Burning Daylight | Page 5

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