Burning Daylight

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BURNING DAYLIGHT

by Jack London

PART I

CHAPTER I

It was a quiet night in the Shovel. At the bar, which ranged
along one side of the large chinked-log room, leaned half a dozen
men, two of whom were discussing the relative merits of
spruce-tea and lime-juice as remedies for scurvy. They argued
with an air of depression and with intervals of morose silence.
The other men scarcely heeded them. In a row, against the
opposite wall, were the gambling games. The crap-table was
deserted. One lone man was playing at the faro-table. The
roulette-ball was not even spinning, and the gamekeeper stood by
the roaring, red-hot stove, talking with the young, dark-eyed
woman, comely of face and figure, who was known from Juneau to
Fort Yukon as the Virgin. Three men sat in at stud-poker, but
they played with small chips and without enthusiasm, while there
were no onlookers. On the floor of the dancing-room, which
opened out at the rear, three couples were waltzing drearily to
the strains of a violin and a piano.

Circle City was not deserted, nor was money tight. The miners
were in from Moseyed Creek and the other diggings to the west,
the summer washing had been good, and the men's pouches were
heavy with dust and nuggets. The Klondike had not yet been
discovered, nor had the miners of the Yukon learned the
possibilities of deep digging and wood-firing. No work was done
in the winter, and they made a practice of hibernating in the
large camps like Circle City during the long Arctic night. Time
was heavy on their hands, their pouches were well filled, and the
only social diversion to be found was in the saloons. Yet the
Shovel was practically deserted, and the Virgin, standing by the
stove, yawned with uncovered mouth and said to Charley Bates:-

"If something don't happen soon, I'm gin' to bed. What's the
matter with the camp, anyway? Everybody dead?"

Bates did not even trouble to reply, but went on moodily rolling
a cigarette. Dan MacDonald, pioneer saloonman and gambler on the
upper Yukon, owner and proprietor of the Tivoli and all its
games, wandered forlornly across the great vacant space of floor
and joined the two at the stove.

"Anybody dead?" the Virgin asked him.

"Looks like it," was the answer.

"Then it must be the whole camp," she said with an air of
finality and with another yawn.

MacDonald grinned and nodded, and opened his mouth to speak, when
the front door swung wide and a man appeared in the light. A
rush of frost, turned to vapor by the heat of the room, swirled
about him to his knees and poured on across the floor, growing
thinner and thinner, and perishing a dozen feet from the stove.
Taking the wisp broom from its nail inside the door, the newcomer
brushed the snow from his moccasins and high German socks. He
would have appeared a large man had not a huge French-Canadian
stepped up to him from the bar and gripped his hand.

"Hello, Daylight!" was his greeting. "By Gar, you good for sore
eyes!"

"Hello, Louis, when did you-all blow in?" returned the newcomer.
"Come up and have a drink and tell us all about Bone Creek. Why,
dog-gone you-all, shake again. Where's that pardner of yours?
I'm looking for him."

Another huge man detached himself from the bar to shake hands.
Olaf Henderson and French Louis, partners together on Bone Creek,
were the two largest men in the country, and though they were but
half a head taller than the newcomer, between them he was dwarfed
completely.

"Hello, Olaf, you're my meat, savvee that," said the one called
Daylight. "To-morrow's my birthday, and I'm going to put you-all
on your back--savvee? And you, too, Louis. I can put you-all on
your back on my birthday--savvee? Come up and drink, Olaf, and
I'll tell you-all about it."

The arrival of the newcomer seemed to send a flood of warmth
through the place. "It's Burning Daylight," the Virgin cried,
the first to recognize him as he came into the light. Charley
Bates' tight features relaxed at the sight, and MacDonald went
over and joined the three at the bar. With the advent of Burning
Daylight the whole place became suddenly brighter and cheerier.
The barkeepers were active. Voices were raised. Somebody
laughed. And when the fiddler, peering into the front room,
remarked to the pianist, "It's Burning Daylight," the waltz-time
perceptibly quickened, and the dancers, catching the contagion,
began to whirl about as if they really enjoyed it. It was known
to them of old time that nothing languished when Burning Daylight
was around.

He turned from the bar and saw the woman by the stove and the
eager look of welcome she extended him.

"Hello, Virgin, old girl," he called. "Hello, Charley. What's
the matter with you-all? Why wear faces like that when coffins
cost only three ounces? Come up, you-all, and drink. Come up,
you unburied dead, and name your poison. Come up, everybody.
This is my night, and I'm going to ride it. To-morrow I'm
thirty, and then I'll be an old man. It's the last fling of
youth. Are you-all with me? Surge along, then. Surge along.

"Hold on there, Davis," he called to the faro-dealer, who had
shoved his chair back from the table. "I'm going you one flutter
to see whether you-all drink with me or we-all drink with you."

Pulling a heavy sack of gold-dust from his coat pocket, he
dropped it on the HIGH CARD.

"Fifty," he said.

The faro-dealer slipped two cards. The high card won. He
scribbled the amount on a pad, and the weigher at the bar
balanced fifty dollars' worth of dust in the gold-scales and
poured it into Burning Daylight's sack. The waltz in the back
room being finished, the three couples, followed by the fiddler
and the pianist and heading for the bar, caught Daylight's eye.

"Surge along, you-all" he cried. "Surge along and name it. This
is my night, and it ain't a night that comes frequent. Surge up,
you Siwashes and Salmon-eaters. It's my night, I tell you-all--"

"A blame mangy night," Charley Bates interpolated.

"You're right, my son," Burning Daylight went on gaily.

"A mangy night, but it's MY night, you see. I'm the mangy old
he-wolf. Listen to me howl."

And howl he did, like a lone gray timber wolf, till the Virgin
thrust her pretty fingers in her ears and shivered. A minute
later she was whirled away in his arms to the dancing-floor,
where, along with the other three women and their partners, a
rollicking Virginia reel was soon in progress. Men and women
danced in moccasins, and the place was soon a-roar, Burning
Daylight the centre of it and the animating spark, with quip and
jest and rough merriment rousing them out of the slough of
despond in which he had found them.

The atmosphere of the place changed with his coming. He seemed
to fill it with his tremendous vitality. Men who entered from
the street felt it immediately, and in response to their queries
the barkeepers nodded at the back room, and said comprehensively,
"Burning Daylight's on the tear." And the men who entered
remained, and kept the barkeepers busy. The gamblers took heart
of life, and soon the tables were filled, the click of chips and
whir of the roulette-ball rising monotonously and imperiously
above the hoarse rumble of men's voices and their oaths and heavy
laughs.

Few men knew Elam Harnish by any other name than Burning
Daylight, the name which had been given him in the early days in
the land because of his habit of routing his comrades out of
their blankets with the complaint that daylight was burning. Of
the pioneers in that far Arctic wilderness, where all men were
pioneers, he was reckoned among the oldest. Men like Al Mayo and
Jack McQuestion antedated him; but they had entered the land by
crossing the Rockies from the Hudson Bay country to the east.
He, however, had been the pioneer over the Chilcoot and Chilcat
passes. In the spring of 1883, twelve years before, a stripling
of eighteen, he had crossed over the Chilcoot with five comrades.

In the fall he had crossed back with one. Four had perished by
mischance in the bleak, uncharted vastness. And for twelve years
Elam Harnish had continued to grope for gold among the shadows of
the Circle.

And no man had groped so obstinately nor so enduringly. He had
grown up with the land. He knew no other land. Civilization was
a dream of some previous life. Camps like Forty Mile and Circle
City were to him metropolises. And not alone had he grown up
with the land, for, raw as it was, he had helped to make it. He
had made history and geography, and those that followed wrote of
his traverses and charted the trails his feet had broken.

Heroes are seldom given to hero-worship, but among those of that
young land, young as he was, he was accounted an elder hero. In
point of time he was before them. In point of deed he was beyond
them. In point of endurance it was acknowledged that he could
kill the hardiest of them. Furthermore, he was accounted a nervy
man, a square man, and a white man.

In all lands where life is a hazard lightly played with and
lightly flung aside, men turn, almost automatically, to gambling
for diversion and relaxation. In the Yukon men gambled their
lives for gold, and those that won gold from the ground gambled
for it with one another. Nor was Elam Harnish an exception. He
was a man's man primarily, and the instinct in him to play the
game of life was strong. Environment had determined what form
that game should take. He was born on an Iowa farm, and his
father had emigrated to eastern Oregon, in which mining country
Elam's boyhood was lived. He had known nothing but hard knocks
for big stakes. Pluck and endurance counted in the game, but the
great god Chance dealt the cards. Honest work for sure but
meagre returns did not count. A man played big. He risked
everything for everything, and anything less than everything
meant that he was a loser. So for twelve Yukon years, Elam
Harnish had been a loser. True, on Moosehide Creek the past
summer he had taken out twenty thousand dollars, and what was
left in the ground was twenty thousand more. But, as he himself
proclaimed, that was no more than getting his ante back. He had
ante'd his life for a dozen years, and forty thousand was a small
pot for such a stake--the price of a drink and a dance at the
Tivoli, of a winter's flutter at Circle City, and a grubstake for
the year to come.

The men of the Yukon reversed the old maxim till it read: hard
come, easy go. At the end of the reel, Elam Harnish called the
house up to drink again. Drinks were a dollar apiece, gold rated
at sixteen dollars an ounce; there were thirty in the house that
accepted his invitation, and between every dance the house was
Elam's guest. This was his night, and nobody was to be allowed
to pay for anything.

Not that Elam Harnish was a drinking man. Whiskey meant little
to him. He was too vital and robust, too untroubled in mind and
body, to incline to the slavery of alcohol. He spent months at a
time on trail and river when he drank nothing stronger than
coffee, while he had gone a year at a time without even coffee.
But he was gregarious, and since the sole social expression of
the Yukon was the saloon, he expressed himself that way. When he
was a lad in the mining camps of the West, men had always done
that. To him it was the proper way for a man to express himself
socially. He knew no other way.

He was a striking figure of a man, despite his garb being similar
to that of all the men in the Tivoli. Soft-tanned moccasins of
moose-hide, beaded in Indian designs, covered his feet. His
trousers were ordinary overalls, his coat was made from a
blanket. Long-gauntleted leather mittens, lined with wool, hung
by his side. They were connected in the Yukon fashion, by a
leather thong passed around the neck and across the shoulders.
On his head was a fur cap, the ear-flaps raised and the
tying-cords dangling. His face, lean and slightly long, with the
suggestion of hollows under the cheek-bones, seemed almost
Indian. The burnt skin and keen dark eyes contributed to this
effect, though the bronze of the skin and the eyes themselves
were essentially those of a white man. He looked older than
thirty, and yet, smooth-shaven and without wrinkles, he was
almost boyish. This impression of age was based on no tangible
evidence. It came from the abstracter facts of the man, from
what he had endured and survived, which was far beyond that of
ordinary men. He had lived life naked and tensely, and something
of all this smouldered in his eyes, vibrated in his voice, and
seemed forever a-whisper on his lips.

The lips themselves were thin, and prone to close tightly over
the even, white teeth. But their harshness was retrieved by the
upward curl at the corners of his mouth. This curl gave to him
sweetness, as the minute puckers at the corners of the eyes
gave him laughter. These necessary graces saved him from a
nature that was essentially savage and that otherwise would have
been cruel and bitter. The nose was lean, full-nostrilled, and
delicate, and of a size to fit the face; while the high forehead,
as if to atone for its narrowness, was splendidly domed and
symmetrical. In line with the Indian effect was his hair, very
straight and very black, with a gloss to it that only health
could give.

"Burning Daylight's burning candlelight," laughed Dan MacDonald,
as an outburst of exclamations and merriment came from the
dancers.

"An' he is der boy to do it, eh, Louis?" said Olaf Henderson.

"Yes, by Gar! you bet on dat," said French Louis. "Dat boy is
all gold--"

"And when God Almighty washes Daylight's soul out on the last big
slucin' day," MacDonald interrupted, "why, God Almighty'll have
to shovel gravel along with him into the sluice-boxes."

"Dot iss goot," Olaf Henderson muttered, regarding the gambler
with profound admiration.

"Ver' good," affirmed French Louis. "I t'ink we take a drink on
dat one time, eh?"

CHAPTER II

It was two in the morning when the dancers, bent on getting
something to eat, adjourned the dancing for half an hour. And it
was at this moment that Jack Kearns suggested poker. Jack Kearns
was a big, bluff-featured man, who, along with Bettles, had made
the disastrous attempt to found a post on the head-reaches of the
Koyokuk, far inside the Arctic Circle. After that, Kearns had
fallen back on his posts at Forty Mile and Sixty Mile and changed
the direction of his ventures by sending out to the States for a
small sawmill and a river steamer. The former was even then
being sledded across Chilcoot Pass by Indians and dogs, and would
come down the Yukon in the early summer after the ice-run. Later
in the summer, when Bering Sea and the mouth of the Yukon cleared
of ice, the steamer, put together at St. Michaels, was to be
expected up the river loaded to the guards with supplies.

Jack Kearns suggested poker. French Louis, Dan MacDonald, and
Hal Campbell (who had make a strike on Moosehide), all three of
whom were not dancing because there were not girls enough to go
around, inclined to the suggestion. They were looking for a
fifth man when Burning Daylight emerged from the rear room, the
Virgin on his arm, the train of dancers in his wake. In response
to the hail of the poker-players, he came over to their table in
the corner.

"Want you to sit in," said Campbell. "How's your luck?"

"I sure got it to-night," Burning Daylight answered with
enthusiasm, and at the same time felt the Virgin press his arm
warningly. She wanted him for the dancing. "I sure got my luck
with me, but I'd sooner dance. I ain't hankerin' to take the
money away from you-all."

Nobody urged. They took his refusal as final, and the Virgin was
pressing his arm to turn him away in pursuit of the
supper-seekers, when he experienced a change of heart. It was
not that he did not want to dance, nor that he wanted to hurt
her; but that insistent pressure on his arm put his free
man-nature in revolt. The thought in his mind was that he did
not want any woman running him. Himself a favorite with women,
nevertheless they did not bulk big with him. They were toys,
playthings, part of the relaxation from the bigger game of life.
He met women along with the whiskey and gambling, and from
observation he had found that it was far easier to break away
from the drink and the cards than from a woman once the man was
properly entangled.

He was a slave to himself, which was natural in one with a
healthy ego, but he rebelled in ways either murderous or panicky
at being a slave to anybody else. Love's sweet servitude was a
thing of which he had no comprehension. Men he had seen in love
impressed him as lunatics, and lunacy was a thing he had never
considered worth analyzing. But comradeship with men was
different from love with women. There was no servitude in
comradeship. It was a business proposition, a square deal
between men who did not pursue each other, but who shared the
risks of trail and river and mountain in the pursuit of life and
treasure. Men and women pursued each other, and one must needs
bend the other to his will or hers. Comradeship was different.
There was no slavery about it; and though he, a strong man beyond
strength's seeming, gave far more than he received, he gave not
something due but in royal largess, his gifts of toil or heroic
effort falling generously from his hands. To pack for days over
the gale-swept passes or across the mosquito-ridden marshes, and
to pack double the weight his comrade packed, did not involve
unfairness or compulsion. Each did his best. That was the
business essence of it. Some men were stronger than
others--true;
but so long as each man did his best it was fair exchange, the
business spirit was observed, and the square deal obtained.

But with women--no. Women gave little and wanted all. Women had
apron-strings and were prone to tie them about any man who looked
twice in their direction. There was the Virgin, yawning her head
off when he came in and mightily pleased that he asked her to
dance. One dance was all very well, but because he danced twice
and thrice with her and several times more, she squeezed his arm
when they asked him to sit in at poker. It was the obnoxious
apron-string, the first of the many compulsions she would exert
upon him if he gave in. Not that she was not a nice bit of a
woman, healthy and strapping and good to look upon, also a very
excellent dancer, but that she was a woman with all a woman's
desire to rope him with her apron-strings and tie him hand and
foot for the branding. Better poker. Besides, he liked poker as
well as he did dancing.

He resisted the pull on his arm by the mere negative mass of him,
and said:--

"I sort of feel a hankering to give you-all a flutter."

Again came the pull on his arm. She was trying to pass the
apron-string around him. For the fraction of an instant he was a
savage, dominated by the wave of fear and murder that rose up in
him. For that infinitesimal space of time he was to all purposes
a frightened tiger filled with rage and terror at the
apprehension of the trap. Had he been no more than a savage, he
would have leapt wildly from the place or else sprung upon her
and destroyed her. But in that same instant there stirred in him
the generations of discipline by which man had become an
inadequate social animal. Tact and sympathy strove with him, and
he smiled with his eyes into the Virgin's eyes as he said:--

"You-all go and get some grub. I ain't hungry. And we'll dance
some more by and by. The night's young yet. Go to it, old
girl."

He released his arm and thrust her playfully on the shoulder, at
the same time turning to the poker-players.

"Take off the limit and I'll go you-all."

"Limit's the roof," said Jack Kearns.

"Take off the roof."

The players glanced at one another, and Kearns announced, "The
roof's off."

Elam Harnish dropped into the waiting chair, started to pull out
his gold-sack, and changed his mind. The Virgin pouted a moment,
then followed in the wake of the other dancers.

"I'll bring you a sandwich, Daylight," she called back over her
shoulder.

He nodded. She was smiling her forgiveness. He had escaped the
apron-string, and without hurting her feelings too severely.

"Let's play markers," he suggested. "Chips do everlastingly
clutter up the table....If it's agreeable to you-all?"

"I'm willing," answered Hal Campbell. "Let mine run at five
hundred."

"Mine, too," answered Harnish, while the others stated the values
they put on their own markers, French Louis, the most modest,
issuing his at a hundred dollars each.

In Alaska, at that time, there were no rascals and no tin-horn
gamblers. Games were conducted honestly, and men trusted one
another. A man's word was as good as his gold in the blower. A
marker was a flat, oblong composition chip worth, perhaps, a
cent. But when a man betted a marker in a game and said it was
worth five hundred dollars, it was accepted as worth five hundred
dollars. Whoever won it knew that the man who issued it would
redeem it with five hundred dollars' worth of dust weighed out on
the scales. The markers being of different colors, there was no
difficulty in identifying the owners. Also, in that early Yukon
day, no one dreamed of playing table-stakes. A man was good in a
game for all that he possessed, no matter where his possessions
were or what was their nature.

Harnish cut and got the deal. At this good augury, and while
shuffling the deck, he called to the barkeepers to set up the
drinks for the house. As he dealt the first card to Dan
MacDonald, on his left, he called out:

"Get down to the ground, you-all, Malemutes, huskies, and Siwash
purps! Get down and dig in! Tighten up them traces! Put your
weight into the harness and bust the breast-bands! Whoop-la!
Yow! We're off and bound for Helen Breakfast! And I tell
you-all clear and plain there's goin' to be stiff grades and fast
goin' to-night before we win to that same lady. And somebody's
goin' to bump...hard."

Once started, it was a quiet game, with little or no
conversation, though all about the players the place was a-roar.
Elam Harnish had ignited the spark. More and more miners dropped
in to the Tivoli and remained. When Burning Daylight went on the
tear, no man cared to miss it. The dancing-floor was full.
Owing to the shortage of women, many of the men tied bandanna
handkerchiefs around their arms in token of femininity and danced
with other men. All the games were crowded, and the voices of
the men talking at the long bar and grouped about the stove were
accompanied by the steady click of chips and the sharp whir,
rising and falling, of the roulette-ball. All the materials of a
proper Yukon night were at hand and mixing.

The luck at the table varied monotonously, no big hands being
out. As a result, high play went on with small hands though no
play lasted long. A filled straight belonging to French Louis
gave him a pot of five thousand against two sets of threes held
by Campbell and Kearns. One pot of eight hundred dollars was won
by a pair of treys on a showdown. And once Harnish called Kearns
for two thousand dollars on a cold steal. When Kearns laid down
his hand it showed a bobtail flush, while Harnish's hand proved
that he had had the nerve to call on a pair of tens.

But at three in the morning the big combination of hands arrived.

It was the moment of moments that men wait weeks for in a poker
game. The news of it tingled over the Tivoli. The onlookers
became quiet. The men farther away ceased talking and moved over
to the table. The players deserted the other games, and the
dancing-floor was forsaken, so that all stood at last, fivescore
and more, in a compact and silent group, around the poker-table.
The high betting had begun before the draw, and still the high
betting went on, with the draw not in sight. Kearns had dealt,
and French Louis had opened the pot with one marker--in his case
one hundred dollars. Campbell had merely "seen" it, but Elam
Harnish, corning next, had tossed in five hundred dollars, with
the remark to MacDonald that he was letting him in easy.

MacDonald, glancing again at his hand, put in a thousand in
markers. Kearns, debating a long time over his hand, finally
"saw." It then cost French Louis nine hundred to remain in the
game, which he contributed after a similar debate. It cost
Campbell likewise nine hundred to remain and draw cards, but to
the surprise of all he saw the nine hundred and raised another
thousand.

"You-all are on the grade at last," Harnish remarked, as he saw
the fifteen hundred and raised a thousand in turn. "Helen
Breakfast's sure on top this divide, and you-all had best look
out for bustin' harness."

"Me for that same lady," accompanied MacDonald's markers for two
thousand and for an additional thousand-dollar raise.

It was at this stage that the players sat up and knew beyond
peradventure that big hands were out. Though their features
showed nothing, each man was beginning unconsciously to tense.
Each man strove to appear his natural self, and each natural self
was different. Hal Campbell affected his customary cautiousness.

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