Nor, on the other hand, was what he gave a conscience dole.
He owed no man, and restitution was unthinkable.
What he gave was a largess, a free, spontaneous gift; and it was for those about him.
He never contributed to an earthquake fund in Japan nor to an open-air fund in New York City.
Instead, he financed Jones, the elevator boy, for a year that he might write a book.
When he learned that the wife of his waiter at the St. Francis was suffering from tuberculosis, he sent her to Arizona, and later, when her case was declared hopeless, he sent the husband, too, to be with her to the end.
Likewise, he bought a string of horse-hair bridles from a convict in a Western penitentiary, who spread the good news until it seemed to Daylight that half the convicts in that institution were making bridles for him.
He bought them all, paying from twenty to fifty dollars each for them. They were beautiful and honest things, and he decorated all the available wall-space of his bedroom with them.
The grim Yukon life had failed to make Daylight hard.
It required civilization to produce this result.
In the fierce, savage game he now played, his habitual geniality imperceptibly slipped away from him, as did his lazy Western drawl.
As his speech became sharp and nervous, so did his mental processes.
In the swift rush of the game he found less and less time to spend on being merely good-natured.
The change marked his face itself. The lines grew sterner.
Less often appeared the playful curl of his lips, the smile in the wrinkling corners of his eyes.
The eyes themselves, black and flashing, like an Indian's, betrayed glints of cruelty and brutal consciousness of power.
His tremendous vitality remained, and radiated from all his being, but it was vitality under the new aspect of the man-trampling man-conqueror.
His battles with elemental nature had been, in a way, impersonal; his present battles were wholly with the males of his species, and the hardships of the trail, the river, and the frost marred him far less than the bitter keenness of the struggle with his fellows.
He still had recrudescence of geniality, but they were largely periodical and forced, and they were usually due to the cocktails he took prior to meal-time.
In the North, he had drunk deeply and at irregular intervals; but now his drinking became systematic and disciplined.
It was an unconscious development, but it was based upon physical and mental condition.
The cocktails served as an inhibition.
Without reasoning or thinking about it, the strain of the office, which was essentially due to the daring and audacity of his ventures, required check or cessation; and he found, through the weeks and months, that the cocktails supplied this very thing. They constituted a stone wall.
He never drank during the morning, nor in office hours; but the instant he left the office he proceeded to rear this wall of alcoholic inhibition athwart his consciousness.
The office became immediately a closed affair. It ceased to exist.
In the afternoon, after lunch, it lived again for one or two hours, when, leaving it, he rebuilt the wall of inhibition.
Of course, there were exceptions to this; and, such was the rigor of his discipline, that if he had a dinner or a conference before him in which, in a business way, he encountered enemies or allies and planned or prosecuted campaigns, he abstained from drinking.
But the instant the business was settled, his everlasting call went out for a Martini, and for a double-Martini at that, served in a long glass so as not to excite comment.
CHAPTER VI
Into Daylight's life came Dede Mason.
She came rather imperceptibly.
He had accepted her impersonally along with the office furnishing, the office boy, Morrison, the chief, confidential, and only clerk, and all the rest of the accessories of a superman's gambling place of business.
Had he been asked any time during the first months she was in his employ, he would have been unable to tell the color of her eyes.
From the fact that she was a demiblonde, there resided dimly in his subconsciousness a conception that she was a brunette.
Likewise he had an idea that she was not thin, while there was an absence in his mind of any idea that she was fat.
As to how she dressed, he had no ideas at all.
He had no trained eye in such matters, nor was he interested.
He took it for granted, in the lack of any impression to the contrary, that she was dressed some how.
He knew her as "Miss Mason," and that was all, though he was aware that as a stenographer she seemed quick and accurate. This impression, however, was quite vague, for he had had no experience with other stenographers, and naturally believed that they were all quick and accurate.
One morning, signing up letters, he came upon an I shall.
Glancing quickly over the page for similar constructions, he found a number of I wills.
The I shall was alone.
It stood out conspicuously.
He pressed the call-bell twice, and a moment later Dede Mason entered.
"Did I say that, Miss Mason?" he asked, extending the letter to her and pointing out the criminal phrase.
A shade of annoyance crossed her face. She stood convicted.
"My mistake," she said. "I am sorry.
But it's not a mistake, you know," she added quickly.
"How do you make that out?" challenged Daylight.
"It sure don't sound right, in my way of thinking."