The Night-Born | Page 3

profits
you derive calculated using the method you already use to calculate
your applicable taxes. If you don't derive profits, no royalty is due.
Royalties are payable to "Project Gutenberg
Association/Carnegie-Mellon University" within the 60 days following

each date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare) your annual
(or equivalent periodic) tax return.
WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU
DON'T HAVE TO?
The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time, scanning
machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty free copyright
licenses, and every other sort of contribution you can think of. Money
should be paid to "Project Gutenberg Association / Carnegie-Mellon
University".
*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN
ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*

The Night-Born by Jack London This etext was prepared by J.R.
Wright of Springfield, MO.

THE NIGHT-BORN
CONTENTS:
THE NIGHT-BORN THE MADNESS OF JOHN HARNED WHEN
THE WORLD WAS YOUNG THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT
WINGED BLACKMAIL BUNCHES OF KNUCKLES WAR UNDER
THE DECK AWNINGS TO KILL A MAN THE MEXICAN

THE NIGHT-BORN
It was in the old Alta-Inyo Club--a warm night for San Francisco--and
through the open windows, hushed and far, came the brawl of the
streets. The talk had led on from the Graft Prosecution and the latest
signs that the town was to be run wide open, down through all the
grotesque sordidness and rottenness of manhate and man-meanness,

until the name of O'Brien was mentioned--O'Brien, the promising
young pugilist who had been killed in the prize-ring the night before.
At once the air had seemed to freshen. O'Brien had been a clean-living
young man with ideals. He neither drank, smoked, nor swore, and his
had been the body of a beautiful young god. He had even carried his
prayer-book to the ringside. They found it in his coat pocket in the
dressing-room. . . afterward.
Here was Youth, clean and wholesome, unsullied--the thing of glory
and wonder for men to conjure with..... after it has been lost to them
and they have turned middle-aged. And so well did we conjure, that
Romance came and for an hour led us far from the man-city and its
snarling roar. Bardwell, in a way, started it by quoting from Thoreau;
but it was old Trefethan, bald-headed and dewlapped, who took up the
quotation and for the hour to come was romance incarnate. At first we
wondered how many Scotches he had consumed since dinner, but very
soon all that was forgotten.
"It was in 1898--I was thirty-five then," he said. "Yes, I know you are
adding it up. You're right. I'm forty-seven now; look ten years more;
and the doctors say--damn the doctors anyway!"
He lifted the long glass to his lips and sipped it slowly to soothe away
his irritation.
"But I was young. . . once. I was young twelve years ago, and I had hair
on top of my head, and my stomach was lean as a runner's, and the
longest day was none too long for me. I was a husky back there in '98.
You remember me, Milner. You knew me then. Wasn't I a pretty good
bit of all right?"
Milner nodded and agreed. Like Trefethan, he was another mining
engineer who had cleaned up a fortune in the Klondike.
"You certainly were, old man," Milner said. "I'll never forget when you
cleaned out those lumberjacks in the M. & M. that night that little
newspaper man started the row. Slavin was in the country at the
time,"--this to us--"and his manager wanted to get up a match with

Trefethan."
"Well, look at me now," Trefethan commanded angrily. "That's what
the Goldstead did to me--God knows how many millions, but nothing
left in my soul..... nor in my veins. The good red blood is gone. I am a
jellyfish, a huge, gross mass of oscillating protoplasm, a--a . . ."
But language failed him, and he drew solace from the long glass.
"Women looked at me then; and turned their heads to look a second
time. Strange that I never married. But the girl. That's what I started to
tell you about. I met her a thousand miles from anywhere, and then
some. And she quoted to me those very words of Thoreau that
Bardwell quoted a moment ago--the ones about the day-born gods and
the night-born."
"It was after I had made my locations on Goldstead--and didn't know
what a treasure-pot that that trip creek was going to prove--that I made
that trip east over the Rockies, angling across to the Great Up North
there the Rockies are something more than a back-bone. They are a
boundary, a dividing line, a wall impregnable and unscalable. There is
no intercourse across them, though, on occasion, from the early days,
wandering trappers have crossed them, though more were lost by