Bankruptcy -- Fiction; Gold mines and mining -- Alaska -- Fiction; Oakland (Calif.) -- Fiction; Western stories; Women pioneers -- Fiction
And yet he still, on occasion, made one of his old-time hell-roaring
nights. But he did so for different reasons. First, it was expected of
him because it had been his way in the old days. And second, he could
afford it. But he no longer cared quite so much for that form of
diversion. He had developed, in a new way, the taste for power. It
had become a lust with him. By far the wealthiest miner in Alaska, he
wanted to be still wealthier. It was a big game he was playing in, and
he liked it better than any other game. In a way, the part he played
was creative. He was doing something. And at no time, striking
another chord of his nature, could he take the joy in a million-dollar
Eldorado dump that was at all equivalent to the joy he took in watching
his two sawmills working and the big down river log-rafts swinging into
the bank in the big eddy just above Moosehide Mountain. 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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