Burning Daylight | Page 4

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