Bankruptcy -- Fiction; Gold mines and mining -- Alaska -- Fiction; Oakland (Calif.) -- Fiction; Western stories; Women pioneers -- Fiction
The socialist press of the city jubilantly exploited this utterance,
scattering it broadcast over San Francisco in tens of thousands of
paper dodgers. And the journalists, stung to the quick, retaliated
with the only means in their power-printer's ink abuse. The attack
became bitterer than ever. The whole affair sank to the deeper deeps
of rancor and savageness. The poor woman who had killed herself was
dragged out of her grave and paraded on thousands of reams of paper as
a martyr and a victim to Daylight's ferocious brutality. Staid,
statistical articles were published, proving that he had made his start
by robbing poor miners of their claims, and that the capstone to his
fortune had been put in place by his treacherous violation of faith
with the Guggenhammers in the deal on Ophir. And there were editorials
written in which he was called an enemy of society, possessed of the
manners and culture of a caveman, a fomenter of wasteful business
troubles, the destroyer of the city's prosperity in commerce and trade,
an anarchist of dire menace; and one editorial gravely recommended that
hanging would be a lesson to him and his ilk, and concluded with the
fervent hope that some day his big motor-car would smash up and smash
him with it.
He was like a big bear raiding a bee-hive and, regardless of the
stings, he obstinately persisted in pawing for the honey. He gritted
his teeth and struck back. Beginning with a raid on two steamship
companies, it developed into a pitched battle with a city, a state, and
a continental coastline. Very well; they wanted fight, and they would
get it. It was what he wanted, and he felt justified in having come
down from the Klondike, for here he was gambling at a bigger table than
ever the Yukon had supplied. Allied with him, on a splendid salary,
with princely pickings thrown in, was a lawyer, Larry Hegan, a young
Irishman with a reputation to make, and whose peculiar genius had been
unrecognized until Daylight picked up with him. Hegan had Celtic
imagination and daring, and to such degree that Daylight's cooler head
was necessary as a check on his wilder visions. Hegan's was a
Napoleonic legal mind, without balance, and it was just this balance
that Daylight supplied. Alone, the Irishman was doomed to failure, but
directed by Daylight, he was on the highroad to fortune and
recognition. Also, he was possessed of no more personal or civic
conscience than Napoleon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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