announced in an after-dinner speech at the Alta-Pacific,
"There was honor amongst thieves, and this was what distinguished thieves from honest men."
That was it.
It hit the nail on the head.
These modern supermen were a lot of sordid banditti who had the successful effrontery to preach a code of right and wrong to their victims which they themselves did not practise.
With them, a man's word was good just as long as he was compelled to keep it. THOU SHALT NOT STEAL was only applicable to the honest worker.
They, the supermen, were above such commandments. They certainly stole and were honored by their fellows according to the magnitude of their stealings.
The more Daylight played the game, the clearer the situation grew.
Despite the fact that every robber was keen to rob every other robber, the band was well organized.
It practically controlled the political machinery of society, from the ward politician up to the Senate of the United States.
It passed laws that gave it privilege to rob.
It enforced these laws by means of the police, the marshals, the militia and regular army, and the courts.
And it was a snap.
A superman's chiefest danger was his fellow-superman.
The great stupid mass of the people did not count.
They were constituted of such inferior clay that the veriest chicanery fooled them.
The superman manipulated the strings, and when robbery of the workers became too slow or monotonous, they turned loose and robbed one another.
Daylight was philosophical, but not a philosopher.
He had never read the books.
He was a hard-headed, practical man, and farthest from him was any intention of ever reading the books.
He had lived life in the simple, where books were not necessary for an understanding of life, and now life in the complex appeared just as simple.
He saw through its frauds and fictions, and found it as elemental as on the Yukon.
Men were made of the same stuff.
They had the same passions and desires.
Finance was poker on a larger scale.
The men who played were the men who had stakes. The workers were the fellows toiling for grubstakes.
He saw the game played out according to the everlasting rules, and he played a hand himself.
The gigantic futility of humanity organized and befuddled by the bandits did not shock him. It was the natural order.
Practically all human endeavors were futile. He had seen so much of it.
His partners had starved and died on the Stewart.
Hundreds of old-timers had failed to locate on Bonanza and Eldorado, while Swedes and chechaquos had come in on the moose-pasture and blindly staked millions.
It was life, and life was a savage proposition at best.
Men in civilization robbed because they were so made.
They robbed just as cats scratched, famine pinched, and frost bit.
So it was that Daylight became a successful financier.
He did not go in for swindling the workers.
Not only did he not have the heart for it, but it did not strike him as a sporting proposition.
The workers were so easy, so stupid.
It was more like slaughtering fat hand-reared pheasants on the English preserves he had heard about.
The sport to him, was in waylaying the successful robbers and taking their spoils from them.
There was fun and excitement in that, and sometimes they put up the very devil of a fight.
Like Robin Hood of old, Daylight proceeded to rob the rich; and, in a small way, to distribute to the needy.
But he was charitable after his own fashion.
The great mass of human misery meant nothing to him. That was part of the everlasting order.
He had no patience with the organized charities and the professional charity mongers.