BURNING DAYLIGHT by Jack London

There's things one mustn't do, which I don't mind as long as I
don't want to do them."
"But when you do?" she asked quickly.
"Then I do them." His lips had drawn firmly with this affirmation
of will, but the next instant he was amending the statement "That
is, I mostly do. But what gets me is the things you mustn't do
when they're not wrong and they won't hurt anybody--this riding,
for instance."
She played nervously with a pencil for a time, as if debating her
reply, while he waited patiently.
"This riding," she began; "it's not what they call the right
thing.
I leave it to you. You know the world. You are Mr. Harnish, the
millionaire-"
"Gambler," he broke in harshly
She nodded acceptance of his term and went on.
"And I'm a stenographer in your office--"
"You're a thousand times better than me--" he attempted to
interpolate, but was in turn interrupted.
"It isn't a question of such things. It's a simple and fairly
common situation that must be considered. I work for you. And
it isn't what you or I might think, but what other persons will
think. And you don't need to be told any more about that. You
know yourself."
Her cool, matter-of-fact speech belied her--or so Daylight
thought, looking at her perturbed feminineness, at the rounded
lines of her figure, the breast that deeply rose and fell, and at
the color that was now excited in her cheeks.
"I'm sorry I frightened you out of your favorite stamping
ground," he said rather aimlessly.
"You didn't frighten me," she retorted, with a touch of fire.
"I'm not a silly seminary girl. I've taken care of myself for a
long time now, and I've done it without being frightened. We
were together two Sundays, and I'm sure I wasn't frightened of
Bob, or you. It isn't that. I have no fears of taking care of
myself, but the world insists on taking care of one as well.
That's the trouble. It's what the world would have to say about
me and my employer meeting regularly and riding in the hills on
Sundays. It's funny, but it's so. I could ride with one of the
clerks without remark, but with you--no."
"But the world don't know and don't need to know," he cried.
"Which makes it worse, in a way, feeling guilty of nothing and
yet sneaking around back-roads with all the feeling of doing
something wrong. It would be finer and braver for me
publicly..."
"To go to lunch with me on a week-day," Daylight said, divining
the drift of her uncompleted argument.
She nodded.
"I didn't have that quite in mind, but it will do. I'd prefer
doing the brazen thing and having everybody know it, to doing the
furtive thing and being found out. Not that I'm asking to be
invited to lunch," she added, with a smile; "but I'm sure you
understand my position."
"Then why not ride open and aboveboard with me in the hills?" he
urged.
She shook her head with what he imagined was just the faintest
hint of regret, and he went suddenly and almost maddeningly
hungry for her.
"Look here, Miss Mason, I know you don't like this talking over
of things in the office. Neither do I. It's part of the whole
thing, I guess; a man ain't supposed to talk anything but
business with his stenographer. Will you ride with me next
Sunday, and we can talk it over thoroughly then and reach some
sort of a conclusion. Out in the hills is the place where you
can talk something besides business. I guess you've seen enough
of me to know I'm pretty square. I-I do honor and respect you,
and... and all that, and I .." He was beginning to flounder, and
the hand that rested on the desk blotter was visibly trembling.
He strove to pull himself together. "I just want to harder than
anything ever in my life before. I-I-I can't explain myself, but
I do, that's all. Will you?--Just next Sunday? To-morrow?"
Nor did he dream that her low acquiescence was due, as much as
anything else, to the beads of sweat on his forehead, his
trembling hand, and his all too-evident general distress.
CHAPTER XIV
"Of course, there's no way of telling what anybody wants from
what they say." Daylight rubbed Bob's rebellious ear with his
quirt and pondered with dissatisfaction the words he had just
uttered. They did not say what he had meant them to say. "What
I'm driving at is that you say flatfooted that you won't meet me
again, and you give your reasons, but how am I to know they are
your real reasons? Mebbe you just don't want to get acquainted
with me, and won't say so for fear of hurting my feelings. Don't
you see? I'm the last man in the world to shove in where I'm not
wanted. And if I thought you didn't care a whoop to see anything
more of me, why, I'd clear out so blamed quick you couldn't see
me for smoke."
Dede smiled at him in acknowledgment of his words, but rode on
silently. And that smile, he thought, was the most sweetly
wonderful smile he had ever seen. There was a difference in it,
he assured himself, from any smile she had ever given him before.
It was the smile of one who knew him just a little bit, of one
who was just the least mite acquainted with him. Of course, he
checked himself up the next moment, it was unconscious on her
part. It was sure to come in the intercourse of any two persons.
Any stranger, a business man, a clerk, anybody after a few casual
meetings would show similar signs of friendliness. It was bound
to happen, but in her case it made more impression on him; and,
besides, it was such a sweet and wonderful smile. Other women he
had known had never smiled like that; he was sure of it.
It had been a happy day. Daylight had met her on the back-road
from Berkeley, and they had had hours together. It was only now,
with the day drawing to a close and with them approaching the
gate of the road to Berkeley, that he had broached the important
subject.
She began her answer to his last contention, and he listened
gratefully.
"But suppose, just suppose, that the reasons I have given are the
only ones?--that there is no question of my not wanting to know
you?"
"Then I'd go on urging like Sam Scratch," he said quickly.
"Because, you see, I've always noticed that folks that incline to
anything are much more open to hearing the case stated. But if
you did have that other reason up your sleeve, if you didn't want
to know me, if--if, well, if you thought my feelings oughtn't to
be hurt just because you had a good job with me..." Here, his
calm consideration of a possibility was swamped by the fear that
it was an actuality, and he lost the thread of his reasoning.
"Well, anyway, all you have to do is to say the word and I'll
clear out.
And with no hard feelings; it would be just a case of bad luck
for me. So be honest, Miss Mason, please, and tell me if that's
the reason--I almost got a hunch that it is."
She glanced up at him, her eyes abruptly and slightly moist, half
with hurt, half with anger.
"Oh, but that isn't fair," she cried. "You give me the choice of
lying to you and hurting you in order to protect myself by
getting rid of you, or of throwing away my protection by telling
you the truth, for then you, as you said yourself, would stay and
urge."
Her cheeks were flushed, her lips tremulous, but she continued to
look him frankly in the eyes.
Daylight smiled grimly with satisfaction.
"I'm real glad, Miss Mason, real glad for those words."
"But they won't serve you," she went on hastily. "They can't
serve you. I refuse to let them. This is our last ride, and...
here is the gate."
Ranging her mare alongside, she bent, slid the catch, and
followed the opening gate.
"No; please, no," she said, as Daylight started to follow.
Humbly acquiescent, he pulled Bob back, and the gate swung shut
between them. But there was more to say, and she did not ride
on.
"Listen, Miss Mason," he said, in a low voice that shook with
sincerity; "I want to assure you of one thing. I'm not just
trying to fool around with you. I like you, I want you, and I
was never more in earnest in my life. There's nothing wrong in
my intentions or anything like that. What I mean is strictly
honorable-"
But the expression of her face made him stop. She was angry, and
she was laughing at the same time.
"The last thing you should have said," she cried. "It's like
a--a matrimonial bureau: intentions strictly honorable; object,
matrimony. But it's no more than I deserved. This is what I
suppose you call urging like Sam Scratch."
The tan had bleached out of Daylight's skin since the time he
came to live under city roofs, so that the flush of blood showed
readily as it crept up his neck past the collar and overspread
his face. Nor in his exceeding discomfort did he dream that she
was looking upon him at that moment with more kindness than at
any time that day. It was not in her experience to behold big
grown-up men who blushed like boys, and already she repented the
sharpness into which she had been surprised.
"Now, look here, Miss Mason," he began, slowly and stumblingly at
first, but accelerating into a rapidity of utterance that was
almost incoherent; "I'm a rough sort of a man, I know that, and I
know I don't know much of anything. I've never had any training
in nice things. I've never made love before, and I've never been
in love before either--and I don't know how to go about it any
more than a thundering idiot. What you want to do is get behind
my tomfool words and get a feel of the man that's behind them.
That's me, and I mean all right, if I don't know how to go about
it."
Dede Mason had quick, birdlike ways, almost flitting from mood to
mood; and she was all contrition on the instant.
"Forgive me for laughing," she said across the gate. "It wasn't
really laughter. I was surprised off my guard, and hurt, too.
You see, Mr. Harnish, I've not been..."
She paused, in sudden fear of completing the thought into which
her birdlike precipitancy had betrayed her.
"What you mean is that you've not been used to such sort of
proposing," Daylight said; "a sort of on-the-run, 'Howdy,
glad-to-make-your-acquaintance, won't-you-be-mine' proposition."
She nodded and broke into laughter, in which he joined, and which
served to pass the awkwardness away. He gathered heart at this,
and went on in greater confidence, with cooler head and tongue.
"There, you see, you prove my case. You've had experience in
such matters. I don't doubt you've had slathers of proposals.
Well, I haven't, and I'm like a fish out of water. Besides, this
ain't a proposal. It's a peculiar situation, that's all, and I'm
in a corner. I've got enough plain horse-sense to know a man
ain't supposed to argue marriage with a girl as a reason for
getting acquainted with her. And right there was where I was in
the hole. Number one, I can't get acquainted with you in the
office. Number two, you say you won't see me out of the office
to give me a chance. Number three, your reason is that folks
will talk because you work for me. Number four, I just got to
get acquainted with you, and I just got to get you to see that I
mean fair and all right. Number five, there you are on one side
the gate getting ready to go, and me here on the other side the
gate pretty desperate and bound to say something to make you
reconsider. Number six, I said it. And now and finally, I just
do want you to reconsider."
And, listening to him, pleasuring in the sight of his earnest,
perturbed face and in the simple, homely phrases that but
emphasized his earnestness and marked the difference between him
and the average run of men she had known, she forgot to listen
and lost herself in her own thoughts. The love of a strong man
is ever a lure to a normal woman, and never more strongly did
Dede feel the lure than now, looking across the closed gate at
Burning Daylight. Not that she would ever dream of marrying
him--she had a score of reasons against it; but why not at least
see more of him? He was certainly not repulsive to her. On the
contrary, she liked him, had always liked him from the day she
had first seen him and looked upon his lean Indian face and into
his flashing Indian eyes. He was a figure of a man in more ways
than his mere magnificent muscles. Besides, Romance had gilded
him, this doughty, rough-hewn adventurer of the North, this man
of many deeds and many millions, who had come down out of the
Arctic to wrestle and fight so masterfully with the men of the
South.
Savage as a Red Indian, gambler and profligate, a man without
morals, whose vengeance was never glutted and who stamped on the
faces of all who opposed him--oh, yes, she knew all the hard
names he had been called. Yet she was not afraid of him. There
was more than that in the connotation of his name. Burning
Daylight called up other things as well. They were there in the
newspapers, the magazines, and the books on the Klondike. When
all was said, Burning Daylight had a mighty connotation--one to
touch any woman's imagination, as it touched hers, the gate
between them, listening to the wistful and impassioned simplicity
of his speech. Dede was after all a woman, with a woman's
sex-vanity, and it was this vanity that was pleased by the fact
that such a man turned in his need to her.
And there was more that passed through her mind--sensations of
tiredness and loneliness; trampling squadrons and shadowy armies
of vague feelings and vaguer prompting; and deeper and dimmer
whisperings and echoings, the flutterings of forgotten
generations crystallized into being and fluttering anew and
always, undreamed and unguessed, subtle and potent, the spirit
and essence of life that under a thousand deceits and masks
forever makes for life. It was a strong temptation, just to ride
with this man in the hills. It would be that only and nothing
more, for she was firmly convinced that his way of life could
never be her way. On the other hand, she was vexed by none of
the ordinary feminine fears and timidities. That she could take
care of herself under any and all circumstances she never
doubted. Then why not? It was such a little thing, after all.
She led an ordinary, humdrum life at best. She ate and slept and
worked, and that was about all. As if in review, her anchorite
existence passed before her: six days of the week spent in the
office and in journeying back and forth on the ferry; the hours
stolen before bedtime for snatches of song at the piano, for
doing her own special laundering, for sewing and mending and
casting up of meagre accounts; the two evenings a week of social
diversion she permitted herself; the other stolen hours and
Saturday afternoons spent with her brother at the hospital; and
the seventh day, Sunday, her day of solace, on Mab's back, out
among the blessed hills. But it was lonely, this solitary
riding. Nobody of her acquaintance rode. Several girls at the
University had been persuaded into trying it, but after a Sunday
or two on hired livery hacks they had lost interest. There was
Madeline, who bought her own horse and rode enthusiastically for
several months, only to get married and go away to live in
Southern California. After years of it, one did get tired of
this eternal riding alone.
He was such a boy, this big giant of a millionaire who had half
the rich men of San Francisco afraid of him. Such a boy! She
had never imagined this side of his nature.
"How do folks get married?" he was saying. "Why, number one,
they meet; number two, like each other's looks; number three, get
acquainted; and number four, get married or not, according to how
they like each other after getting acquainted. But how in
thunder we're to have a chance to find out whether we like each
other enough is beyond my savvee, unless we make that chance
ourselves. I'd come to see you, call on you, only I know you're
just rooming or boarding, and that won't do."
Suddenly, with a change of mood, the situation appeared to Dede
ridiculously absurd. She felt a desire to laugh--not angrily,
not hysterically, but just jolly. It was so funny. Herself, the
stenographer, he, the notorious and powerful gambling
millionaire, and the gate between them across which poured his
argument of people getting acquainted and married. Also, it was
an impossible situation. On the face of it, she could not go on
with it. This program of furtive meetings in the hills would
have to discontinue. There would never be another meeting. And
if, denied this, he tried to woo her in the office, she would be
compelled to lose a very good position, and that would be an end
of the episode. It was not nice to contemplate; but the world of
men, especially in the cities, she had not found particularly
nice. She had not worked for her living for years without losing
a great many of her illusions.
"We won't do any sneaking or hiding around about it," Daylight
was explaining. "We'll ride around as bold if you please, and if
anybody sees us, why, let them. If they talk--well, so long as
our consciences are straight we needn't worry. Say the word, and
Bob will have on his back the happiest man alive."
She shook her head, pulled in the mare, who was impatient to be
off for home, and glanced significantly at the lengthening
shadows.
"It's getting late now, anyway," Daylight hurried on, "and we've
settled nothing after all. Just one more Sunday, anyway--that's
not asking much--to settle it in."
"We've had all day," she said.
"But we started to talk it over too late. We'll tackle it
earlier next time. This is a big serious proposition with me, I
can tell you. Say next Sunday?"
"Are men ever fair?" she asked. "You know thoroughly well that
by 'next Sunday' you mean many Sundays."
"Then let it be many Sundays," he cried recklessly, while she
thought that she had never seen him looking handsomer. "Say the
word. Only say the word. Next Sunday at the quarry..."
She gathered the reins into her hand preliminary to starting.
"Good night," she said, "and--"
"Yes," he whispered, with just the faintest touch of
impressiveness.
"Yes," she said, her voice low but distinct.
At the same moment she put the mare into a canter and went down
the road without a backward glance, intent on an analysis of her
own feelings. With her mind made up to say no--and to the last
instant she had been so resolved--her lips nevertheless had said
yes. Or at least it seemed the lips. She had not intended to
consent. Then why had she? Her first surprise and bewilderment
at so wholly unpremeditated an act gave way to consternation as
she considered its consequences. She knew that Burning Daylight
was not a man to be trifled with, that under his simplicity and
boyishness he was essentially a dominant male creature, and that
she had pledged herself to a future of inevitable stress and
storm. And again she demanded of herself why she had said yes at
the very moment when it had been farthest from her intention.
CHAPTER XV
Life at the office went on much the way it had always gone.
Never, by word or look, did they acknowledge that the situation
was in any wise different from what it had always been. Each
Sunday saw the arrangement made for the following Sunday's ride;
nor was this ever referred to in the office. Daylight was
fastidiously chivalrous on this point. He did not want to lose
her from the office. The sight of her at her work was to him an
undiminishing joy. Nor did he abuse this by lingering over
dictation or by devising extra work that would detain her longer
before his eyes. But over and beyond such sheer selfishness of
conduct was his love of fair play. He scorned to utilize the
accidental advantages of the situation. Somewhere within him
was a higher appeasement of love than mere possession. He wanted
to be loved for himself, with a fair field for both sides.
On the other hand, had he been the most artful of schemers he
could not have pursued a wiser policy. Bird-like in her love of
individual freedom, the last woman in the world to be bullied in
her affections, she keenly appreciated the niceness of his
attitude. She did this consciously, but deeper than all
consciousness, and intangible as gossamer, were the effects of
this. All unrealizable, save for some supreme moment, did the
web of Daylight's personality creep out and around her. Filament
by filament, these secret and undreamable bonds were being
established. They it was that could have given the cue to her
saying yes when she had meant to say no. And in some such
fashion, in some future crisis of greater moment, might she not,
in violation of all dictates of sober judgment, give another
unintentional consent?
Among other good things resulting from his growing intimacy with
Dede, was Daylight's not caring to drink so much as formerly.
There was a lessening in desire for alcohol of which even he at
last became aware. In a way she herself was the needed
inhibition. The thought of her was like a cocktail. Or, at any
rate, she substituted for a certain percentage of cocktails.
From the strain of his unnatural city existence and of his
intense gambling operations, he had drifted on to the cocktail
route. A wall must forever be built to give him easement from
the high pitch, and Dede became a part of this wall. Her
personality, her laughter, the intonations of her voice, the
impossible golden glow of her eyes, the light on her hair, her
form, her dress, her actions on horseback, her merest physical
mannerisms--all, pictured over and over in his mind and dwelt
upon, served to take the place of many a cocktail or long Scotch
and soda.
In spite of their high resolve, there was a very measurable
degree of the furtive in their meetings. In essence, these
meetings were stolen. They did not ride out brazenly together in
the face of the world. On the contrary, they met always
unobserved, she riding across the many-gated backroad from
Berkeley to meet him halfway. Nor did they ride on any save
unfrequented roads, preferring to cross the second range of hills
and travel among a church-going farmer folk who would scarcely
have recognized even Daylight from his newspaper photographs.
He found Dede a good horsewoman--good not merely in riding but in
endurance. There were days when they covered sixty, seventy, and
even eighty miles; nor did Dede ever claim any day too long,
nor--another strong recommendation to Daylight--did the hardest
day ever the slightest chafe of the chestnut sorrel's back. "A
sure enough hummer," was Daylight's stereotyped but ever
enthusiastic verdict to himself.
They learned much of each other on these long, uninterrupted
rides. They had nothing much to talk about but themselves, and,
while she received a liberal education concerning Arctic travel
and gold-mining, he, in turn, touch by touch, painted an ever
clearer portrait of her. She amplified the ranch life of her
girlhood, prattling on about horses and dogs and persons and
things until it was as if he saw the whole process of her growth
and her becoming. All this he was able to trace on through the
period of her father's failure and death, when she had been
compelled to leave the university and go into office work. The
brother, too, she spoke of, and of her long struggle to have him
cured and of her now fading hopes. Daylight decided that it was
easier to come to an understanding of her than he had
anticipated, though he was always aware that behind and under all
he knew of her was the mysterious and baffling woman and sex.
There, he was humble enough to confess to himself, was a
chartless, shoreless sea, about which he knew nothing and which
he must nevertheless somehow navigate.
His lifelong fear of woman had originated out of
non-understanding and had also prevented him from reaching any
understanding. Dede on horseback, Dede gathering poppies on a
summer hillside, Dede taking down dictation in her swift
shorthand strokes--all this was comprehensible to him. But he
did not know the Dede who so quickly changed from mood to mood,
the Dede who refused steadfastly to ride with him and then
suddenly consented, the Dede in whose eyes the golden glow
forever waxed and waned and whispered hints and messages that
were not for his ears. In all such things he saw the glimmering
profundities of sex, acknowledged their lure, and accepted them
as incomprehensible.
There was another side of her, too, of which he was consciously
ignorant. She knew the books, was possessed of that mysterious
and awful thing called "culture." And yet, what continually
surprised him was that this culture was never obtruded on their
intercourse. She did not talk books, nor art, nor similar
folderols. Homely minded as he was himself, he found her almost
equally homely minded. She liked the simple and the
out-of-doors, the horses and the hills, the sunlight and the
flowers. He found himself in a partly new flora, to which she
was the guide, pointing out to him all the varieties of the oaks,
making him acquainted with the madrono and the manzanita,
teaching him the names, habits, and habitats of unending series
of wild flowers, shrubs, and ferns. Her keen woods eye was
another delight to him. It had been trained in the open, and
little escaped it. One day, as a test, they strove to see which
could discover the greater number of birds' nests. And he, who
had always prided himself on his own acutely trained observation,
found himself hard put to keep his score ahead. At the end of
the day he was but three nests in the lead, one of which she
challenged stoutly and of which even he confessed serious doubt.
He complimented her and told her that her success must be due to
the fact that she was a bird herself, with all a bird's keen
vision and quick-flashing ways.
The more he knew her the more he became convinced of this
birdlike quality in her. That was why she liked to ride, he
argued. It was the nearest approach to flying. A field of
poppies, a glen of ferns, a row of poplars on a country lane, the
tawny brown of a hillside, the shaft of sunlight on a distant
peak--all such were provocative of quick joys which seemed to him
like so many outbursts of song. Her joys were in little things,
and she seemed always singing. Even in sterner things it was the
same. When she rode Bob and fought with that magnificent brute
for mastery, the qualities of an eagle were uppermost in her.
These quick little joys of hers were sources of joy to him. He
joyed in her joy, his eyes as excitedly fixed on her as bears
were fixed on the object of her attention. Also through her he
came to a closer discernment and keener appreciation of nature.
She showed him colors in the landscape that he would never have
dreamed were there. He had known only the primary colors. All
colors of red were red. Black was black, and brown was just
plain brown until it became yellow, when it was no longer brown.
Purple he had always imagined was red, something like blood,
until she taught him better. Once they rode out on a high hill
brow where wind-blown poppies blazed about their horses' knees,
and she was in an ecstasy over the lines of the many distances.
Seven, she counted, and he, who had gazed on landscapes all his
life, for the first time learned what a "distance" was. After
that, and always, he looked upon the face of nature with a more
seeing eye, learning a delight of his own in surveying the
serried ranks of the upstanding ranges, and in slow contemplation
of the purple summer mists that haunted the languid creases of
the distant hills.
But through it all ran the golden thread of love. At first he
had been content just to ride with Dede and to be on comradely
terms with her; but the desire and the need for her increased.
The more he knew of her, the higher was his appraisal. Had she
been reserved and haughty with him, or been merely a giggling,
simpering creature of a woman, it would have been different.
Instead, she amazed him with her simplicity and wholesomeness,
with her great store of comradeliness. This latter was the
unexpected. He had never looked upon woman in that way. Woman,
the toy; woman, the harpy; woman, the necessary wife and mother
of the race's offspring,--all this had been his expectation and
understanding of woman. But woman, the comrade and playfellow
and joyfellow--this was what Dede had surprised him in. And the
more she became worth while, the more ardently his love burned,
unconsciously shading his voice with caresses, and with equal
unconsciousness flaring up signal fires in his eyes. Nor was she
blind to it yet, like many women before her, she thought to play
with the pretty fire and escape the consequent conflagration.
"Winter will soon be coming on," she said regretfully, and with
provocation, one day, "and then there won't be any more riding."
"But I must see you in the winter just the same," he cried
hastily.
She shook her head.
"We have been very happy and all that," she said, looking at him
with steady frankness. "I remember your foolish argument for
getting acquainted, too; but it won't lead to anything; it can't.
I know myself too well to be mistaken."
Her face was serious, even solicitous with desire not to hurt,
and her eyes were unwavering, but in them was the light, golden
and glowing--the abyss of sex into which he was now unafraid to
gaze.
"I've been pretty good," he declared. "I leave it to you if I
haven't. It's been pretty hard, too, I can tell you. You just
think it over. Not once have I said a word about love to you,
and me loving you all the time. That's going some for a man
that's used to having his own way. I'm somewhat of a rusher when
it comes to travelling. I reckon I'd rush God Almighty if it
came to a race over the ice. And yet I didn't rush you. I guess
this fact is an indication of how much I do love you. Of course
I want you to marry me. Have I said a word about it, though?
Nary a chirp, nary a flutter. I've been quiet and good, though
it's almost made me sick at times, this keeping quiet. I haven't
asked you to marry me. I'm not asking you now. Oh, not but what
you satisfy me. I sure know you're the wife for me. But how
about myself ? Do you know me well enough know your own mind?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know, and I ain't going to
take chances on it now. You've got to know for sure whether you
think you could get along with me or not, and I'm playing a slow
conservative game. I ain't a-going to lose for overlooking my
hand."
This was love-making of a sort beyond Dede's experience. Nor had
she ever heard of anything like it. Furthermore, its lack of
ardor carried with it a shock which she could overcome only by
remembering the way his hand had trembled in the past, and by
remembering the passion she had seen that very day and every day
in his eyes, or heard in his voice. Then, too, she recollected
what he had said to her weeks before: "Maybe you don't know what
patience is," he had said, and thereat told her of shooting
squirrels with a big rifle the time he and Elijah Davis had
starved on the Stewart River.
"So you see," he urged, "just for a square deal we've got to see
some more of each other this winter. Most likely your mind ain't
made up yet--"
"But it is," she interrupted. "I wouldn't dare permit myself to
care for you. Happiness, for me, would not lie that way. I like
you, Mr. Harnish, and all that, but it can never be more than
that."
"It's because you don't like my way of living," he charged,
thinking in his own mind of the sensational joyrides and general
profligacy with which the newspapers had credited him--thinking
this, and wondering whether or not, in maiden modesty, she would
disclaim knowledge of it.
To his surprise, her answer was flat and uncompromising.
"No; I don't."
"I know I've been brash on some of those rides that got into the
papers," he began his defense, "and that I've been travelling
with a lively crowd."
"I don't mean that," she said, "though I know about it too, and
can't say that I like it. But it is your life in general, your
business. There are women in the world who could marry a man
like you and be happy, but I couldn't. And the more I cared for
such a man, the more unhappy I should be. You see, my
unhappiness, in turn, would tend to make him unhappy. I should
make a mistake, and he would make an equal mistake, though his
would not be so hard on him because he would still have his
business."
"Business!" Daylight gasped. "What's wrong with my business? I
play fair and square. There's nothing under hand about it, which
can't be said of most businesses, whether of the big corporations
or of the cheating, lying, little corner-grocerymen. I play the
straight rules of the game, and I don't have to lie or cheat or
break my word."
Dede hailed with relief the change in the conversation and at the
same time the opportunity to speak her mind.
"In ancient Greece," she began pedantically, "a man was judged a
good citizen who built houses, planted trees--" She did not
complete the quotation, but drew the conclusion hurriedly. "How
many houses have you built? How many trees have you planted?"
He shook his head noncommittally, for he had not grasped the
drift of the argument.
"Well," she went on, "two winters ago you cornered coal--"
"Just locally," he grinned reminiscently, "just locally. And I
took advantage of the car shortage and the strike in British
Columbia."
"But you didn't dig any of that coal yourself. Yet you forced it
up four dollars a ton and made a lot of money. That was your
business. You made the poor people pay more for their coal. You
played fair, as you said, but you put your hands down into all
their pockets and took their money away from them. I know. I
burn a grate fire in my sitting-room at Berkeley. And instead of
eleven dollars a ton for Rock Wells, I paid fifteen dollars that
winter. You robbed me of four dollars. I could stand it. But
there were thousands of the very poor who could not stand it.
You might call it legal gambling, but to me it was downright
robbery."
Daylight was not abashed. This was no revelation to him. He
remembered the old woman who made wine in the Sonoma hills and
the millions like her who were made to be robbed.
"Now look here, Miss Mason, you've got me there slightly, I
grant. But you've seen me in business a long time now, and you
know I don't make a practice of raiding the poor people. I go
after the big fellows. They're my meat. They rob the poor, and
I rob them. That coal deal was an accident. I wasn't after the
poor people in that, but after the big fellows, and I got them,
too. The poor people happened to get in the way and got hurt,
that was all.
"Don't you see," he went on, "the whole game is a gamble.
Everybody gambles in one way or another. The farmer gambles
against the weather and the market on his crops. So does the
United States Steel Corporation. The business of lots of men is
straight robbery of the poor people. But I've never made that my
business. You know that. I've always gone after the robbers."
"I missed my point," she admitted. "Wait a minute."
And for a space they rode in silence.
"I see it more clearly than I can state it, but it's something
like this. There is legitimate work, and there's work
that--well,
that isn't legitimate. The farmer works the soil and produces
grain. He's making something that is good for humanity. He
actually, in a way, creates something, the grain that will fill
the
mouths of the hungry."
"And then the railroads and market-riggers and the rest proceed
to rob him of that same grain,"--Daylight broke in Dede smiled
and
held up her hand.
"Wait a minute. You'll make me lose my point. It doesn't hurt
if they rob him of all of it so that he starves to death. The
point is that the wheat he grew is still in the world. It
exists. Don't you see? The farmer created something, say ten
tons of wheat, and those ten tons exist. The railroads haul the
wheat to market, to the mouths that will eat it. This also is
legitimate. It's like some one bringing you a glass of water,
or taking a cinder out of your eye. Something has been done, in
a
way been created, just like the wheat."
"But the railroads rob like Sam Scratch," Daylight objected.
"Then the work they do is partly legitimate and partly not. Now
we come to you. You don't create anything. Nothing new exists
when you're done with your business. Just like the coal. You
didn't dig it. You didn't haul it to market. You didn't deliver
it. Don't you see? that's what I meant by planting the trees
and building the houses. You haven't planted one tree nor built
a single house."
"I never guessed there was a woman in the world who could talk
business like that," he murmured admiringly. "And you've got me
on that point. But there's a lot to be said on my side just the
same. Now you listen to me. I'm going to talk under three
heads. Number one: We live a short time, the best of us, and
we're a long time dead. Life is a big gambling game. Some are
born lucky and some are born unlucky. Everybody sits in at the
table, and everybody tries to rob everybody else. Most of them
get robbed. They're born suckers.
"Fellow like me comes along and sizes up the proposition. I've
got
two choices. I can herd with the suckers, or I can herd with the
robbers. As a sucker, I win nothing. Even the crusts of bread
are
snatched out of my mouth by the robbers. I work hard all my
days,
and die working. And I ain't never had a flutter. I've had
nothing but work, work, work. They talk about the dignity of
labor. I tell you there ain't no dignity in that sort of labor.
My other choice is to herd with the robbers, and I herd with
them.
I play that choice wide open to win. I get the automobiles, and
the porterhouse steaks, and the soft beds.
"Number two: There ain't much difference between playing halfway
robber like the railroad hauling that farmer's wheat to market,
and playing all robber and robbing the robbers like I do. And,
besides, halfway robbery is too slow a game for me to sit in.
You don't win quick enough for me."
"But what do you want to win for?" Dede demanded. "You have
millions and millions, already. You can't ride in more than one
automobile at a time, sleep in more than one bed at a time."
"Number three answers that," he said, "and here it is: Men and
things are so made that they have different likes. A rabbit
likes a vegetarian diet. A lynx likes meat. Ducks swim;
chickens are scairt of water. One man collects postage stamps,
another man collects butterflies. This man goes in for
paintings, that man goes in for yachts, and some other fellow for
hunting big game. One man thinks horse-racing is It, with a big
I, and another man finds the biggest satisfaction in actresses.
They can't help these likes. They have them, and what are they
going to do about it? Now I like gambling. I like to play the
game. I want to play it big and play it quick. I'm just made
that way. And I play it."
"But why can't you do good with all your money?"
Daylight laughed.
"Doing good with your money! It's like slapping God in the face,
as much as to tell him that he don't know how to run his world
and that you'll be much obliged if he'll stand out of the way and
give you a chance. Thinking about God doesn't keep me sitting up
nights, so I've got another way of looking at it. Ain't it
funny, to go around with brass knuckles and a big club breaking
folks' heads and taking their money away from them until I've got
a pile, and then, repenting of my ways, going around and
bandaging up the heads the other robbers are breaking? I leave
it to you. That's what doing good with money amounts to. Every
once in a while some robber turns soft-hearted and takes to
driving an ambulance. That's what Carnegie did. He smashed
heads in pitched battles at Homestead, regular wholesale
head-breaker he was, held up the suckers for a few hundred
million, and now he goes around dribbling it back to them.
funny? I leave it to you."
He rolled a cigarette and watched her half curiously, half
amusedly. His replies and harsh generalizations of a harsh
school were disconcerting, and she came back to her earlier
position.
"I can't argue with you, and you know that. No matter how right
a woman is, men have such a way about them well, what they say
sounds most convincing, and yet the woman is still certain they
are wrong. But there is one thing--the creative joy. Call it
gambling if you will, but just the same it seems to me more
satisfying to create something, make something, than just to roll
dice out of a dice-box all day long. Why, sometimes, for
exercise, or when I've got to pay fifteen dollars for coal, I
curry Mab and give her a whole half hour's brushing. And when I
see her coat clean and shining and satiny, I feel a satisfaction
in what I've done. So it must be with the man who builds a house
or plants a tree. He can look at it. He made it. It's his
handiwork. Even if somebody like you comes along and takes his
tree away from him, still it is there, and still did he make it.
You can't rob him of that, Mr. Harnish, with all your millions.
It's the creative joy, and it's a higher joy than mere gambling.
Haven't you ever made things yourself--a log cabin up in the
Yukon, or a canoe, or raft, or something? And don't you remember
how satisfied you were, how good you felt, while you were doing
it and after you had it done?"
While she spoke his memory was busy with the associations she
recalled. He saw the deserted flat on the river bank by the
Klondike, and he saw the log cabins and warehouses spring up, and
all the log structures he had built, and his sawmills working
night and day on three shifts.
"Why, dog-gone it, Miss Mason, you're right--in a way. I've
built hundreds of houses up there, and I remember I was proud and
glad to see them go up. I'm proud now, when I remember them.
And there was Ophir--the most God-forsaken moose-pasture of a
creek you ever laid eyes on. I made that into the big Ophir.
Why, I ran the water in there from the Rinkabilly, eighty miles
away. They all said I couldn't, but I did it, and I did it by
myself. The dam and the flume cost me four million. But you
should have seen that Ophir--power plants, electric lights, and
hundreds of men on the pay-roll, working night and day. I guess
I do get an inkling of what you mean by making a thing. I made
Ophir, and by God, she was a sure hummer--I beg your pardon. I
didn't mean to cuss. But that Ophir !--I sure am proud of her
now, just as the last time I laid eyes on her."
"And you won something there that was more than mere money," Dede
encouraged. "Now do you know what I would do if I had lots of
money and simply had to go on playing at business? Take all the
southerly and westerly slopes of these bare hills. I'd buy them
in and plant eucalyptus on them. I'd do it for the joy of doing
it anyway; but suppose I had that gambling twist in me which you
talk about, why, I'd do it just the same and make money out of
the trees. And there's my other point again. Instead of raising
the price of coal without adding an ounce of coal to the market
supply, I'd be making thousands and thousands of cords of
firewood--making something where nothing was before. And
everybody who ever crossed on the ferries would look up at these
forested hills and be made glad. Who was made glad by your
adding four dollars a ton to Rock Wells?"
It was Daylight's turn to be silent for a time while she waited
an answer.
"Would you rather I did things like that?" he asked at last.
"It would be better for the world, and better for you," she
answered noncommittally.
CHAPTER XVI
All week every one in the office knew that something new and big
was afoot in Daylight's mind. Beyond some deals of no
importance, he had not been interested in anything for several
months. But now he went about in an almost unbroken brown study,
made unexpected and lengthy trips across the bay to Oakland, or
sat at his desk silent and motionless for hours. He seemed
particularly happy with what occupied his mind. At times men
came in and conferred with him--and with new faces and differing
in type from those that usually came to see him.
On Sunday Dede learned all about it. "I've been thinking a lot
of our talk," he began, "and I've got an idea I'd like to give it
a flutter. And I've got a proposition to make your hair stand
up. It's what you call legitimate, and at the same time it's the
gosh-dangdest gamble a man ever went into. How about planting
minutes wholesale, and making two minutes grow where one minute
grew before? Oh, yes, and planting a few trees, too--say several
million of them. You remember the quarry I made believe I was
looking at? Well, I'm going to buy it. I'm going to buy these
hills, too, clear from here around to Berkeley and down the other
way to San Leandro. I own a lot of them already, for that
matter. But mum is the word. I'll be buying a long time to come
before anything much is guessed about it, and I don't want the
market to jump up out of sight. You see that hill over there.
It's my hill running clear down its slopes through Piedmont and
halfway along those rolling hills into Oakland. And it's nothing
to all the things I'm going to buy."
He paused triumphantly. "And all to make two minutes grow where
one grew before?" Dede queried, at the same time laughing
heartily at his affectation of mystery.
He stared at her fascinated. She had such a frank, boyish way of
throwing her head back when she laughed. And her teeth were an
unending delight to him. Not small, yet regular and firm,
without a blemish, he considered then the healthiest, whitest,
prettiest teeth he had ever seen. And for months he had been
comparing them with the teeth of every woman he met.
It was not until her laughter was over that he was able to
continue.
"The ferry system between Oakland and San Francisco is the worst
one-horse concern in the United States. You cross on it every
day, six days in the week. That's say, twenty-five days a month,
or three hundred a year. Now long does it take you one way?
Forty minutes, if you're lucky. I'm going to put you across in
twenty minutes. If that ain't making two minutes grow where one
grew before, knock off my head with little apples. I'll save you
twenty minutes each way. That's forty minutes a day, times three
hundred, equals twelve thousand minutes a year, just for you,
just for one person. Let's see: that's two hundred whole hours.
Suppose I save two hundred hours a year for thousands of other
folks,--that's farming some, ain't it?"
Dede could only nod breathlessly. She had caught the contagion
of his enthusiasm, though she had no clew as to how this great
time-saving was to be accomplished.
"Come on," he said. "Let's ride up that hill, and when I get you
out on top where you can see something, I'll talk sense."
A small footpath dropped down to the dry bed of the canon, which
they crossed before they began the climb. The slope was steep
and covered with matted brush and bushes, through which the
horses slipped and lunged. Bob, growing disgusted, turned back
suddenly and attempted to pass Mab. The mare was thrust sidewise
into the denser bush, where she nearly fell. Recovering, she
flung her weight against Bob. Both riders' legs were caught in
the consequent squeeze, and, as Bob plunged ahead down hill, Dede
was nearly scraped off. Daylight threw his horse on to its
haunches and at the same time dragged Dede back into the saddle.
Showers of twigs and leaves fell upon them, and predicament
followed predicament, until they emerged on the hilltop the worse
for wear but happy and excited. Here no trees obstructed the
view. The particular hill on which they were, out-jutted from
the regular line of the range, so that the sweep of their vision
extended over three-quarters of the circle. Below, on the flat
land bordering the bay, lay Oakland, and across the bay was San
Francisco. Between the two cities they could see the white
ferry-boats on the water. Around to their right was Berkeley,
and to their left the scattered villages between Oakland and San
Leandro. Directly in the foreground was Piedmont, with its
desultory dwellings and patches of farming land, and from
Piedmont the land rolled down in successive waves upon Oakland.
"Look at it," said Daylight, extending his arm in a sweeping
gesture. "A hundred thousand people there, and no reason there
shouldn't be half a million. There's the chance to make five
people grow where one grows now. Here's the scheme in a
nutshell. Why don't more people live in Oakland? No good
service with San Francisco, and, besides, Oakland is asleep.
It's a whole lot better place to live in than San Francisco.
Now, suppose I buy in all the street railways of Oakland,
Berkeley, Alameda, San Leandro, and the rest,--bring them under
one head with a competent management? Suppose I cut the time to
San Francisco one-half by building a big pier out there almost to
Goat Island and establishing a ferry system with modern
up-to-date boats? Why, folks will want to live over on this
side. Very good. They'll need land on which to build. So,
first
I buy up the land. But the land's cheap now. Why? Because it's
in the country, no electric roads, no quick communication, nobody
guessing that the electric roads are coming. I'll build the
roads.
That will make the land jump up. Then I'll sell the land as fast
as the folks will want to buy because of the improved ferry
system
and transportation facilities.
"You see, I give the value to the land by building the roads.
Then I sell the land and get that value back, and after that,
there's the roads, all carrying folks back and forth and earning
big money. Can't lose. And there's all sorts of millions in it.
I'm going to get my hands on some of that water front and the
tide-lands. Take between where I'm going to build my pier and
the old pier. It's shallow water. I can fill and dredge and put
in a system of docks that will handle hundreds of ships. San
Francisco's water front is congested. No more room for ships.
With hundreds of ships loading and unloading on this side right
into the freight cars of three big railroads, factories will
start up over here instead of crossing to San Francisco. That
means factory sites. That means me buying in the factory sites
before anybody guesses the cat is going to jump, much less, which
way. Factories mean tens of thousands of workingmen and their
families. That means more houses and more land, and that means
me, for I'll be there to sell them the land. And tens of
thousands of families means tens of thousands of nickels every
day for my electric cars. The growing population will mean more
stores, more banks, more everything. And that'll mean me, for
I'll be right there with business property as well as home
property. What do you think of it?"
Therefore she could answer, he was off again, his mind's eye
filled with this new city of his dream which he builded on the
Alameda hills by the gateway to the Orient.
"Do you know--I've been looking it up--the Firth Of Clyde, where
all the steel ships are built, isn't half as wide as Oakland
Creek down there, where all those old hulks lie? Why ain't it a
Firth of Clyde? Because the Oakland City Council spends its time
debating about prunes and raisins. What is needed is somebody to
see things, and, after that, organization. That's me. I didn't
make Ophir for nothing. And once things begin to hum, outside
capital will pour in. All I do is start it going. 'Gentlemen,'
I say, 'here's all the natural advantages for a great metropolis.
God Almighty put them advantages here, and he put me here to see
them. Do you want to land your tea and silk from Asia and ship
it straight East? Here's the docks for your steamers, and here's
the railroads. Do you want factories from which you can ship
direct by land or water? Here's the site, and here's the modern,
up-to-date city, with the latest improvements for yourselves and
your workmen, to live in.'"
"Then there's the water. I'll come pretty close to owning the
watershed. Why not the waterworks too? There's two water
companies in Oakland now, fighting like cats and dogs and both
about broke. What a metropolis needs is a good water system.
They can't give it. They're stick-in-the-muds. I'll gobble them
up and deliver the right article to the city. There's money
there, too--money everywhere. Everything works in with
everything else. Each improvement makes the value of everything
else pump up. It's people that are behind the value. The bigger
the crowd that herds in one place, the more valuable is the real
estate. And this is the very place for a crowd to herd. Look at
it. Just look at it! You could never find a finer site for a
great city. All it needs is the herd, and I'll stampede a couple
of hundred thousand people in here ins two years. And what's
more it won't be one of these wild cat land booms. It will be
legitimate. Twenty years for now there'll be a million people on
this side the bay. Another thing is hotels. There isn't a
decent one in the town. I'll build a couple of up-to-date ones
that'll make them sit up and take notice. I won't care if they
don't pay for years. Their effect will more than give me my
money back out of the other holdings. And, oh, yes, I'm going to
plant eucalyptus, millions of them, on these hills."
"But how are you going to do it?" Dede asked. "You haven't
enough money for all that you've planned."
"I've thirty million, and if I need more I can borrow on the land
and other things. Interest on mortgages won't anywhere near eat
up the increase in land values, and I'll be selling land right
along."
In the weeks that followed, Daylight was a busy man. He spent
most of his time in Oakland, rarely coming to the office. He
planned to move the office to Oakland, but, as he told Dede, the
secret preliminary campaign of buying had to be put through
first. Sunday by Sunday, now from this hilltop and now from
that, they looked down upon the city and its farming suburbs, and
he pointed out to her his latest acquisitions. At first it was
patches and sections of land here and there; but as the weeks
passed it was the unowned portions that became rare, until at
last they stood as islands surrounded by Daylight's land.
It meant quick work on a colossal scale, for Oakland and the
adjacent country was not slow to feel the tremendous buying. But
Daylight had the ready cash, and it had always been his policy to
strike quickly. Before the others could get the warning of the
boom, he quietly accomplished many things. At the same time that
his agents were purchasing corner lots and entire blocks in the
heart of the business section and the waste lands for factory
sites, Day was rushing franchises through the city council,
capturing the two exhausted water companies and the eight or nine
independent street railways, and getting his grip on the Oakland
Creek and the bay tide-lands for his dock system. The tide-lands
had been in litigation for years, and he took the bull by the
horns--buying out the private owners and at the same time leasing
from the city fathers.
By the time that Oakland was aroused by this unprecedented
activity in every direction and was questioning excitedly the
meaning of it, Daylight secretly bought the chief Republican
newspaper and the chief Democratic organ, and moved boldly into
his new offices. Of necessity, they were on a large scale,
occupying four floors of the only modern office building in the
town--the only building that wouldn't have to be torn down later
on, as Daylight put it. There was department after department, a
score of them, and hundreds of clerks and stenographers. As he
told Dede: "I've got more companies than you can shake a stick
at. There's the Alameda & Contra Costa Land Syndicate, the
Consolidated Street Railways, the Yerba Buena Ferry Company, the
United Water Company, the Piedmont Realty Company, the Fairview
and Portola Hotel Company, and half a dozen more that I've got to
refer to a notebook to remember. There's the Piedmont Laundry
Farm, and Redwood Consolidated Quarries. Starting in with our
quarry, I just kept a-going till I got them all. And there's the
ship-building company I ain't got a name for yet. Seeing as I
had to have ferry-boats, I decided to build them myself. They'll
be done by the time the pier is ready for them. Phew! It all
sure beats poker. And I've had the fun of gouging the robber
gangs as well. The water company bunches are squealing yet. I
sure got them where the hair was short. They were just about all
in when I came along and finished them off."
"But why do you hate them so?" Dede asked.
"Because they're such cowardly skunks."
"But you play the same game they do."
"Yes; but not in the same way." Daylight regarded her
thoughtfully. "When I say cowardly skunks, I mean just
that,--cowardly skunks. They set up for a lot of gamblers, and
there ain't one in a thousand of them that's got the nerve to be
a gambler. They're four-flushers, if you know what that means.
They're a lot of little cottontail rabbits making believe they're
big rip-snorting timber wolves. They set out to everlastingly
eat up some proposition but at the first sign of trouble they
turn tail and stampede for the brush. Look how it works. When
the big fellows wanted to unload Little Copper, they sent Jakey
Fallow into the New York Stock Exchange to yell out: 'I'll buy
all or any part of Little Copper at fifty five,' Little Copper
being at fifty-four. And in thirty minutes them cottontails--
financiers, some folks call them--bid up Little Copper to sixty.
And an hour after that, stampeding for the brush, they were
throwing Little Copper overboard at forty-five and even forty.
"They're catspaws for the big fellows. Almost as fast as they
rob the suckers, the big fellows come along and hold them up. Or
else the big fellows use them in order to rob each other. That's
the way the Chattanooga Coal and Iron Company was swallowed up by
the trust in the last panic. The trust made that panic. It had
to break a couple of big banking companies and squeeze half a
dozen big fellows, too, and it did it by stampeding the
cottontails. The cottontails did the rest all right, and the
trust gathered in Chattanooga Coal and Iron. Why, any man, with
nerve and savvee, can start them cottontails jumping for the
brush. I don't exactly hate them myself, but I haven't any
regard for chicken-hearted four-flushers."
CHAPTER XVII
For months Daylight was buried in work. The outlay was terrific,
and there was nothing coming in. Beyond a general rise in land
values, Oakland had not acknowledged his irruption on the
financial scene. The city was waiting for him to show what he
was going to do, and he lost no time about it. The best skilled
brains on the market were hired by him for the different branches
of the work. Initial mistakes he had no patience with, and he
was determined to start right, as when he engaged Wilkinson,
almost doubling his big salary, and brought him out from Chicago
to take charge of the street railway organization. Night and day
the road gangs toiled on the streets. And night and day the
pile-drivers hammered the big piles down into the mud of San
Francisco Bay. The pier was to be three miles long, and the
Berkeley hills were denuded of whole groves of mature eucalyptus
for the piling.
At the same time that his electric roads were building out
through the hills, the hay-fields were being surveyed and broken
up into city squares, with here and there, according to best
modern methods, winding boulevards and strips of park. Broad
streets, well graded, were made, with sewers and water-pipes
ready laid, and macadamized from his own quarries. Cement
sidewalks were also laid, so that all the purchaser had to do was
to select his lot and architect and start building. The quick
service of Daylight's new electric roads into Oakland made this
big district immediately accessible, and long before the ferry
system was in operation hundreds of residences were going up.
The profit on this land was enormous. In a day, his onslaught of
wealth had turned open farming country into one of the best
residential districts of the city.
But this money that flowed in upon him was immediately poured
back into his other investments. The need for electric cars was
so great that he installed his own shops for building them. And
even on the rising land market, he continued to buy choice
factory sites and building properties. On the advice of
Wilkinson, practically every electric road already in operation
was rebuilt. The light, old fashioned rails were torn out and
replaced by the heaviest that were manufactured. Corner lots, on
the sharp turns of narrow streets, were bought and ruthlessly
presented to the city in order to make wide curves for his tracks
and high speed for his cars. Then, too, there were the main-line
feeders for his ferry system, tapping every portion of Oakland,
Alameda, and Berkeley, and running fast expresses to the pier
end. The same large-scale methods were employed in the water
system. Service of the best was needed, if his huge land
investment was to succeed. Oakland had to be made into a
worth-while city, and that was what he intended to do. In
addition to his big hotels, he built amusement parks for the
common people, and art galleries and club-house country inns for
the more finicky classes. Even before there was any increase in
population, a marked increase in street-railway traffic took
place. There was nothing fanciful about his schemes. They were
sound investments.
"What Oakland wants is a first glass theatre," he said, and,
after vainly trying to interest local capital, he started the
building of the theatre himself; for he alone had vision for the
two hundred thousand new people that were coming to the town.
But no matter what pressure was on Daylight, his Sundays he
reserved for his riding in the hills. It was not the winter
weather, however, that brought these rides with Dede to an end.
One Saturday afternoon in the office she told him not to expect
to meet her next day, and, when he pressed for an explanation:
"I've sold Mab."
Daylight was speechless for the moment. Her act meant one of so
many serious things that he couldn't classify it. It smacked
almost of treachery. She might have met with financial disaster.
It might be her way of letting him know she had seen enough of
him. Or...
"What's the matter?" he managed to ask.
"I couldn't afford to keep her with hay forty-five dollars a
ton," Dede answered.
"Was that your only reason?" he demanded, looking at her
steadily; for he remembered her once telling him how she had
brought the mare through one winter, five years before, when hay
had gone as high as sixty dollars a ton.
"No. My brother's expenses have been higher, as well, and I was
driven to the conclusion that since I could not afford both, I'd
better let the mare go and keep the brother."
Daylight felt inexpressibly saddened. He was suddenly aware of a
great emptiness. What would a Sunday be without Dede? And
Sundays without end without her? He drummed perplexedly on the
desk with his fingers.
"Who bought her?" he asked. Dede's eyes flashed in the way long
since familiar to him when she was angry.
"Don't you dare buy her back for me," she cried. "And don't deny
that that was what you had in mind."
"I won't deny it. It was my idea to a tee. But I wouldn't have
done it without asking you first, and seeing how you feel about
it, I won't even ask you. But you thought a heap of that mare,
and it's pretty hard on you to lose her. I'm sure sorry. And
I'm sorry, too, that you won't be riding with me tomorrow. I'll
be plumb lost. I won't know what to do with myself."
"Neither shall I," Dede confessed mournfully, "except that I
shall be able to catch up with my sewing."
"But I haven't any sewing."
Daylight's tone was whimsically plaintive, but secretly he was
delighted with her confession of loneliness. It was almost worth
the loss of the mare to get that out of her. At any rate, he
meant something to her. He was not utterly unliked.
"I wish you would reconsider, Miss Mason," he said softly. "Not
alone for the mare's sake, but for my sake. Money don't cut any
ice in this. For me to buy that mare wouldn't mean as it does to
most men to send a bouquet of flowers or a box of candy to a
young lady. And I've never sent you flowers or candy." He
observed the warning flash of her eyes, and hurried on to escape
refusal. "I'll tell you what we'll do. Suppose I buy the mare
and own her myself, and lend her to you when you want to ride.
There's nothing wrong in that. Anybody borrows a horse from
anybody, you know."
Agin he saw refusal, and headed her off.
"Lots of men take women buggy-riding. There's nothing wrong in
that. And the man always furnishes the horse and buggy. Well,
now, what's the difference between my taking you buggy-riding and
furnishing the horse and buggy, and taking you horse-back-riding
and furnishing the horses?"
She shook her head, and declined to answer, at the same time
looking at the door as if to intimate that it was time for this
unbusinesslike conversation to end. He made one more effort.
"Do you know, Miss Mason, I haven't a friend in the world outside
you? I mean a real friend, man or woman, the kind you chum with,
you know, and that you're glad to be with and sorry to be away
from. Hegan is the nearest man I get to, and he's a million
miles away from me. Outside business, we don't hitch. He's got
a big library of books, and some crazy kind of culture, and he
spends all his off times reading things in French and German and
other outlandish lingoes--when he ain't writing plays and poetry.
There's nobody I feel chummy with except you, and you know how
little we've chummed--once a week, if it didn't rain, on Sunday.
I've grown kind of to depend on you. You're a sort of--of--of--"
"A sort of habit," she said with a smile.
"That's about it. And that mare, and you astride of her, coming
along the road under the trees or through the sunshine--why, with
both you and the mare missing, there won't be anything worth
waiting through the week for. If you'd just let me buy her
back--"
"No, no; I tell you no." Dede rose impatiently, but her eyes
were moist with the memory of her pet. "Please don't mention her
to me again. If you think it was easy to part with her, you are
mistaken. But I've seen the last of her, and I want to forget
her."
Daylight made no answer, and the door closed behind him.
Half an hour later he was conferring with Jones, the erstwhile
elevator boy and rabid proletarian whom Daylight long before had
grubstaked to literature for a year. The resulting novel had
been a failure. Editors and publishers would not look at it, and
now Daylight was using the disgruntled author in a little private
secret service system he had been compelled to establish for
himself. Jones, who affected to be surprised at nothing after
his crushing experience with railroad freight rates on firweood
and charcoal, betrayed no surprise now when the task was given to
him to locate the purchaser of a certain sorrel mare.
"How high shall I pay for her?" he asked.
"Any price. You've got to get her, that's the point. Drive a
sharp bargain so as not to excite suspicion, but her. Then you
deliver her to that address up in Sonoma County. The man's the
caretaker on a little ranch I have there. Tell him he's to take
whacking good care of her. And after that forget all about it.
Don't tell me the name of the man you buy her from. Don't tell
me anything about it except that you've got her and delivered
her. Savvee?"
But the week had not passed, when Daylight noted the flash in
Dede's eyes that boded trouble.
"Something's gone wrong--what is it?" he asked boldly.
"Mab," she said. "The man who bought her has sold her already.
If I thought you had anything to do with it--"
"I don't even know who you sold her to," was Daylight's answer.
"And what's more, I'm not bothering my head about her. She was
your mare, and it's none of my business what you did with her.
You haven't got her, that's sure and worse luck. And now, while
we're on touchy subjects, I'm going to open another one with you.
And you needn't get touchy about it, for it's not really your
business at all."
She waited in the pause that followed, eyeing him almost
suspiciously.
"It's about that brother of yours. He needs more than you can do
for him. Selling that mare of yours won't send him to Germany.
And that's what his own doctors say he needs--that crack German
specialist who rips a man's bones and muscles into pulp and then
molds them all over again. Well, I want to send him to Germany
and give that crack a flutter, that's all."
"If it were only possible" she said, half breathlessly, and
wholly without anger. "Only it isn't, and you know it isn't. I
can't accept money from you--"
"Hold on, now," he interrupted. "Wouldn't you accept a drink of
water from one of the Twelve Apostles if you was dying of thirst?
Or would you be afraid of his evil intentions"--she made a
gesture of dissent "--or of folks might say about it?"
"But that's different," she began.
"Now look here, Miss Mason. You've got to get some foolish
notions out of your head. This money notion is one of the
funniest things I've seen. Suppose you was falling over a cliff,
wouldn't it be all right for me to reach out and hold you by the
arm? Sure it would. But suppose you ended another sort of
help--instead of the strength of arm, the strength of my pocket?
That would be all and that's what they all say. But why do they
say it. Because the robber gangs want all the suckers to be
honest and respect money. If the suckers weren't honest and
didn't respect money, where would the robbers be? Don't you see?
The robbers don't deal in arm-holds; they deal in dollars.
Therefore arm-holds are just common and ordinary, while dollars
are sacred--so sacred that you didn't let me lend you a hand with
a few.
"Or here's another way," he continued, spurred on by her mute
protest. "It's all right for me to give the strength of my arm
when you're falling over a cliff. But if I take that same
strength of arm and use it at pick-and-shovel work for a day and
earn two dollars, you won't have anything to do with the two
dollars. Yet it's the same old strength of arm in a new form,
that's all. Besides, in this proposition it won't be a claim on
you. It ain't even a loan to you. It's an arm-hold I'm giving
your brother--just the same sort of arm-hold as if he was falling
over a cliff. And a nice one you are, to come running out and
yell 'Stop!' at me, and let your brother go on over the cliff.
What he needs to save his legs is that crack in Germany, and
that's the arm-hold I'm offering.
"Wish you could see my rooms. Walls all decorated with horsehair
bridles--scores of them--hundreds of them. They're no use to me,
and they cost like Sam Scratch. But there's a lot of convicts
making them, and I go on buying. Why, I've spent more money in a
single night on whiskey than would get the best specialists and
pay all the expenses of a dozen cases like your brother's. And
remember, you've got nothing to do with this. If your brother
wants to look on it as a loan, all right. It's up to him, and
you've got to stand out of the way while I pull him back from
that cliff."
Still Dede refused, and Daylight's argument took a more painful
turn.
"I can only guess that you're standing in your brother's way on
account of some mistaken idea in your head that this is my idea
of courting. Well, it ain't. You might as well think I'm
courting all those convicts I buy bridles from. I haven't asked
you to marry me, and if I do I won't come trying to buy you into
consenting. And there won't be anything underhand when I come
a-asking."
Dede's face was flushed and angry. "If you knew how ridiculous
you
are, you'd stop," she blurted out. "You can make me more
uncomfortable than any man I ever knew. Every little while you
give me to understand that you haven't asked me to marry you yet.
I'm not waiting to be asked, and I warned you from the first that
you had no chance. And yet you hold it over my head that some
time, some day, you're going to ask me to marry you. Go ahead
and
ask me now, and get your answer and get it over and done with."
He looked at her in honest and pondering admiration. "I want you
so bad, Miss Mason, that I don't dast to ask you now," he said,
with such whimsicality and earnestness as to make her throw her
head back in a frank boyish laugh. "Besides, as I told you, I'm
green at it. I never went a-courting before, and I don't want to
make any mistakes."
"But you're making them all the time," she cried impulsively.
"No man ever courted a woman by holding a threatened proposal
over her head like a club."
"I won't do it any more," he said humbly. "And anyway, we're off
the argument. My straight talk a minute ago still holds. You're
standing in your brother's way. No matter what notions you've
got in your head, you've got to get out of the way and give him a
chance. Will you let me go and see him and talk it over with
him? I'll make it a hard and fast business proposition. I'll
stake him to get well, that's all, and charge him interest."
She visibly hesitated.
"And just remember one thing, Miss Mason: it's HIS leg, not
yours."
Still she refrained from giving her answer, and Daylight went on
strengthening his position.
"And remember, I go over to see him alone. He's a man, and I can
deal with him better without womenfolks around. I'll go over
to-morrow afternoon."
CHAPTER XVIII
Daylight had been wholly truthful when he told Dede that he had
no real friends. On speaking terms with thousands, on fellowship
and drinking terms with hundreds, he was a lonely man. He failed
to find the one man, or group of several men, with whom he could
be really intimate. Cities did not make for comradeship as did
the Alaskan trail. Besides, the types of men were different.
Scornful and contemptuous of business men on the one hand, on the
other his relations with the San Francisco bosses had been more
an alliance of expediency than anything else. He had felt more
of kinship for the franker brutality of the bosses and their
captains, but they had failed to claim any deep respect. They
were too prone to crookedness. Bonds were better than men's word
in this modern world, and one had to look carefully to the bonds.
In the old Yukon days it had been different. Bonds didn't go. A
man said he had so much, and even in a poker game his appeasement
was accepted.
Larry Hegan, who rose ably to the largest demands of Daylight's
operations and who had few illusions and less hypocrisy, might
have proved a chum had it not been for his temperamental twist.
Strange genius that he was, a Napoleon of the law, with a power
of visioning that far exceeded Daylight's, he had nothing in
common with Daylight outside the office. He spent his time with
books, a thing Daylight could not abide. Also, he devoted
himself to the endless writing of plays which never got beyond
manuscript form, and, though Daylight only sensed the secret
taint of it, was a confirmed but temperate eater of hasheesh.
Hegan lived all his life cloistered with books in a world of
agitation. With the out-of-door world he had no understanding
nor tolerance. In food and drink he was abstemious as a monk,
while exercise was a thing abhorrent. Daylight's friendships, in
lieu of anything closer, were drinking friendships and roistering
friendships. And with the passing of the Sunday rides with Dede,
he fell back more and more upon these for diversion. The
cocktail wall of inhibition he reared more assiduously than ever.
The big red motor-car was out more frequently now, while a stable
hand was hired to give Bob exercise. In his early San Francisco
days, there had been intervals of easement between his deals, but
in this present biggest deal of all the strain was unremitting.
Not in a month, or two, or three, could his huge land investment
be carried to a successful consummation. And so complete and
wide-reaching was it that complications and knotty situations
constantly arose. Every day brought its problems, and when he
had solved them in his masterful way, he left the office in his
big car, almost sighing with relief at anticipation of the
approaching double Martini. Rarely was he made tipsy. His
constitution was too strong for that. Instead, he was that
direst of all drinkers, the steady drinker, deliberate and
controlled, who averaged a far higher quantity of alcohol than
the irregular and violent drinker. For six weeks hard-running he
had seen nothing of Dede except in the office, and there he
resolutely refrained from making approaches. But by the seventh
Sunday his hunger for her overmastered him. It was a stormy day.
A heavy southeast gale was blowing, and squall after squall of
rain and wind swept over the city. He could not take his mind
off of her, and a persistent picture came to him of her sitting
by a window and sewing feminine fripperies of some sort. When
the time came for his first pre-luncheon cocktail to be served to
him in his rooms, he did not take it.
Filled with a daring determination, he glanced at his note book
for Dede's telephone number, and called for the switch.
At first it was her landlady's daughter who was raised, but in a
minute he heard the voice he had been hungry to hear.
"I just wanted to tell you that I'm coming out to see you," he
said. "I didn't want to break in on you without warning, that
was all."
"Has something happened?" came her voice.
"I'll tell you when I get there," he evaded.
He left the red car two blocks away and arrived on foot at the
pretty, three-storied, shingled Berkeley house. For an instant
only, he was aware of an inward hesitancy, but the next moment he
rang the bell. He knew that what he was doing was in direct
violation of her wishes, and that he was setting her a difficult
task to receive as a Sunday caller the multimillionaire and
notorious Elam Harnish of newspaper fame. On the other hand, the
one thing he did not expect of her was what he would have termed
"silly female capers."
And in this he was not disappointed.
She came herself to the door to receive him and shake hands with
him. He hung his mackintosh and hat on the rack in the
comfortable square hall and turned to her for direction.
"They are busy in there," she said, indicating the parlor from
which came the boisterous voices of young people, and through the
open door of which he could see several college youths. "So you
will have to come into my rooms."
She led the way through the door opening out of the hall to the
right, and, once inside, he stood awkwardly rooted to the floor,
gazing about him and at her and all the time trying not to gaze.
In his perturbation he failed to hear and see her invitation to a
seat. So these were her quarters. the intimacy of it and her
making no fuss about it was startling, but it was no more than he
would have expected of her. It was almost two rooms in one, the
one he was in evidently the sitting-room, and the one he could
see into, the bedroom. Beyond an oaken dressing-table, with an
orderly litter of combs and brushes and dainty feminine
knickknacks, there was no sign of its being used as a bedroom.
The broad couch, with a cover of old rose and banked high with
cushions, he decided must be the bed, but it was farthest from
any experience of a civilized bed he had ever had.
Not that he saw much of detail in that awkward moment of
standing. His general impression was one of warmth and comfort
and beauty. There were no carpets, and on the hardwood floor he
caught a glimpse of several wolf and coyote skins. What captured
and perceptibly held his eye for a moment was a Crouched Venus
that stood on a Steinway upright against a background of
mountain-lion skin on the wall.
But it was Dede herself that smote most sharply upon sense and
perception. He had always cherished the idea that she was very
much a woman--the lines of her figure, her hair, her eyes, her
voice, and birdlike laughing ways had all contributed to this;
but here, in her own rooms, clad in some flowing, clinging gown,
the emphasis of sex was startling. He had been accustomed to her
only in trim tailor suits and shirtwaists, or in riding costume
of velvet corduroy, and he was not prepared for this new
revelation. She seemed so much softer, so much more pliant, and
tender, and lissome. She was a part of this atmosphere of
quietude and beauty. She fitted into it just as she had fitted
in with the sober office furnishings.
"Won't you sit down?" she repeated.
He felt like an animal long denied food. His hunger for her
welled up in him, and he proceeded to "wolf" the dainty morsel
before him. Here was no patience, no diplomacy. The
straightest, direct way was none too quick for him and, had he
known it, the least unsuccessful way he could have chosen.
"Look here," he said, in a voice that shook with passion,
"there's one thing I won't do, and that's propose to you in the
office. That's why I'm here. Dede Mason, I want you. I just
want
you."
While he spoke he advanced upon her, his black eyes burning with
bright fire, his aroused blood swarthy in his cheek.
So precipitate was he, that she had barely time to cry out her
involuntary alarm and to step back, at the same time catching one
of his hands as he attempted to gather her into his arms.
In contrast to him, the blood had suddenly left her cheeks. The
hand that had warded his off and that still held it, was
trembling. She relaxed her fingers, and his arm dropped to his
side. She wanted to say something, do something, to pass on from
the awkwardness of the situation, but no intelligent thought nor
action came into her mind. She was aware only of a desire to
laugh. This impulse was party hysterical and partly spontaneous
humor--the latter growing from instant to instant. Amazing as
the affair was, the ridiculous side of it was not veiled to her.
She felt like one who had suffered the terror of the onslaught of
a murderous footpad only to find out that it was an innocent
pedestrian asking the time.
Daylight was the quicker to achieve action. "Oh, I know I'm a
sure enough fool," he said. "I-I guess I'll sit down. Don't be
scairt, Miss Mason. I'm not real dangerous."
"I'm not afraid," she answered, with a smile, slipping down
herself into a chair, beside which, on the floor, stood a
sewing-basket from which, Daylight noted, some white fluffy thing
of lace and muslin overflowed. Again she smiled. "Though I
confess you did startle me for the moment."
"It's funny," Daylight sighed, almost with regret; "here I am,
strong enough to bend you around and tie knots in you. Here I
am, used to having my will with man and beast and anything. And
here I am sitting in this chair, as weak and helpless as a little
lamb. You sure take the starch out of me."
Dede vainly cudgeled her brains in quest of a reply to these
remarks. Instead, her thought dwelt insistently upon the
significance of his stepping aside, in the middle of a violent
proposal, in order to make irrelevant remarks. What struck her
was the man's certitude. So little did he doubt that he would
have her, that he could afford to pause and generalize upon love
and the effects of love.
She noted his hand unconsciously slipping in the familiar way
into the side coat pocket where she knew he carried his tobacco
and brown papers.
"You may smoke, if you want to," she said. He withdrew his hand
with a jerk, as if something in the pocket had stung him.
"No, I wasn't thinking of smoking. I was thinking of you.
What's a man to do when he wants a woman but ask her to marry
him? That's all that I'm doing. I can't do it in style. I
know that. But I can use straight English, and that's good
enough for me. I sure want you mighty bad, Miss Mason. You're
in my mind 'most all the time, now. And what I want to know
is--well, do you want me? That's all."
"I-I wish you hadn't asked," she said softly.
"Mebbe it's best you should know a few things before you give me
an answer," he went on, ignoring the fact that the answer had
already been given. "I never went after a woman before in my
life, all reports to the contrary not withstanding. The stuff
you read about me in the papers and books, about me being a
lady-killer, is all wrong. There's not an iota of truth in it. I
guess I've done more than my share of card-playing and
whiskey-drinking, but women I've let alone. There was a woman
that killed herself, but I didn't know she wanted me that bad or
else I'd have married her--not for love, but to keep her from
killing herself. She was the best of the boiling, but I never
gave her any encouragement. I'm telling you all this because
you've read about it, and I want you to get it straight from me.
"Lady-killer! " he snorted. "Why, Miss Mason, I don't mind
telling you that I've sure been scairt of women all my life.
You're the first one I've not been afraid of. That's the strange
thing about it. I just plumb worship you, and yet I'm not afraid
of you. Mebbe it's because you're different from the women I
know. You've never chased me. Lady-killer! Why, I've been
running away from ladies ever since I can remember, and I
guess all that saved me was that I was strong in the wind and
that I never fell down and broke a leg or anything.
"I didn't ever want to get married until after I met you, and
until a long time after I met you. I cottoned to you from the
start; but I never thought it would get as bad as marriage. Why,
I can't get to sleep nights, thinking of you and wanting you."
He came to a stop and waited. She had taken the lace and muslin
from the basket, possibly to settle her nerves and wits, and was
sewing upon it. As she was not looking at him, he devoured her
with his eyes. He noted the firm, efficient hands--hands that
could control a horse like Bob, that could run a typewriter
almost as fast as a man could talk, that could sew on dainty
garments, and that, doubtlessly, could play on the piano over
there in the corner. Another ultra-feminine detail he
noticed--her slippers. They were small and bronze. He had never
imagined she had such a small foot. Street shoes and riding
boots were all that he had ever seen on her feet, and they had
given no advertisement of this. The bronze slippers fascinated
him, and to them his eyes repeatedly turned.
A knock came at the door, which she answered. Daylight could not
help hearing the conversation. She was wanted at the telephone.
"Tell him to call up again in ten minutes," he heard her say, and
the masculine pronoun caused in him a flashing twinge of
jealousy. Well, he decided, whoever it was, Burning Daylight
would give him a run for his money. The marvel to him was that a
girl like Dede hadn't been married long since.
She came back, smiling to him, and resumed her sewing. His eyes
wandered from the efficient hands to the bronze slippers and back
again, and he swore to himself that there were mighty few
stenographers like her in existence. That was because she must
have come of pretty good stock, and had a pretty good raising.
Nothing else could explain these rooms of hers and the clothes
she wore and the way she wore them.
"Those ten minutes are flying," he suggested.
"I can't marry you," she said.
"You don't love me?"
She shook her head.
"Do you like me--the littlest bit?"
This time she nodded, at the same time allowing the smile of
amusement to play on her lips. But it was amusement without
contempt. The humorous side of a situation rarely appealed in
vain to her.
"Well, that's something to go on," he announced. "You've got to
make a start to get started. I just liked you at first, and look
what it's grown into. You recollect, you said you didn't like my
way of life. Well, I've changed it a heap. I ain't gambling
like I used to. I've gone into what you called the legitimate,
making two minutes grow where one grew before, three hundred
thousand folks where only a hundred thousand grew before. And
this time next year there'll be two million eucalyptus growing on
the hills. Say do you like me more than the littlest bit?"
She raised her eyes from her work and looked at him as she
answered:
"I like you a great deal, but--"
He waited a moment for her to complete the sentence, failing
which, he went on himself.
"I haven't an exaggerated opinion of myself, so I know I ain't
bragging when I say I'll make a pretty good husband. You'd find
I was no hand at nagging and fault-finding. I can guess what it
must be for a woman like you to be independent. Well, you'd be
independent as my wife. No strings on you. You could follow
your own sweet will, and nothing would be too good for you. I'd
give you everything your heart desired--"
"Except yourself," she interrupted suddenly, almost sharply.
Daylight's astonishment was momentary.
"I don't know about that. I'd be straight and square, and live
true. I don't hanker after divided affections."
"I don't mean that," she said. "Instead of giving yourself to
your wife, you would give yourself to the three hundred thousand
people of Oakland, to your street railways and ferry-routes, to
the two million trees on the hills to everything
business--and--and to all that that means."
"I'd see that I didn't," he declared stoutly. "I'd be yours to
command."
"You think so, but it would turn out differently." She suddenly
became nervous. "We must stop this talk. It is too much like
attempting to drive a bargain. 'How much will you give?' 'I'll
give so much.' 'I want more,' and all that. I like you, but not
enough to marry you, and I'll never like you enough to marry
you."
"How do you know that?" he demanded.
"Because I like you less and less."
Daylight sat dumfounded. The hurt showed itself plainly in his
face.
"Oh, you don't understand," she cried wildly, beginning to lose
self-control--"It's not that way I mean. I do like you; the more
I've known you the more I've liked you. And at the same time the
more I've known you the less would I care to marry you."
This enigmatic utterance completed Daylight's perplexity.
"Don't you see?" she hurried on. "I could have far easier
married the Elam Harnish fresh from Klondike, when I first laid
eyes on him long ago, than marry you sitting before me now."
He shook his head slowly. "That's one too many for me. The more
you know and like a man the less you want to marry him.
Familiarity breeds contempt--I guess that's what you mean."
"No, no," she cried, but before she could continue, a knock came
on the door.
"The ten minutes is up," Daylight said.
His eyes, quick with observation like an Indian's, darted about
the room while she was out. The impression of warmth and comfort
and beauty predominated, though he was unable to analyze it;
while the simplicity delighted him--expensive simplicity, he
decided, and most of it leftovers from the time her father went
broke and died. He had never before appreciated a plain hardwood
floor with a couple of wolfskins; it sure beat all the carpets in
creation. He stared solemnly at a bookcase containing acCouple
of hundred books. There was mystery. He could not understand
what people found so much to write about.
Writing things and reading things were not the same as doing
things, and himself primarily a man of action, doing things was
alone comprehensible.
His gaze passed on from the Crouched Venus to a little tea-table
with all its fragile and exquisite accessories, and to a shining
copper kettle and copper chafing-dish. Chafing dishes were not
unknown to him, and he wondered if she concocted suppers on this
one for some of those University young men he had heard whispers
about. One or two water-colors on the wall made him conjecture
that she had painted them herself. There were photographs of
horses and of old masters, and the trailing purple of a Burial of
Christ held him for a time. But ever his gaze returned to that
Crouched Venus on the piano. To his homely, frontier-trained
mind, it seemed curious that a nice young woman should have such
a bold, if not sinful, object on display in her own room. But he
reconciled himself to it by an act of faith. Since it was Dede,
it must be eminently all right. Evidently such things went along
with culture. Larry Hegan had similar casts and photographs in
his book-cluttered quarters. But then, Larry Hegan was
different. There was that hint of unhealth about him that
Daylight invariably sensed in his presence, while Dede, on the
contrary, seemed always so robustly wholesome, radiating an
atmosphere compounded of the sun and wind and dust of the open
road. And yet, if such a clean, healthy woman as she went in for
naked women crouching on her piano, it must be all right. Dede
made it all right. She could come pretty close to making
anything all right. Besides, he didn't understand culture
anyway.
She reentered the room, and as she crossed it to her chair, he
admired the way she walked, while the bronze slippers were
maddening.
"I'd like to ask you several questions," he began immediately
"Are you thinking of marrying somebody?"
She laughed merrily and shook her head.
"Do you like anybody else more than you like me?--that man at the
'phone just now, for instance?"
"There isn't anybody else. I don't know anybody I like well
enough to marry. For that matter, I don't think I am a marrying
woman. Office work seems to spoil one for that."
Daylight ran his eyes over her, from her face to the tip of a
bronze slipper, in a way that made the color mantle in her
cheeks. At the same time he shook his head sceptically.
"It strikes me that you're the most marryingest woman that ever
made a man sit up and take notice. And now another question.
You see, I've just got to locate the lay of the land. Is there
anybody you like as much as you like me?"
But Dede had herself well in hand.
"That's unfair," she said. "And if you stop and consider, you
will find that you are doing the very thing you
disclaimed--namely,
nagging. I refuse to answer any more of your
questions. Let us talk about other things. How is Bob?"
Half an hour later, whirling along through the rain on Telegraph
Avenue toward Oakland, Daylight smoked one of his brown-paper
cigarettes and reviewed what had taken place. It was not at all
bad, was his summing up, though there was much about it that was
baffling. There was that liking him the more she knew him and at
the same time wanting to marry him less. That was a puzzler.
But the fact that she had refused him carried with it a certain
elation. In refusing him she had refused his thirty million
dollars. That was going some for a ninety dollar-a-month
stenographer who had known better ties. She wasn't after money,
that was patent. Every woman he had encountered had seemed
willing to swallow him down for the sake of his money. Why, he
had doubled his fortune, made fifteen millions, since the day she
first came to work for him, and behold, any willingness to marry
him she might have possessed had diminished as his money had
increased.
"Gosh!" he muttered. "If I clean up a hundred million on this
land deal she won't even be on speaking terms with me."
But he could not smile the thing away. It remained to baffle
him, that enigmatic statement of hers that she could more easily
have married the Elam Harnish fresh from the Klondike than the
present Elam Harnish. Well, he concluded, the thing to do was
for him to become more like that old-time Daylight who had come
down out of the North to try his luck at the bigger game. But
that was impossible. He could not set back the flight of time.
Wishing wouldn't do it, and there was no other way. He might as
well wish himself a boy again.
Another satisfaction he cuddled to himself from their interview.
He had heard of stenographers before, who refused their
employers, and who invariably quit their positions immediately
afterward. But Dede had not even hinted at such a thing. No
matter how baffling she was, there was no nonsensical silliness
about her. She was level headed. But, also, he had been
level-headed and was partly responsible for this. He hadn't
taken advantage of her in the office. True, he had twice
overstepped the bounds, but he had not followed it up and made a
practice of it. She knew she could trust him. But in spite of
all this he was confident that most young women would have been
silly enough to resign a position with a man they had turned
down. And besides, after he had put it to her in the right
light, she had not been silly over his sending her brother to
Germany.
"Gee!" he concluded, as the car drew up before his hotel. "If
I'd only known it as I do now, I'd have popped the question the
first day she came to work. According to her say-so, that would
have been the proper moment. She likes me more and more, and the
more she likes me the less she'd care to marry me! Now what do
youbthink of that? She sure must be fooling."
CHAPTER XIX
Once again, on a rainy Sunday, weeks afterward, Daylight
proposed to Dede. As on the first time, he restrained himself
until his hunger for her overwhelmed him and swept him away in
his red automobile to Berkeley. He left the machine several
blocks away and proceeded to the house on foot. But Dede was
out, the landlady's daughter told him, and added, on second
thought, that she was out walking in the hills. Furthermore, the
young lady directed him where Dede's walk was most likely to
extend.
Daylight obeyed the girl's instructions, and soon the street he
followed passed the last house and itself ceased where began the
first steep slopes of the open hills. The air was damp with the
on-coming of rain, for the storm had not yet burst, though the
rising wind proclaimed its imminence. As far as he could see,
there was no sign of Dede on the smooth, grassy hills. To the
right, dipping down into a hollow and rising again, was a large,
full-grown eucalyptus grove. Here all was noise and movement,
the lofty, slender trunked trees swaying back and forth in the
wind and clashing their branches together. In the squalls, above
all the minor noises of creaking and groaning, arose a deep
thrumming note as of a mighty harp. Knowing Dede as he did,
Daylight was confident that he would find her somewhere in this
grove where the storm effects were so pronounced. And find her
he did, across the hollow and on the exposed crest of the
opposing slope where the gale smote its fiercest blows.
There was something monotonous, though not tiresome, about the
way Daylight proposed. Guiltless of diplomacy subterfuge, he was
as direct and gusty as the gale itself. had time neither for
greeting nor apology.
"It's the same old thing," he said. "I want you and I've come
for
you. You've just got to have me, Dede, for the more I think
about it the more certain I am that you've got a Sneaking liking
for me that's something more than just Ordinary liking. And you
don't dast say that it isn't; now dast you?"
He had shaken hands with her at the moment he began speaking, and
he had continued to hold her hand. Now, when she did not answer,
she felt a light but firmly insistent pressure as of his drawing
her to him. Involuntarily, she half-yielded to him, her desire
for the moment stronger than her will. Then suddenly she drew
herself away, though permitting her hand still to remain in his.
"You sure ain't afraid of me?" he asked, with quick compunction.
"No." She smiled woefully. "Not of you, but of myself."
"You haven't taken my dare," he urged under this encouragement.
"Please, please," she begged. "We can never marry, so don't let
us discuss it."
"Then I copper your bet to lose." He was almost gay, now, for
success was coming faster than his fondest imagining. She liked
him, without a doubt; and without a doubt she liked him well
enough to let him hold her hand, well enough to be not repelled
by the nearness of him.
She shook her head. "No, it is impossible. You would lose your
bet."
For the first time a dark suspicion crossed Daylight's mind--a
clew
that explained everything.
"Say, you ain't been let in for some one of these secret
marriages
have you?"
The consternation in his voice and on his face was too much for
her, and her laugh rang out, merry and spontaneous as a burst of
joy from the throat of a bird.
Daylight knew his answer, and, vexed with himself decided that
action was more efficient than speech. So he stepped between her
and the wind and drew her so that she stood close in the shelter
of him. An unusually stiff squall blew about them and thrummed
overhead in the tree-tops and both paused to listen. A shower of
flying leaves enveloped them, and hard on the heel of the wind
came driving drops of rain. He looked down on her and on her
hair wind-blown about her face; and because of her closeness to
him and of a fresher and more poignant realization of what she
meant to him, he trembled so that she was aware of it in the hand
that held hers.
She suddenly leaned against him, bowing her head until it rested
lightly upon his breast. And so they stood while another squall,
with flying leaves and scattered drops of rain, rattled past.
With equal suddenness she lifted her head and looked at him.
"Do you know," she said, "I prayed last night about you. I
prayed that you would fail, that you would lose everything
everything."
Daylight stared his amazement at this cryptic utterance. "That
sure beats me. I always said I got out of my depth with women,
and you've got me out of my depth now. Why you want me to lose
everything, seeing as you like me--"
"I never said so."
"You didn't dast say you didn't. So, as I was saying: liking me,
why you'd want me to go broke is clean beyond my simple
understanding. It's right in line with that other puzzler of
yours, the more-you-like-me-the-less-you-want-to-marry-me one.
Well, you've just got to explain, that's all."
His arms went around her and held her closely, and this time she
did not resist. Her head was bowed, and he had not see her face,
yet he had a premonition that she was crying. He had learned the
virtue of silence, and he waited her will in the matter. Things
had come to such a pass that she was bound to tell him something
now. Of that he was confident.
"I am not romantic," she began, again looking at him as he spoke.
"It might be better for me if I were. Then I could make a fool
of myself and be unhappy for the rest of my life. But my
abominable common sense prevents. And that doesn't make me a bit
happier, either."
"I'm still out of my depth and swimming feeble," Daylight said,
after waiting vainly for her to go on. "You've got to show me,
and you ain't shown me yet. Your common sense and praying that
I'd go broke is all up in the air to me. Little woman, I just
love you mighty hard, and I want you to marry me. That's
straight and simple and right off the bat. Will you marry me?"
She shook her head slowly, and then, as she talked, seemed to
grow angry, sadly angry; and Daylight knew that this anger was
against him.
"Then let me explain, and just as straight and simply as you have
asked." She paused, as if casting about for a beginning. "You
are honest and straightforward. Do you want me to be honest and
straightforward as a woman is not supposed to be?--to tell you
things that will hurt you?--to make confessions that ought to
shame me? to behave in what many men would think was an
unwomanly manner?"
The arm around her shoulder pressed encouragement, but he did not
speak.
"I would dearly like to marry you, but I am afraid. I am proud
and humble at the same time that a man like you should care for
me. But you have too much money. There's where my abominable
common sense steps in. Even if we did marry, you could never be
my man--my lover and my husband. You would be your money's man.
I know I am a foolish woman, but I want my man for myself. You
would not be free for me. Your money possesses you, taking your
time, your thoughts, your energy, ever thing, bidding you go here
and go there, do this and do that. Don't you see? Perhaps it's
pure silliness, but I feel that I can love much, give much--give
all, and in return, though I don't want all, I want much--and I
want much more than your money would permit you to give me.
"And your money destroys you; it makes you less and less nice. I
am not ashamed to say that I love you, because I shall never
marry you. And I loved you much when I did not know you at all,
when you first came down from Alaska and I first went into the
office. You were my hero. You were the Burning Daylight of the
gold-diggings, the daring traveler and miner. And you looked it.
I don't see how any woman could have looked at you without loving
you--then. But you don't look it now.
"Please, please, forgive me for hurting you. You wanted straight
talk, and I am giving it to you. All these last years you have
been living unnaturally. You, a man of the open, have been
cooping yourself up in the cities with all that that means. You
are not the same man at all, and your money is destroying you.
You are becoming something different, something not so healthy,
not so clean, not so nice. Your money and your way of life are
doing it. You know it. You haven't the same body now that you
had then. You are putting on flesh, and it is not healthy flesh.
You are kind and genial with me, I know, but you are not kind and
genial to all the world as you were then. You have become harsh
and cruel. And I know. Remember, I have studied you six days a
week, month after month, year after year; and I know more about
the most insignificant parts of you than you know of all of me.
The cruelty is not only in your heart and thoughts, but it is
there in face. It has put its lines there. I have watched them
come and grow. Your money, and the life it compels you to lead
have done all this. You are being brutalized and degraded. And
this process can only go on and on until you are hopelessly
destroyed--"
He attempted to interrupt, but she stopped him, herself
breathless and her voice trembling.
"No, no; let me finish utterly. I have done nothing but think,
think, think, all these months, ever since you came riding with
me, and now that I have begun to speak I am going to speak all
that I have in me. I do love you, but I cannot marry you and
destroy love. You are growing into a thing that I must in the
end despise. You can't help it. More than you can possibly love
me, do you love this business game. This business--and it's all
perfectly useless, so far as you are concerned--claims all of
you. I sometimes think it would be easier to share you equitably
with another woman than to share you with this business. I might
have half of you, at any rate. But this business would claim,
not half of you, but nine-tenths of you, or ninety-nine
hundredths.
"Remember, the meaning of marriage to me is not to get a man's
money to spend. I want the man. You say you want ME. And
suppose I consented, but gave you only one-hundredth part of me.
Suppose there was something else in my life that took the other
ninety-nine parts, and, furthermore, that ruined my figure, that
put pouches under my eyes and crows-feet in the corners, that
made me unbeautiful to look upon and that made my spirit
unbeautiful. Would you be satisfied with that one-hundredth part
of me? Yet that is all you are offering me of yourself. Do you
wonder that I won't marry you?--that I can't?"
Daylight waited to see if she were quite done, and she went on
again.
"It isn't that I am selfish. After all, love is giving, not
receiving. But I see so clearly that all my giving could not do
you any good. You are like a sick man. You don't play business
like other men. You play it heart and and all of you. No matter
what you believed and intended a wife would be only a brief
diversion. There is that magnificent Bob, eating his head off in
the stable. You would buy me a beautiful mansion and leave me in
it to yawn my head off, or cry my eyes out because of my
helplessness and inability to save you. This disease of business
would be corroding you and marring you all the time. You play it
as you have played everything else, as in Alaska you played the
life of the trail. Nobody could be permitted to travel as fast
and as far as you, to work as hard or endure as much. You hold
back nothing; you put all you've got into whatever you are
doing."
"Limit is the sky," he grunted grim affirmation.
"But if you would only play the lover-husband that way--"
Her voice faltered and stopped, and a blush showed in her wet
cheeks as her eyes fell before his.
"And now I won't say another word," she added. "I've delivered a
whole sermon."
She rested now, frankly and fairly, in the shelter of his arms,
and both were oblivious to the gale that rushed past them in
quicker and stronger blasts. The big downpour of rain had not
yet come, but the mist-like squalls were more frequent. Daylight
was openly perplexed, and he was still perplexed when he began to
speak.
"I'm stumped. I'm up a tree. I'm clean flabbergasted, Miss
Mason--or Dede, because I love to call you that name. I'm free
to confess there's a mighty big heap in what you say. As I
understand it, your conclusion is that you'd marry me if I hadn't
a cent and if I wasn't getting fat. No, no; I'm not joking. I
acknowledge the corn, and that's just my way of boiling the
matter down and summing it up. If I hadn't a cent, and if I was
living a healthy life with all the time in the world to love you
and be your husband instead of being awash to my back teeth in
business and all the rest--why, you'd marry me.
"That's all as clear as print, and you're correcter than I ever
guessed before. You've sure opened my eyes a few. But I'm
stuck. What can I do? My business has sure roped, thrown, and
branded me. I'm tied hand and foot, and I can't get up and
meander over green pastures. I'm like the man that got the bear
by the tail. I can't let go; and I want you, and I've got to let
go to get you.
"I don't know what to do, but something's sure got to happen--I
can't lose you. I just can't. And I'm not going to. Why,
you're running business a close second right now. Business never
kept me awake nights.
"You've left me no argument. I know I'm not the same man that
came from Alaska. I couldn't hit the trail with the dogs as I
did in them days. I'm soft in my muscles, and my mind's gone
hard. I used to respect men. I despise them now. You see, I
spent all my life in the open, and I reckon I'm an open-air man.
Why, I've got the prettiest little ranch you ever laid eyes on,
up in Glen Ellen. That's where I got stuck for that brick-yard.
You recollect handling the correspondence. I only laid eyes on
the ranch that one time, and I so fell in love with it that I
bought it there and then. I just rode around the hills, and was
happy as a kid out of school. I'd be a better man living in the
country. The city doesn't make me better. You're plumb right
there. I know it. But suppose your prayer should be answered
and I'd go clean broke and have to work for day's wages?"
She did not answer, though all the body of her seemed to urge
consent.
"Suppose I had nothing left but that little ranch, and was
satisfied to grow a few chickens and scratch a living somehow-
-would you marry me then, Dede?"
"Why, we'd be together all the time!" she cried.
"But I'd have to be out ploughing once in a while, he warned, "or
driving to town to get the grub."
"But there wouldn't be the office, at any rate, and no man to
see, and men to see without end. But it is all foolish and
impossible, and we'll have to be starting back now if we're to
escape the rain."
Then was the moment, among the trees, where they began the
descent of the hill, that Daylight might have drawn her closely
to him and kissed her once. But he was too perplexed with the
new thoughts she had put into his head to take advantage of the
situation. He merely caught her by the arm and helped her over
the rougher footing.
"It's darn pretty country up there at Glen Ellen," he said
meditatively. "I wish you could see it."
At the edge of the grove he suggested that it might be better for
them to part there.
"It's your neighborhood, and folks is liable to talk."
But she insisted that he accompany her as far as the house.
"I can't ask you in," she said, extending her hand at the foot of
the steps.
The wind was humming wildly in sharply recurrent gusts, but still
the rain held off.
"Do you know," he said, "taking it by and large, it's the
happiest day of my life." He took off his hat, and the wind
rippled and twisted his black hair as he went on solemnly, "And
I'm sure grateful to God, or whoever or whatever is responsible
for your being on this earth. For you do like me heaps. It's
been my joy to hear you say so to-day. It's--" He left the
thought arrested, and his face assumed the familiar whimsical
expression as he murmured: "Dede, Dede, we've just got to get
married. It's the only way, and trust to luck for it's coming
out all right--".
But the tears were threatening to rise in her eyes again, as she
shook her head and turned and went up the steps.
CHAPTER XX
When the ferry system began to run, and the time between Oakland
and San Francisco was demonstrated to be cut in half, the tide of
Daylight's terrific expenditure started to turn. Not that it
really did turn, for he promptly went into further investments.
Thousands of lots in his residence tracts were sold, and
thousands of homes were being built. Factory sites also were
selling, and business properties in the heart of Oakland. All
this tended to a steady appreciation in value of Daylight's huge
holdings. But, as of old, he had his hunch and was riding it.
Already he had begun borrowing from the banks. The magnificent
profits he made on the land he sold were turned into more land,
into more development; and instead of paying off old loans, he
contracted new ones. As he had pyramided in Dawson City, he now
pyramided in Oakland; but he did it with the knowledge that it
was a stable enterprise rather than a risky placer-mining boom.
In a small way, other men were following his lead, buying and
selling land and profiting by the improvement work he was doing.
But this was to be expected, and the small fortunes they were
making at his expense did not irritate him. There was an
exception, however. One Simon Dolliver, with money to go in
with, and with cunning and courage to back it up, bade fair to
become a several times millionaire at Daylight's expense.
Dolliver, too, pyramided, playing quickly and accurately, and
keeping his money turning over and over. More than once Daylight
found him in the way, as he himself had got in the way of the
Guggenhammers when they first set their eyes on Ophir Creek.
Work on Daylight's dock system went on apace, yet was one of
those enterprises that consumed money dreadfully and that could
not be accomplished as quickly as a ferry system. The
engineering difficulties were great, the dredging and filling a
cyclopean task. The mere item of piling was anything but small.
A good average pile, by the time it was delivered on the ground,
cost a twenty-dollar gold piece, and these piles were used in
unending thousands. All accessible groves of mature eucalyptus
were used, and as well, great rafts of pine piles were towed down
the coast from Peugeot Sound.
Not content with manufacturing the electricity for his street
railways in the old-fashioned way, in power-houses, Daylight
organized the Sierra and Salvador Power Company. This
immediately assumed large proportions. Crossing the San Joaquin
Valley on the way from the mountains, and plunging through the
Contra Costa hills, there were many towns, and even a robust
city, that could be supplied with power, also with light; and it
became a street- and house-lighting project as well. As soon as
the purchase of power sites in the Sierras was rushed through,
the survey parties were out and building operations begun.
And so it went. There were a thousand maws into which he poured
unceasing streams of money. But it was all so sound and
legitimate, that Daylight, born gambler that he was, and with his
clear, wide vision, could not play softly and safely. It was a
big opportunity, and to him there was only one way to play it,
and that was the big way. Nor did his one confidential adviser,
Larry Hegan, aid him to caution. On the contrary, it was
Daylight who was compelled to veto the wilder visions of that
able hasheesh dreamer. Not only did Daylight borrow heavily from
the banks and trust companies, but on several of his corporations
he was compelled to issue stock. He did this grudgingly however,
and retained most of his big enterprises of his own. Among the
companies in which he reluctantly allowed the investing public to
join were the Golden Gate Dock Company, and Recreation Parks
Company, the United Water Company, the Uncial Shipbuilding
Company, and the Sierra and Salvador Power Company.
Nevertheless, between himself and Hegan, he retained the
controlling share in each of these enterprises.
His affair with Dede Mason only seemed to languish. While
delaying to grapple with the strange problem it presented, his
desire for her continued to grow. In his gambling simile, his
conclusion was that Luck had dealt him the most remarkable card
in the deck, and that for years he had overlooked it. Love was
the card, and it beat them all. Love was the king card of
trumps, the fifth ace, the joker in a game of tenderfoot poker.
It was the card of cards, and play it he would, to the limit,
when the opening came. He could not see that opening yet. The
present game would have to play to some sort of a conclusion
first.
Yet he could not shake from his brain and vision the warm
recollection of those bronze slippers, that clinging gown, and
all the feminine softness and pliancy of Dede in her pretty
Berkeley rooms. Once again, on a rainy Sunday, he telephoned
that he was coming. And, as has happened ever since man first
looked upon woman and called her good, again he played the blind
force of male compulsion against the woman's secret weakness to
yield. Not that it was Daylight's way abjectly to beg and
entreat. On the contrary, he was masterful in whatever he did,
but he had a trick of whimsical wheedling that Dede found harder
to resist than the pleas of a suppliant lover. It was not a
happy scene in its outcome, for Dede, in the throes of her own
desire, desperate with weakness and at the same time with her
better judgment hating her weakness cried out:--
"You urge me to try a chance, to marry you now and trust to luck
for it to come out right. And life is a gamble say. Very well,
let us gamble. Take a coin and toss it in the air. If it comes
heads, I'll marry you. If it doesn't, you are forever to leave
me alone and never mention marriage again."
A fire of mingled love and the passion of gambling came into
Daylight's eyes. Involuntarily his hand started for his pocket
for the coin. Then it stopped, and the light in his eyes was
troubled.
"Go on," she ordered sharply. "Don't delay, or I may change my
mind, and you will lose the chance."
"Little woman." His similes were humorous, but there was no
humor in their meaning. His thought was as solemn as his voice.
"Little woman, I'd gamble all the way from Creation to the Day of
Judgment; I'd gamble a golden harp against another man's halo;
I'd toss for pennies on the front steps of the New Jerusalem or
set up a faro layout just outside the Pearly Gates; but I'll be
everlastingly damned if I'll gamble on love. Love's too big to
me to take a chance on. Love's got to be a sure thing, and
between you and me it is a sure thing. If the odds was a hundred
to one on my winning this flip, just the same, nary a flip."
In the spring of the year the Great Panic came on. The first
warning was when the banks began calling in their unprotected
loans. Daylight promptly paid the first several of his personal
notes that were presented; then he divined that these demands but
indicated the way the wind was going to blow, and that one of
those terrific financial storms he had heard about was soon to
sweep over the United States. How terrific this particular storm
was to be he did not anticipate. Nevertheless, he took every
precaution in his power, and had no anxiety about his weathering
it out.
Money grew tighter. Beginning with the crash of several of the
greatest Eastern banking houses, the tightness spread, until
every bank in the country was calling in its credits. Daylight
was caught, and caught because of the fact that for the first
time he had been playing the legitimate business game. In the
old days, such a panic, with the accompanying extreme shrinkage
of values, would have been a golden harvest time for him. As it
was, he watched the gamblers, who had ridden the wave of
prosperity and made preparation for the slump, getting out from
under and safely scurrying to cover or proceeding to reap a
double harvest. Nothing remained for him but to stand fast and
hold up.
He saw the situation clearly. When the banks demanded that he
pay his loans, he knew that the banks were in sore need of the
money. But he was in sorer need. And he knew that the banks did
not want his collateral which they held. It would do them no
good. In such a tumbling of values was no time to sell. His
collateral was good, all of it, eminently sound and worth while;
yet it was worthless at such a moment, when the one unceasing cry
was money, money, money. Finding him obdurate, the banks
demanded more collateral, and as the money pinch tightened they
asked for two and even three times as much as had been originally
accepted. Sometimes Daylight yielded to these demands, but more
often not, and always battling fiercely.
He fought as with clay behind a crumbling wall. All portions of
the wall were menaced, and he went around constantly
strengthening the weakest parts with clay. This clay was money,
and was applied, a sop here and a sop there, as fast as it was
needed, but only when it was directly needed. The strength of
his position lay in the Yerba Buena Ferry Company, the
Consolidated Street Railways, and the United Water Company.
Though people were no longer buying residence lots and factory
and business sites, they were compelled to ride on his cars and
ferry-boats and to consume his water. When all the financial
world was clamoring for money and perishing through lack of it,
the first of each month many thousands of dollars poured into his
coffers from the water-rates, and each day ten thousand dollars,
in dime and nickels, came in from his street railways and
ferries.
Cash was what was wanted, and had he had the use of all this
steady river of cash, all would have been well with him. As it
was, he had to fight continually for a portion of it.
Improvement work ceased, and only absolutely essential repairs
were made. His fiercest fight was with the operating expenses,
and this was a fight that never ended. There was never any
let-up in his turning the thumb-screws of extended credit and
economy. From the big wholesale suppliers down through the
salary list to office stationery and postage stamps, he kept the
thumb-screws turning. When his superintendents and heads of
departments performed prodigies of cutting down, he patted them
on the back and demanded more. When they threw down their hands
in despair, he showed them how more could be accomplished.
"You are getting eight thousand dollars a year," he told
Matthewson. "It's better pay than you ever got in your life
before. Your fortune is in the same sack with mine. You've got
to stand for some of the strain and risk. You've got personal
credit in this town. Use it. Stand off butcher and baker and
all the rest. Savvee? You're drawing down something like six
hundred and sixty dollars a month. I want that cash. From now
on, stand everybody off and draw down a hundred. I'll pay you
interest on the rest till this blows over."
Two weeks later, with the pay-roll before them, it was:--
"Matthewson, who's this bookkeeper, Rogers? Your nephew? I
thought so. He's pulling down eighty-five a month. After--this
let him draw thirty-five. The forty can ride with me at
interest."
"Impossible! " Matthewson cried. "He can't make ends meet on
his salary as it is, and he has a wife and two kids--"
Daylight was upon him with a mighty oath.
"Can't! Impossible! What in hell do you think I'm running? A
home for feeble-minded? Feeding and dressing and wiping the
little noses of a lot of idiots that can't take care of
themselves? Not on your life. I'm hustling, and now's the time
that everybody that works for me has got to hustle. I want no
fair-weather birds holding down my office chairs or anything
else. This is nasty weather, damn nasty weather, and they've got
to buck into it just like me. There are ten thousand men out of
work in Oakland right now, and sixty thousand more in San
Francisco. Your nephew, and everybody else on your pay-roll, can
do as I say right now or quit. Savvee? If any of them get
stuck, you go around yourself and guarantee their credit with the
butchers and grocers. And you trim down that pay-roll
accordingly. I've been carrying a few thousand folks that'll
have to carry themselves for a while now, that's all."
"You say this filter's got to be replaced," he told his chief of
the water-works. "We'll see about it. Let the people of Oakland
drink mud for a change. It'll teach them to appreciate good
water. Stop work at once. Get those men off the pay-roll.
Cancel all orders for material. The contractors will sue? Let
'em sue and be damned. We'll be busted higher'n a kite or on
easy street before they can get judgment."
And to Wilkinson:
"Take off that owl boat. Let the public roar and come home early
to its wife. And there's that last car that connects with the
12:45 boat at Twenty-second and Hastings. Cut it out. I can't
run it for two or three passengers. Let them take an earlier
boat home or walk. This is no time for philanthropy. And you
might as well take off a few more cars in the rush hours. Let
the strap-hangers pay. It's the strap-hangers that'll keep us
from
going under."
And to another chief, who broke down under the excessive strain
of retrenchment:-
"You say I can't do that and can't do this. I'll just show you a
few of the latest patterns in the can-and-can't line. You'll be
compelled to resign? All right, if you think so I never saw the
man yet that I was hard up for. And when any man thinks I can't
get along without him, I just show him the latest pattern in that
line of goods and give him his walking-papers."
And so he fought and drove and bullied and even wheedled his way
along. It was fight, fight, fight, and no let-up, from the first
thing in the morning till nightfall. His private office saw
throngs every day. All men came to see him, or were ordered to
come. Now it was an optimistic opinion on the panic, a funny
story, a serious business talk, or a straight take-it-or-leave-it
blow from the shoulder. And there was nobody to relieve him. It
was a case of drive, drive, drive, and he alone could do the
driving. And this went on day after day, while the whole
business world rocked around him and house after house crashed to
the ground.
"It's all right, old man," he told Hegan every morning; and it
was the same cheerful word that he passed out all day long,
except at such times when he was in the thick of fighting to have
his will with persons and things.
Eight o'clock saw him at his desk each morning. By ten o'clock,
it was into the machine and away for a round of the banks. And
usually in the machine with him was the ten thousand and more
dollars that had been earned by his ferries and railways the day
before. This was for the weakest spot in the financial dike.
And with one bank president after another similar scenes were
enacted. They were paralyzed with fear, and first of all he
played his role of the big vital optimist. Times were improving.
Of course they were. The signs were already in the air. All
that anybody had to do was to sit tight a little longer and hold
on. That was all. Money was already more active in the East.
Look at the trading on Wall Street of the last twenty-four hours.
That was the straw that showed the wind. Hadn't Ryan said so and
so? and wasn't it reported that Morgan was preparing to do this
and that?
As for himself, weren't the street-railway earnings increasing
steadily? In spite of the panic, more and more people were
coming to Oakland right along. Movements were already beginning
in real estate. He was dickering even then to sell over a
thousand of his suburban acres. Of course it was at a sacrifice,
but it would ease the strain on all of them and bolster up the
faint-hearted. That was the trouble--the faint-hearts. Had
there
been no faint-hearts there would have been no panic. There was
that Eastern syndicate, negotiating with him now to take the
majority of the stock in the Sierra and Salvador Power Company
off his hands. That showed confidence that better times were at
hand.
And if it was not cheery discourse, but prayer and entreaty or
show down and fight on the part of the banks, Daylight had to
counter in kind. If they could bully, he could bully. If the
favor he asked were refused, it became the thing he demanded.
And when it came down to raw and naked fighting, with the last
veil of sentiment or illusion torn off, he could take their
breaths away.
But he knew, also, how and when to give in. When he saw the wall
shaking and crumbling irretrievably at a particular place, he
patched it up with sops of cash from his three cash-earning
companies. If the banks went, he went too. It was a case of
their having to hold out. If they smashed and all the collateral
they held of his was thrown on the chaotic market, it would be
the end. And so it was, as the time passed, that on occasion his
red motor-car carried, in addition to the daily cash, the most
gilt-edged securities he possessed; namely, the Ferry Company,
United Water and Consolidated Railways. But he did this
reluctantly, fighting inch by inch.
As he told the president of the Merchants San Antonio who made
the plea of carrying so many others:--
"They're small fry. Let them smash. I'm the king pin here.
You've got more money to make out of me than them. Of course,
you're carrying too much, and you've got to choose, that's all.
It's root hog or die for you or them. I'm too strong to smash.
You could only embarrass me and get yourself tangled up. Your
way out is to let the small fry go, and I'll lend you a hand to
do it."
And it was Daylight, also, in this time of financial anarchy, who
sized up Simon Dolliver's affairs and lent the hand that sent
that rival down in utter failure. The Golden Gate National was
the keystone of Dolliver's strength, and to the president of that
institution Daylight said:--
"Here I've been lending you a hand, and you now in the last
ditch, with Dolliver riding on you and me all the time. It don't
go. You hear me, it don't go. Dolliver couldn't cough up eleven
dollars to save you. Let him get off and walk, and I'll tell you
what I'll do. I'll give you the railway nickels for four
days--that's forty thousand cash. And on the sixth of the month
you can count on twenty thousand more from the Water Company."
He shrugged his shoulders. "Take it or leave it. Them's my
terms."
"It's dog eat dog, and I ain't overlooking any meat that's
floating around," Daylight proclaimed that afternoon to Hegan;
and Simon Dolliver went the way of the unfortunate in the Great
Panic who were caught with plenty of paper and no money.
Daylight's shifts and devices were amazing. Nothing however
large or small, passed his keen sight unobserved. The strain he
was under was terrific. He no longer ate lunch. The days were
too short, and his noon hours and his office were as crowded as
at any other time. By the end of the day he was exhausted, and,
as never before, he sought relief behind his wall of alcoholic
inhibition. Straight to his hotel he was driven, and straight to
his rooms he went, where immediately was mixed for him the first
of a series of double Martinis. By dinner, his brain was well
clouded and the panic forgotten. By bedtime, with the assistance
of Scotch whiskey, he was full--not violently nor uproariously
full, nor stupefied, but merely well under the influence of a
pleasant and mild anesthetic.
Next morning he awoke with parched lips and mouth, and with
sensations of heaviness in his head which quickly passed away.
By eight o'clock he was at his desk, buckled down to the fight,
by ten o'clock on his personal round of the banks, and after
that, without a moment's cessation, till nightfall, he was
handling the knotty tangles of industry, finance, and human
nature that crowded upon him. And with nightfall it was back to
the hotel, the double Martinis and the Scotch; and this was his
program day after day until the days ran into weeks.
CHAPTER XXI
Though Daylight appeared among his fellows hearty voiced,
inexhaustible, spilling over with energy and vitality, deep down
he was a very weary man. And sometime under the liquor drug,
snatches of wisdom came to him far more lucidity than in his
sober moments, as, for instance, one night, when he sat on the
edge of the bed with one shoe in his hand and meditated on Dede's
aphorism to the effect that he could not sleep in more than one
bed at a time. Still holding the shoe, he looked at the array of
horsehair bridles on the walls. Then, carrying the shoe, he got
up and solemnly counted them, journeying into the two adjoining
rooms to complete the tale. Then he came back to the bed and
gravely addressed his shoe:--
"The little woman's right. Only one bed at a time. One hundred
and forty hair bridles, and nothing doing with ary one of them.
One bridle at a time! I can't ride one horse at a time. Poor
old Bob. I'd better be sending you out to pasture. Thirty
million dollars, and a hundred million or nothing in sight, and
what have I got to show for it? There's lots of things money
can't buy. It can't buy the little woman. It can't buy
capacity. What's the good of thirty millions when I ain't got
room for more than a quart of cocktails a day? If I had a
hundred-quart-cocktail thirst, it'd be different. But one
quart--one measly little quart! Here I am, a thirty times over
millionaire, slaving harder every day than any dozen men that
work for me, and all I get is two meals that don't taste good,
one bed, a quart of Martini, and a hundred and forty hair bridles
to look at on the wall."
He stared around at the array disconsolately. "Mr. Shoe, I'm
sizzled. Good night."
Far worse than the controlled, steady drinker is the solitary
drinker, and it was this that Daylight was developing into. He
rarely drank sociably any more, but in his own room, by himself.
Returning weary from each day's unremitting effort, he drugged
himself to sleep, knowing that on the morrow he would rise up
with a dry and burning mouth and repeat the program.
But the country did not recover with its wonted elasticity.
Money did not become freer, though the casual reader of
Daylight's newspapers, as well as of all the other owned and
subsidised newspapers in the country, could only have concluded
that the money tightness was over and that the panic was past
history. All public utterances were cheery and optimistic, but
privately many of the utters were in desperate straits. The
scenes enacted in the privacy of Daylight's office, and of the
meetings of his boards of directors, would have given the lie to
the editorials in his newspapers; as, for instance, when he
addressed the big stockholders in the Sierra and Salvador Power
Company, the United Water Company, and the several other stock
companies:--
"You've got to dig. You've got a good thing, but you'll have to
sacrifice in order to hold on. There ain't no use spouting hard
times explanations. Don't I know the hard times is on? Ain't
that what you're here for? As I said before, you've got to dig.
I run the majority stock, and it's come to a case of assess.
It's that or smash. If ever I start going you won't know what
struck you, I'll smash that hard. The small fry can let go, but
you big ones can't. This ship won't sink as long as you stay
with her. But if you start to leave her, down you'll sure go
before you can get to shore. This assessment has got to be met
that's all."
The big wholesale supply houses, the caterers for his hotels, and
all the crowd that incessantly demanded to be paid, had their hot
half-hours with him. He summoned them to his office and
displayed his latest patterns of can and can't and will and
won't.
"By God, you've got to carry me!" he told them. "If you think
this is a pleasant little game of parlor whist and that you can
quit and go home whenever you want, you're plumb wrong. Look
here, Watkins, you remarked five minutes ago that you wouldn't
stand for it. Now let me tell you a few. You're going to stand
for it and keep on standin's for it. You're going to continue
supplying me and taking my paper until the pinch is over. How
you're going to do it is your trouble, not mine. You remember
what I did to Klinkner and the Altamont Trust Company? I know
the inside of your business better than you do yourself, and if
you try to drop me I'll smash you. Even if I'd be going to smash
myself, I'd find a minute to turn on you and bring you down with
me. It's sink or swim for all of us, and I reckon you'll find it
to your interest to keep me on top the puddle."
Perhaps his bitterest fight was with the stockholders of the
United Water Company, for it was practically the whole of the
gross earnings of this company that he voted to lend to himself
and used to bolster up his wide battle front. Yet he never
pushed his arbitrary rule too far. Compelling sacrifice from the
men whose fortunes were tied up with his, nevertheless when any
one of them was driven to the wall and was in dire need, Daylight
was there to help him back into the line. Only a strong man
could have saved so complicated a situation in such time of
stress, and Daylight was that man. He turned and twisted,
schemed and devised, bludgeoned and bullied the weaker ones, kept
the faint-hearted in the fight, and had no mercy on the deserter.
And in the end, when early summer was on, everything began to
mend. Came a day when Daylight did the unprecedented. He left
the office an hour earlier than usual, and for the reason that
for the first time since the panic there was not an item of work
waiting to be done. He dropped into Hegan's private office,
before leaving, for a chat, and as he stood up to go, he said:--
"Hegan, we're all hunkadory. We're pulling out of the financial
pawnshop in fine shape, and we'll get out without leaving one
unredeemed pledge behind. The worst is over, and the end is in
sight. Just a tight rein for a couple more weeks, just a bit of
a pinch or a flurry or so now and then, and we can let go and
spit on our hands."
For once he varied his program. Instead of going directly to his
hotel, he started on a round of the bars and cafes, drinking a
cocktail here and a cocktail there, and two or three when he
encountered men he knew. It was after an hour or so of this that
he dropped into the bar of the Parthenon for one last drink
before going to dinner. By this time all his being was
pleasantly warmed by the alcohol, and he was in the most genial
and best of spirits. At the corner of the bar several young men
were up to the old trick of resting their elbows and attempting
to force each other's hands down. One broad-shouldered young
giant never removed his elbow, but put down every hand that came
against him. Daylight was interested.
"It's Slosson," the barkeeper told him, in answer to his query.
"He's the heavy-hammer thrower at the U.C. Broke all records
this year, and the world's record on top of it. He's a husky all
right all right."
Daylight nodded and went over to him, placing his own arm in
opposition.
"I'd like to go you a flutter, son, on that proposition," he
said.
The young man laughed and locked hands with him; and to
Daylight's astonishment it was his own hand that was forced down
on the bar
"Hold on," he muttered. "Just one more flutter. I reckon I
wasn't just ready that time."
Again the hands locked. It happened quickly. The offensive
attack of Daylight's muscles slipped instantly into defense, and,
resisting vainly, his hand was forced over and down. Daylight
was dazed. It had been no trick. The skill was equal, or, if
anything, the superior skill had been his. Strength, sheer
strength, had done it. He called for the drinks, and, still
dazed and pondering, held up his own arm, and looked at it as at
some new strange thing. He did not know this arm. It certainly
was not the arm he had carried around with him all the years.
The old arm? Why, it would have been play to turn down that
young husky's. But this arm--he continued to look at it with
such
dubious perplexity as to bring a roar of laughter from the young
men.
This laughter aroused him. He joined in it at first, and then
his face slowly grew grave. He leaned toward the hammer-thrower.
"Son," he said, "let me whisper a secret. Get out of here and
quit drinking before you begin."
The young fellow flushed angrily, but Daylight held steadily on.
"You listen to your dad, and let him say a few. I'm a young man
myself, only I ain't. Let me tell you, several years ago for me
to turn your hand down would have been like committing assault
and battery on a kindergarten."
Slosson looked his incredulity, while the others grinned and
clustered around Daylight encouragingly.
"Son, I ain't given to preaching. This is the first time I ever
come to the penitent form, and you put me there yourself--hard.
I've seen a few in my time, and I ain't fastidious so as you can
notice it. But let me tell you right not that I'm worth the
devil alone knows how many millions, and that I'd sure give it
all, right here on the bar, to turn down your hand. Which means
I'd give the whole shooting match just to be back where I was
before I quit sleeping under the stars and come into the
hen-coops
of cities to drink cocktails and lift up my feet and ride.
Son, that's that's the matter with me, and that's the way I feel
about it. The game ain't worth the candle. You just take care
of
yourself, and roll my advice over once in a while. Good night."
He turned and lurched out of the place, the moral effect of his
utterance largely spoiled by the fact that he was so patently
full while he uttered it.
Still in a daze, Daylight made to his hotel, accomplished his
dinner, and prepared for bed.
"The damned young whippersnapper!" he muttered. "Put my hand
down easy as you please. My hand!"
He held up the offending member and regarded it with stupid
wonder. The hand that had never been beaten! The hand that had
made the Circle City giants wince! And a kid from college, with
a
laugh on his face, had put it down--twice! Dede was right. He
was not the same man. The situation would bear more serious
looking into than he had ever given it. But this was not the
time. In the morning, after a good sleep, he would give it
consideration.
CHAPTER XXII
Daylight awoke with the familiar parched mouth and lips and
throat, took a long drink of water from the pitcher beside his
bed, and gathered up the train of thought where he had left it
the night before. He reviewed the easement of the financial
strain. Things were mending at last. While the going was still
rough, the greatest dangers were already past. As he had told
Hegan, a tight rein and careful playing were all that was needed
now. Flurries and dangers were bound to come, but not so grave
as the ones they had already weathered. He had been hit hard,
but he was coming through without broken bones, which was more
than Simon Dolliver and many another could say. And not one of
his business friends had been ruined. He had compelled them to
stay in line to save himself, and they had been saved as well.
His mind moved on to the incident at the corner of the bar of the
Parthenon, when the young athlete had turned his hand down. He
was no longer stunned by the event, but he was shocked and
grieved, as only a strong man can be, at this passing of his
strength. And the issue was too clear for him to dodge, even
with himself. He knew why his hand had gone down. Not because
he was an old man. He was just in the first flush of his prime,
and, by rights, it was the hand of the hammer-thrower which
should have gone down. Daylight knew that he had taken liberties
with himself. He had always looked upon this strength of his as
permanent, and here, for years, it had been steadily oozing from
him. As he had diagnosed it, he had come in from under the stars
to roost in the coops of cities. He had almost forgotten how to
walk. He had lifted up his feet and been ridden around in
automobiles, cabs and carriages, and electric cars. He had not
exercised, and he had dry-rotted his muscles with alcohol.
And was it worth it? What did all his money mean after all?
Dede was right. It could buy him no more than one bed at a time,
and at the same time it made him the abjectest of slaves. It
tied him fast. He was tied by it right now. Even if he so
desired, he could not lie abed this very day. His money called
him. The office whistle would soon blow, and he must answer it.
The early sunshine was streaming through his window--a fine day
for a ride in the hills on Bob, with Dede beside him on her Mab.
Yet all his millions could not buy him this one day. One of
those flurries might come along, and he had to be on the spot to
meet it. Thirty millions! And they were powerless to persuade
Dede to ride on Mab--Mab, whom he had bought, and who was unused
and growing fat on pasture. What were thirty millions when they
could not buy a man a ride with the girl he loved? Thirty
millions!--that made him come here and go there, that rode upon
him like so many millstones, that destroyed him while they grew,
that put their foot down and prevented him from winning this girl
who worked for ninety dollars a month.
Which was better? he asked himself. All this was Dede's own
thought. It was what she had meant when she prayed he would go
broke. He held up his offending right arm. It wasn't the same
old arm. Of course she could not love that arm and that body as
she had loved the strong, clean arm and body of years before. He
didn't like that arm and body himself. A young whippersnapper
had been able to take liberties with it. It had gone back on
him. He sat up suddenly. No, by God, he had gone back on it!
He had gone back on himself. He had gone back on Dede. She was
right, a thousand times right, and she had sense enough to know
it, sense enough to refuse to marry a money slave with a
whiskey-rotted carcass.
He got out of bed and looked at himself in the long mirror on the
wardrobe door. He wasn't pretty. The old-time lean cheeks
were gone. These were heavy, seeming to hang down by their own
weight. He looked for the lines of cruelty Dede had spoken of,
and he found them, and he found the harshness in the eyes as
well, the eyes that were muddy now after all the cocktails of the
night before, and of the months and years before. He looked at
the clearly defined pouches that showed under his eyes, and
they've shocked him. He rolled up the sleeve of his pajamas. No
wonder the hammer-thrower had put his hand down. Those weren't
muscles. A rising tide of fat had submerged them. He stripped
off the pajama coat. Again he was shocked, this time but the
bulk of his body. It wasn't pretty. The lean stomach had become
a paunch. The ridged muscles of chest and shoulders and abdomen
had broken down into rolls of flesh.
He sat down on the bed, and through his mind drifted pictures of
his youthful excellence, of the hardships he had endured over
other men, of the Indians and dogs he had run off their legs in
the heart-breaking days and nights on the Alaskan trail, of the
feats of strength that had made him king over a husky race of
frontiersmen.
And this was age. Then there drifted across the field of vision
of his mind's eye the old man he had encountered at Glen Ellen,
corning up the hillside through the fires of sunset, white-headed
and white-bearded, eighty-four, in his hand the pail of foaming
milk and in his face all the warm glow and content of the passing
summer day. That had been age. "Yes siree, eighty-four, and
spryer than most," he could hear the old man say. "And I ain't
loafed none. I walked across the Plains with an ox-team and fit
Injuns in '51, and I was a family man then with seven
youngsters."
Next he remembered the old woman of the chaparral, pressing
grapes in her mountain clearing; and Ferguson, the little man who
had scuttled into the road like a rabbit, the one-time managing
editor of a great newspaper, who was content to live in the
chaparral along with his spring of mountain water and his
hand-reared and manicured fruit trees. Ferguson had solved a
problem. A weakling and an alcoholic, he had run away from the
doctors and the chicken-coop of a city, and soaked up health like
a thirsty sponge. Well, Daylight pondered, if a sick man whom
the doctors had given up could develop into a healthy farm
laborer, what couldn't a merely stout man like himself do under
similar circumstances? He caught a vision of his body with all
its youthful excellence returned, and thought of Dede, and sat
down suddenly on the bed, startled by the greatness of the idea
that had come to him.
He did not sit long. His mind, working in its customary way,
like a steel trap, canvassed the idea in all its bearings. It
was big--bigger than anything he had faced before. And he faced
it squarely, picked it up in his two hands and turned it over and
around and looked at it. The simplicity of it delighted him. He
chuckled over it, reached his decision, and began to dress.
Midway in the dressing he stopped in order to use the telephone.
Dede was the first he called up.
"Don't come to the office this morning," he said. "I'm coming
out to see you for a moment." He called up others. He ordered
his motor-car. To Jones he gave instructions for the forwarding
of Bob and Wolf to Glen Ellen. Hegan he surprised by asking him
to look up the deed of the Glen Ellen ranch and make out a new
one in Dede Mason's name. "Who?" Hegan demanded. "Dede Mason,"
Daylight replied imperturbably the 'phone must be indistinct this
morning. "D-e-d-e M-a-s o-n. Got it?"
Half an hour later he was flying out to Berkeley. And for the
first time the big red car halted directly before the house.
Dede offered to receive him in the parlor, but he shook his head
and nodded toward her rooms.
"In there," he said. "No other place would suit."
As the door closed, his arms went out and around her. Then he
stood with his hands on her shoulders and looking down into her
face.
"Dede, if I tell you, flat and straight, that I'm going up to
live on that ranch at Glen Ellen, that I ain't taking a cent with
me, that I'm going to scratch for every bite I eat, and that I
ain't going to play ary a card at the business game again, will
you come along with me?"
She gave a glad little cry, and he nestled her in closely. But
the
next moment she had thrust herself out from him to the old
position at arm's length.
"I-I don't understand," she said breathlessly.
"And you ain't answered my proposition, though I guess no answer
is necessary. We're just going to get married right away and
start. I've sent Bob and Wolf along already. When will you be
ready?"
Dede could not forbear to smile. "My, what a hurricane of a man
it is. I'm quite blown away. And you haven't explained a word
to me."
Daylight smiled responsively.
"Look here, Dede, this is what card-sharps call a show-down. No
more philandering and frills and long-distance sparring between
you and me. We're just going to talk straight out in
meeting--the
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Now you
answer some questions for me, and then I'll answer yours."
He paused. "Well, I've got only one question after all: Do you
love me enough to marry me?"
"But--" she began.
"No buts," he broke in sharply. "This is a show-down. When I
say marry, I mean what I told you at first, that we'd go up and
live on the ranch. Do you love me enough for that?"
She looked at him for a moment, then her lids dropped, and all of
her seemed to advertise consent.
"Come on, then, let's start." The muscles of his legs tensed
involuntarily as if he were about to lead her to the door. "My
auto's waiting outside. There's nothing to delay excepting
getting on your hat."
He bent over her. "I reckon it's allowable," he said, as he
kissed her.
It was a long embrace, and she was the first to speak.
"You haven't answered my questions. How is this possible? How
can you leave your business? Has anything happened?"
"No, nothing's happened yet, but it's going to, blame quick.
I've taken your preaching to heart, and I've come to the penitent
form. You are my Lord God, and I'm sure going to serve you. The
rest can go to thunder. You were sure right. I've been the
slave to my money, and since I can't serve two masters I'm
letting the money slide. I'd sooner have you than all the money
in the world, that's all." Again he held her closely in his
arms. "And I've sure got you, Dede. I've sure got you.
"And I want to tell you a few more. I've taken my last drink.
You're marrying a whiskey-soak, but your husband won't be that.
He's going to grow into another man so quick you won't know him.
A couple of months from now, up there in Glen Ellen, you'll wake
up some morning and find you've got a perfect stranger in the
house with you, and you'll have to get introduced to him all over
again. You'll say, 'I'm Mrs. Harnish, who are you?" And I'll
say, 'I'm Elam Harnish's younger brother. I've just arrived from
Alaska to attend the funeral.' 'What funeral?' you'll say. And
I'll say, 'Why, the funeral of that good-for-nothing, gambling,
whiskey-drinking Burning Daylight--the man that died of fatty
degeneration of the heart from sitting in night and day at the
business game 'Yes ma'am,' I'll say, 'he's sure a gone 'coon, but
I've come to take his place and make you happy. And now, ma'am,
if you'll allow me, I'll just meander down to the pasture and
milk the cow while you're getting breakfast.'"
Again he caught her hand and made as if to start with her for the
door. When she resisted, he bent and kissed her again and again.
"I'm sure hungry for you, little woman," he murmured "You make
thirty millions look like thirty cents."
"Do sit down and be sensible," she urged, her cheeks flushed, the
golden light in her eyes burning more golden than he had ever
seen it before.
But Daylight was bent on having his way, and when he sat down it
was with her beside him and his arm around her.
"'Yes, ma'am,' I'll say, 'Burning Daylight was a pretty good
cuss, but it's better that he's gone. He quit rolling up in his
rabbit-skins and sleeping in the snow, and went to living in a
chicken-coop. He lifted up his legs and quit walking and
working, and took to existing on Martini cocktails and Scotch
whiskey. He thought he loved you, ma'am, and he did his best,
but he loved his cocktails more, and he loved his money more, and
himself more, and 'most everything else more than he did you.'
And then I'll say, 'Ma'am, you just run your eyes over me and see
how different I am. I ain't got a cocktail thirst, and all the
money I got is a dollar and forty cents and I've got to buy a new
ax, the last one being plumb wore out, and I can love you just
about eleven times as much as your first husband did. You see,
ma'am, he went all to fat. And there ain't ary ounce of fat on
me.' And I'll roll up my sleeve and show you, and say, 'Mrs.
Harnish, after having experience with being married to that old
fat money-bags, do you-all mind marrying a slim young fellow like
me?' And you'll just wipe a tear away for poor old Daylight, and
kind of lean toward me with a willing expression in your eye, and
then I'll blush maybe some, being a young fellow, and put my arm
around you, like that, and then--why, then I'll up and marry my
brother's widow, and go out and do the chores while she's cooking
a bite to eat."
"But you haven't answered my questions," she reproached him, as
she emerged, rosy and radiant, from the embrace that had
accompanied the culmination of his narrative.
"Now just what do you want to know?" he asked.
"I want to know how all this is possible? How you are able to
leave your business at a time like this? What you meant by
saying that something was going to happen quickly? I--" She
hesitated and blushed. "I answered your question, you know."
"Let's go and get married," he urged, all the whimsicality of his
utterance duplicated in his eyes. "You know I've got to make way
for that husky young brother of mine, and I ain't got long to
live." She made an impatient moue, and he continued seriously.
"You see, it's like this, Dede. I've been working like forty
horses ever since this blamed panic set in, and all the time some
of those ideas you'd given me were getting ready to sprout.
Well, they sprouted this morning, that's all. I started to get
up, expecting to go to the office as usual. But I didn't go to
the office. All that sprouting took place there and then. The
sun was shining in the window, and I knew it was a fine day in
the hills. And I knew I wanted to ride in the hills with you
just about thirty million times more than I wanted to go to the
office. And I knew all the time it was impossible. And why?
Because of the office. The office wouldn't let me. All my money
reared right up on its hind legs and got in the way and wouldn't
let me. It's a way that blamed money has of getting in the way.
You know that yourself.
"And then I made up my mind that I was to the dividing of the
ways. One way led to the office. The other way led to Berkeley.
And I took the Berkeley road. I'm never going to set foot in the
office again. That's all gone, finished, over and done with, and
I'm letting it slide clean to smash and then some. My mind's set
on this. You see, I've got religion, and it's sure the old-time
religion; it's love and you, and it's older than the oldest
religion in the world. It's IT, that's what it is--IT, with a
capital I-T."
She looked at him with a sudden, startled expression.
"You mean--?" she began.
"I mean just that. I'm wiping the slate clean. I'm letting it
all go to smash. When them thirty million dollars stood up to my
face and said I couldn't go out with you in the hills to-day, I
knew the time had come for me to put my foot down. And I'm
putting it down. I've got you, and my strength to work for you,
and that little ranch in Sonoma. That's all I want, and that's
all I'm going to save out, along with Bob and Wolf, a suit case
and a hundred and forty hair bridles. All the rest goes, and
good riddance. It's that much junk."
But Dede was insistent.
"Then this--this tremendous loss is all unnecessary?" she asked.
"Just what I haven't been telling you. It IS necessary. If that
money thinks it can stand up right to my face and say I can't go
riding with you-"
"No, no; be serious," Dede broke in. "I don't mean that, and you
know it. What I want to know is, from a standpoint of business,
is this failure necessary?"
He shook his head.
"You bet it isn't necessary. That's the point of it. I'm not
letting go of it because I'm licked to a standstill by the panic
and have got to let go. I'm firing it out when I've licked the
panic and am winning, hands down. That just shows how little I
think of it. It's you that counts, little woman, and I make my
play accordingly."
But she drew away from his sheltering arms.
"You are mad, Elam."
"Call me that again," he murmured ecstatically. "It's sure
sweeter than the chink of millions."
All this she ignored.
"It's madness. You don't know what you are doing--"
"Oh, yes, I do," he assured her. "I'm winning the dearest wish
of my heart. Why, your little finger is worth more--"
"Do be sensible for a moment."
"I was never more sensible in my lie. I know what I want, and
I'm going to get it. I want you and the open air. I want to get
my foot off the paving-stones and my ear away from the telephone.
I want a little ranch-house in one of the prettiest bits of
country God ever made, and I want to do the chores around that
ranch-house--milk cows, and chop wood, and curry horses, and
plough the ground, and all the rest of it; and I want you there
in the ranch-house with me. I'm plumb tired of everything else,
and clean wore out. And I'm sure the luckiest man alive, for
I've got what money can't buy. I've got you, and thirty millions
couldn't buy you, nor three thousand millions, nor thirty cents-"
A knock at the door interrupted him, and he was left to stare
delightedly at the Crouched Venus and on around the room at
Dede's dainty possessions, while she answered the telephone.
"It is Mr. Hegan," she said, on returning. "He is holding the
line. He says it is important."
Daylight shook his head and smiled.
"Please tell Mr. Hegan to hang up. I'm done with the office and
I don't want to hear anything about anything."
A minute later she was back again.
"He refuses to hang up. He told me to tell you that Unwin is in
the office now, waiting to see you, and Harrison, too. Mr. Hegan
said that Grimshaw and Hodgkins are in trouble. That it
looks as if they are going to break. And he said something about
protection."
It was startling information. Both Unwin and Harrison
represented big banking corporations, and Daylight knew that if
the house of Grimshaw and Hodgkins went it would precipitate a
number of failures and start a flurry of serious dimensions. But
Daylight smiled, and shook his head, and mimicked the stereotyped
office tone of voice as he said:--
"Miss Mason, you will kindly tell Mr. Hegan that there is
nothing doing and to hang up."
"But you can't do this," she pleaded.
"Watch me," he grimly answered.
"Elam!"
"Say it again'' he cried. "Say it again, and a dozen Grimshaws
and Hodgkins can smash!"
He caught her by the hand and drew her to him.
"You let Hegan hang on to that line till he's tired. We can't be
wasting a second on him on a day like this. He's only in love
with books and things, but I've got a real live woman in my arms
that's loving me all the time she's kicking over the traces."
CHAPTER XXIII
"But I know something of the fight you have been making," Dede
contended. "If you stop now, all the work you have done,
everything, will be destroyed. You have no right to do it. You
can't do it."
Daylight was obdurate. He shook his head and smiled
tantalizingly.
"Nothing will be destroyed, Dede, nothing. You don't understand
this business game. It's done on paper. Don't you see? Where's
the gold I dug out of Klondike? Why, it's in twenty-dollar gold
pieces, in gold watches, in wedding rings. No matter what
happens to me, the twenty-dollar pieces, the watches, and the
wedding rings remain. Suppose I died right now. It wouldn't
affect the gold one iota. It's sure the same with this present
situation. All I stand for is paper. I've got the paper for
thousands of acres of land. All right. Burn up the paper, and
burn me along with it. The land remains, don't it? The rain
falls on it, the seeds sprout in it, the trees grow out of it,
the houses stand on it, the electric cars run over it. It's
paper that business is run on. I lose my paper, or I lose my
life, it's all the same; it won't alter one grain of sand in all
that land, or twist one blade of grass around sideways.
"Nothing is going to be lost--not one pile out of the docks, not
one railroad spike, not one ounce of steam out of the gauge of a
ferry-boat. The cars will go on running, whether I hold the
paper or somebody else holds it. The tide has set toward
Oakland. People are beginning to pour in. We're selling
building lots again. There is no stopping that tide. No matter
what happens to me or the paper, them three hundred thousand
folks are coming in the same. And there'll be cars to carry them
around, and houses to hold them, and good water for them to drink
and electricity to give them light, and all the rest."
By this time Hegan had arrived in an automobile. The honk of it
came in through the open window, and they saw, it stop alongside
the big red machine. In the car were Unwin and Harrison, while
Jones sat with the chauffeur
"I'll see Hegan," Daylight told Dede. "There's no need for the
rest. They can wait in the machine."
"Is he drunk?" Hegan whispered to Dede at the door.
She shook her head and showed him in.
"Good morning, Larry," was Daylight's greeting. "Sit down and
rest your feet. You sure seem to be in a flutter."
"I am," the little Irishman snapped back. "Grimshaw and Hodgkins
are going to smash if something isn't done quick. Why didn't you
come to the office? What are you going to do about it?"
"Nothing," Daylight drawled lazily. "Except let them smash, I
guess--"
"But--"
"I've had no dealings with Grimshaw and Hodgkins. I don't owe
them anything. Besides, I'm going to smash myself. Look here,
Larry, you know me. You know when I make up my mind I mean it.
Well, I've sure made up my mind. I'm tired of the whole game.
I'm letting go of it as fast as I can, and a smash is the
quickest way to let go."
Hegan stared at his chief, then passed his horror-stricken gaze
on to Dede, who nodded in sympathy.
"So let her smash, Larry," Daylight went on. "All you've got to
do is to protect yourself and all our friends. Now you listen to
me while I tell you what to do. Everything is in good shape to
do it. Nobody must get hurt. Everybody that stood by me must
come through without damage. All the back wages and salaries
must be paid pronto. All the money I've switched away from the
water company, the street cars, and the ferries must be switched
back. And you won't get hurt yourself none. Every company you
got stock in will come through-"
"You are crazy, Daylight!" the little lawyer cried out. "This is
all babbling lunacy. What is the matter with you? You haven't
been eating a drug or something?"
"I sure have!" Daylight smiled reply. "And I'm now coughing it
up. I'm sick of living in a city and playing business--I'm going
off to the sunshine, and the country, and the green grass. And
Dede, here, is going with me. So you've got the chance to be the
first to congratulate me."
"Congratulate the--the devil! " Hegan spluttered. "I'm not
going to stand for this sort of foolishness."
"Oh, yes, you are; because if you don't there'll be a bigger
smash and some folks will most likely get hurt. You're worth a
million or more yourself, now, and if you listen to me you come
through with a whole skin. I want to get hurt, and get hurt to
the limit. That's what I'm looking for, and there's no man or
bunch of men can get between me and what I'm looking for.
Savvee, Hegan? Savvee?"
"What have you done to him?" Hegan snarled at Dede.
"Hold on there, Larry." For the first time Daylight's voice
was sharp, while all the old lines of cruelty in his face stood
forth. "Miss Mason is going to be my wife, and while I don't
mind your talking to her all you want, you've got to use a
different tone of voice or you'll be heading for a hospital,
which will sure be an unexpected sort of smash. And let me tell
you one other thing. This-all is my doing. She says I'm crazy,
too."
Hegan shook his head in speechless sadness and continued to
stare.
"There'll be temporary receiverships, of course," Daylight
advised; "but they won't bother none or last long. What you must
do immediately is to save everybody--the men that have been
letting their wages ride with me, all the creditors, and all the
concerns that have stood by. There's the wad of land that New
Jersey crowd has been dickering for. They'll take all of a
couple of thousand acres and will close now if you give them half
a chance. That Fairmount section is the cream of it, and they'll
dig up as high as a thousand dollars an acre for a part of it.
That'll help out some. That five-hundred acre tract beyond,
you'll be lucky if they pay two hundred an acre."
Dede, who had been scarcely listening, seemed abruptly to make up
her mind, and stepped forward where she confronted the two men.
Her face was pale, but set with determination, so that Daylight,
looking at it, was reminded of the day when she first rode Bob.
"Wait," she said. "I want to say something. Elam, if you do
this insane thing, I won't marry you. I refuse to marry you."
Hegan, in spite of his misery, gave her a quick, grateful look.
"I'll take my chance on that," Daylight began.
"Wait!" she again interrupted. "And if you don't do this thing,
I will marry you."
"Let me get this proposition clear." Daylight spoke with
exasperating slowness and deliberation. "As I understand it, if
I keep right on at the business game, you'll sure marry me?
You'll marry me if I keep on working my head off and drinking
Martinis?"
After each question he paused, while she nodded an affirmation.
"And you'll marry me right away?"
"Yes."
"To-day? Now?"
"Yes."
He pondered for a moment.
"No, little woman, I won't do it. It won't work, and you know it
yourself. I want you--all of you; and to get it I'll have to
give you all of myself, and there'll be darn little of myself
left over to give if I stay with the business game. Why, Dede,
with you on the ranch with me, I'm sure of you--and of myself.
I'm sure of you, anyway. You can talk will or won't all you
want, but you're sure going to marry me just the same. And now,
Larry, you'd better be going. I'll be at the hotel in a little
while, and since I'm not going a step into the office again,
bring all papers to sign and the rest over to my rooms. And you
can get me on the 'phone there any time. This smash is going
through. Savvee? I'm quit and done."
He stood up as a sign for Hegan to go. The latter was plainly
stunned. He also rose to his feet, but stood looking helplessly
around.
"Sheer, downright, absolute insanity," he muttered.
Daylight put his hand on the other's shoulder.
"Buck up, Larry. You're always talking about the wonders of
human nature, and here I am giving you another sample of it and
you ain't appreciating it. I'm a bigger dreamer than you are,
that's all, and I'm sure dreaming what's coming true. It's the
biggest, best dream I ever had, and I'm going after it to get
it--"
"By losing all you've got," Hegan exploded at him.
"Sure--by losing all I've got that I don't want. But I'm
hanging on to them hundred and forty hair bridles just the same.
Now you'd better hustle out to Unwin and Harrison and get on down
town. I'll be at the hotel, and you can call me up any time."
He turned to Dede as soon as Hegan was gone, and took her by the
hand.
"And now, little woman, you needn't come to the office any more.
Consider yourself discharged. And remember I was your employer,
so you've got to come to me for recommendation, and if you're not
real good, I won't give you one. In the meantime, you just rest
up and think about what things you want to pack, because we'll
just about have to set up housekeeping on your stuff--leastways,
the front part of the house."
"But, Elam, I won't, I won't! If you do this mad thing I never
will marry you."
She attempted to take her hand away, but he closed on it with a
protecting, fatherly clasp.
"Will you be straight and honest? All right, here goes. Which
would you sooner have--me and the money, or me and the ranch?"
"But-" she began.
"No buts. Me and the money?"
She did not answer.
"Me and the ranch?"
Still she did not answer, and still he was undisturbed.
"You see, I know your answer, Dede, and there's nothing more to
say. Here's where you and I quit and hit the high places for
Sonoma. You make up your mind what you want to pack, and I'll
have some men out here in a couple of days to do it for you. It
will be about the last work anybody else ever does for us. You
and I will do the unpacking and the arranging ourselves."
She made a last attempt.
"Elam, won't you be reasonable? There is time to reconsider. I
can telephone down and catch Mr. Hegan as soon as he reaches the
office--"
"Why, I'm the only reasonable man in the bunch right now," he
rejoined. "Look at me--as calm as you please, and as happy as a
king, while they're fluttering around like a lot of cranky hens
whose heads are liable to be cut off."
"I'd cry, if I thought it would do any good," she threatened.
"In which case I reckon I'd have to hold you in my arms some more
and sort of soothe you down," he threatened back. "And now I'm
going to go. It's too bad you got rid of Mab. You could have
sent her up to the ranch. But see you've got a mare to ride of
some sort or other."
As he stood at the top of the steps, leaving, she said:-
"You needn't send those men. There will be no packing, because I
am not going to marry you."
"I'm not a bit scared," he answered, and went down the steps.
CHAPTER XXIV
Three days later, Daylight rode to Berkeley in his red car. It
was for the last time, for on the morrow the big machine passed
into another's possession. It had been a strenuous three days,
for his smash had been the biggest the panic had precipitated in
California. The papers had been filled with it, and a great cry
of indignation had gone up from the very men who later found that
Daylight had fully protected their interests. It was these
facts, coming slowly to light, that gave rise to the widely
repeated charge that Daylight had gone insane. It was the
unanimous conviction among business men that no sane man could
possibly behave in such fashion. On the other hand, neither his
prolonged steady drinking nor his affair with Dede became public,
so the only conclusion attainable was that the wild financier
from Alaska had gone lunatic. And Daylight had grinned and
confirmed the suspicion by refusing to see the reporters.
He halted the automobile before Dede's door, and met her with his
same rushing tactics, enclosing her in his arms before a word
could be uttered. Not until afterward, when she had recovered
herself from him and got him seated, did he begin to speak.
"I've done it," he announced. "You've seen the newspapers, of
course. I'm plumb cleaned out, and I've just called around to
find out what day you feel like starting for Glen Ellen. It'll
have to be soon, for it's real expensive living in Oakland these
days. My board at the hotel is only paid to the end of the week,
and I can't afford to stay after that. And beginning with
to-morrow I've got to use the street cars, and they sure eat up
the nickels."
He paused, and waited, and looked at her. Indecision and trouble
showed on her face. Then the smile he knew so well began to grow
on her lips and in her eyes, until she threw back her head and
laughed in the old forthright boyish way.
"When are those men coming to pack for me?" she asked.
And again she laughed and simulated a vain attempt to escape his
bearlike arms.
"Dear Elam," she whispered; "dear Elam." And of herself, for
the first time, she kissed him.
She ran her hand caressingly through his hair.
"Your eyes are all gold right now," he said. "I can look in them
and tell just how much you love me."
"They have been all gold for you, Elam, for a long time. I
think,
on our little ranch, they will always be all gold."
"Your hair has gold in it, too, a sort of fiery gold." He
turned her face suddenly and held it between his hands and looked
long into her eyes. "And your eyes were full of gold only the
other day, when you said you wouldn't marry me."
She nodded and laughed.
"You would have your will," she confessed. "But I couldn't be a
party to such madness. All that money was yours, not mine. But
I was loving you all the time, Elam, for the great big boy you
are, breaking the thirty-million toy with which you had grown
tired of playing. And when I said no, I knew all the time it was
yes. And I am sure that my eyes were golden all the time. I had
only one fear, and that was that you would fail to lose
everything. Because, dear, I knew I should marry you anyway, and
I did so want just you and the ranch and Bob and Wolf and those
horse-hair bridles. Shall I tell you a secret? As soon as you
left, I telephoned the man to whom I sold Mab."
She hid her face against his breast for an instant, and then
looked at him again, gladly radiant.
"You see, Elam, in spite of what my lips said, my mind was made
up then. I--I simply had to marry you. But I was praying you
would succeed in losing everything. And so I tried to find what
had become of Mab. But the man had sold her and did not know
what had become of her. You see, I wanted to ride with you over
the Glen Ellen hills, on Mab and you on Bob, just as I had ridden
with you through the Piedmont hills."
The disclosure of Mab's whereabouts trembled on Daylight's lips,
but he forbore.
"I'll promise you a mare that you'll like just as much as Mab,"
he said.
But Dede shook her head, and on that one point refused to be
comforted.
"Now, I've got an idea," Daylight said, hastening to get the
conversation on less perilous ground. "We're running away from
cities, and you have no kith nor kin, so it don't seem exactly
right that we should start off by getting married in a city. So
here's the idea: I'll run up to the ranch and get things in shape
around the house and give the caretaker his walking-papers. You
follow me in a couple of days, coming on the morning train. I'll
have the preacher fixed and waiting. And here's another idea.
You bring your riding togs in a suit case. And as soon as the
ceremony's over, you can go to the hotel and change. Then out
you come, and you find me waiting with a couple of horses, and
we'll ride over the landscape so as you can see the prettiest
parts of the ranch the first thing. And she's sure pretty, that
ranch. And now that it's settled, I'll be waiting for you at the
morning train day after to-morrow."
Dede blushed as she spoke.
"You are such a hurricane."
"Well, ma'am," he drawled, "I sure hate to burn daylight. And
you
and I have burned a heap of daylight. We've been
scandalously extravagant. We might have been married years ago."
Two days later, Daylight stood waiting outside the little Glen
Ellen hotel. The ceremony was over, and he had left Dede to go
inside and change into her riding-habit while he brought the
horses. He held them now, Bob and Mab, and in the shadow of the
watering-trough Wolf lay and looked on. Already two days of
ardent California sun had touched with new fires the ancient
bronze in Daylight's face. But warmer still was the glow that
came into his cheeks and burned in his eyes as he saw Dede coming
out the door, riding-whip in hand, clad in the familiar corduroy
skirt and leggings of the old Piedmont days. There was warmth
and glow in her own face as she answered his gaze and glanced on
past him to the horses. Then she saw Mab. But her gaze leaped
back to the man.
"Oh, Elam!" she breathed.
It was almost a prayer, but a prayer that included a thousand
meanings Daylight strove to feign sheepishness, but his heart was
singing too wild a song for mere playfulness. All things had
been in the naming of his name--reproach, refined away by
gratitude, and all compounded of joy and love.
She stepped forward and caressed the mare, and again turned and
looked at the man, and breathed:--
"Oh, Elam! "
And all that was in her voice was in her eyes, and in them
Daylight glimpsed a profundity deeper and wider than any speech
or thought--the whole vast inarticulate mystery and wonder of sex
and love.
Again he strove for playfulness of speech, but it was too great a
moment for even love fractiousness to enter in. Neither spoke.
She gathered the reins, and, bending, Daylight received her foot
in his hand. She sprang, as he lifted and gained the saddle.
The next moment he was mounted and beside her, and, with Wolf
sliding along ahead in his typical wolf-trot, they went up the
hill that led out of town--two lovers on two chestnut sorrel
steeds, riding out and away to honeymoon through the warm summer
day. Daylight felt himself drunken as with wine. He was at the
topmost pinnacle of life. Higher than this no man could climb
nor had ever climbed. It was his day of days, his love-time and
his mating-time, and all crowned by this virginal possession of a
mate who had said "Oh, Elam," as she had said it, and looked at
him out of her soul as she had looked.
They cleared the crest of the hill, and he watched the joy mount
in her face as she gazed on the sweet, fresh land. He pointed
out
the group of heavily wooded knolls across the rolling stretches
of
ripe grain.
"They're ours," he said. "And they're only a sample of the
ranch. Wait till you see the big canon. There are 'coons down
there, and back here on the Sonoma there are mink. And deer!--
why, that mountain's sure thick with them, and I reckon we can
scare up a mountain-lion if we want to real hard. And, say,
there's a little meadow=-well, I ain't going to tell you another
word. You wait and see for yourself."
They turned in at the gate, where the road to the clay-pit
crossed the fields, and both sniffed with delight as the warm
aroma of the ripe hay rose in their nostrils. As on his first
visit, the larks were uttering their rich notes and fluttering up
before the horses until the woods and the flower-scattered glades
were reached, when the larks gave way to blue jays and
woodpeckers.
"We're on our land now," he said, as they left the hayfield
behind. "It runs right across country over the roughest parts.
Just you wait and see."
As on the first day, he turned aside from the clay-pit and worked
through the woods to the left, passing the first spring and
jumping the horses over the ruined remnants of the
stake-and-rider fence. From here on, Dede was in an unending
ecstasy. By the spring that gurgled among the redwoods grew
another great wild lily, bearing on its slender stalk the
prodigious outburst of white waxen bells. This time he did not
dismount, but led the way to the deep canon where the stream had
cut a passage among the knolls. He had been at work here, and a
steep and slippery horse trail now crossed the creek, so they
rode up beyond, through the somber redwood twilight, and, farther
on, through a tangled wood of oak and madrono. They came to a
small clearing of several acres, where the grain stood waist
high.
"Ours," Daylight said.
She bent in her saddle, plucked a stalk of the ripe grain, and
nibbled it between her teeth.
"Sweet mountain hay," she cried. "The kind Mab likes."
And throughout the ride she continued to utter cries and
ejaculations of surprise and delight.
"And you never told me all this!" she reproached him, as they
looked across the little clearing and over the descending slopes
of woods to the great curving sweep of Sonoma Valley.
"Come," he said; and they turned and went back through the forest
shade, crossed the stream and came to the lily by the spring.
Here, also, where the way led up the tangle of the steep hill, he
had cut a rough horse trail. As they forced their way up the
zigzags, they caught glimpses out and down through the sea of
foliage. Yet always were their farthest glimpses stopped by the
closing vistas of green, and, yet always, as they climbed, did
the forest roof arch overhead, with only here and there rifts
that permitted shattered shafts of sunlight to penetrate. And
all about them were ferns, a score of varieties, from the tiny
gold-backs and maidenhair to huge brakes six and eight feet tall.
Below them, as they mounted, they glimpsed great gnarled trunks
and branches of ancient trees, and above them were similar great
gnarled branches.
Dede stopped her horse and sighed with the beauty of it all.
"It is as if we are swimmers," she said, "rising out of a deep
pool of green tranquillity. Up above is the sky and the sun, but
this is a pool, and we are fathoms deep."
They started their horses, but a dog-tooth violet, shouldering
amongst the maidenhair, caught her eye and made her rein in
again.
They cleared the crest and emerged from the pool as if into
another world, for now they were in the thicket of velvet-trunked
young madronos and looking down the open, sun-washed hillside,
across the nodding grasses, to the drifts of blue and white
nemophilae that carpeted the tiny meadow on either side the tiny
stream. Dede clapped her hands.
"It's sure prettier than office furniture," Daylight remarked.
"It sure is," she answered.
And Daylight, who knew his weakness in the use of the particular
word sure, knew that she had repeated it deliberately and with
love.
They crossed the stream and took the cattle track over the low
rocky hill and through the scrub forest of manzanita, till they
emerged on the next tiny valley with its meadow-bordered
streamlet.
"If we don't run into some quail pretty soon, I'll be surprised
some," Daylight said.
And as the words left his lips there was a wild series of
explosive thrumming as the old quail arose from all about Wolf,
while the young ones scuttled for safety and disappeared
miraculously before the spectators' very eyes.
He showed her the hawk's nest he had found in the
lightning-shattered top of the redwood, and she discovered a
wood-rat's nest which he had not seen before. Next they took the
old wood-road and came out on the dozen acres of clearing where
the
wine grapes grew in the wine-colored volcanic soil. Then they
followed the cow-path through more woods and thickets and
scattered glades, and dropped down the hillside to where the
farm-house, poised on the lip of the big canon, came into view
only when they were right upon it.
Dede stood on the wide porch that ran the length of the house
while Daylight tied the horses. To Dede it was very quiet. It
was the dry, warm, breathless calm of California midday. All the
world seemed dozing. From somewhere pigeons were cooing lazily.
With a deep sigh of satisfaction, Wolf, who had drunk his fill at
all the streams along the way, dropped down in the cool shadow of
the porch. She heard the footsteps of Daylight returning, and
caught her breath with a quick intake. He took her hand in his,
and, as he turned the door-knob, felt her hesitate. Then he put
his arm around her; the door swung open, and together they passed
in.
CHAPTER XXV
Many persons, themselves city-bred and city-reared, have fled to
the soil and succeeded in winning great happiness. In such cases
they have succeeded only by going through a process of savage
disillusionment. But with Dede and Daylight it was different.
They had both been born on the soil, and they knew its naked
simplicities and rawer ways. They were like two persons, after
far wandering, who had merely come home again. There was less of
the unexpected in their dealings with nature, while theirs was
all the delight of reminiscence. What might appear sordid and
squalid to the fastidiously reared, was to them eminently
wholesome and natural. The commerce of nature was to them no
unknown and untried trade. They made fewer mistakes. They
already knew, and it was a joy to remember what they had
forgotten.
And another thing they learned was that it was easier for one who
has gorged at the flesh-pots to content himself with the
meagerness of a crust, than for one who has known only the crust.
Not that their life was meagre. It was that they found keener
delights and deeper satisfactions in little things. Daylight,
who had played the game in its biggest and most fantastic
aspects, found that here, on the slopes of Sonoma Mountain, it
was still the same old game. Man had still work to perform,
forces to combat, obstacles to overcome. When he experimented in
a small way at raising a few pigeons for market, he found no less
zest in calculating in squabs than formerly when he had
calculated in millions. Achievement was no less achievement,
while the process of it seemed more rational and received the
sanction of his reason.
The domestic cat that had gone wild and that preyed on his
pigeons, he found, by the comparative standard, to be of no less
paramount menace than a Charles Klinkner in the field of finance,
trying to raid him for several millions. The hawks and weasels
and 'coons were so many Dowsetts, Lettons, and Guggenhammers that
struck at him secretly. The sea of wild vegetation that tossed
its surf against the boundaries of all his clearings and that
sometimes crept in and flooded in a single week was no mean enemy
to contend with and subdue. His fat-soiled vegetable-garden in
the nook of hills that failed of its best was a problem of
engrossing importance, and when he had solved it by putting in
drain-tile, the joy of the achievement was ever with him. He
never worked in it and found the soil unpacked and tractable
without experiencing the thrill of accomplishment.
There was the matter of the plumbing. He was enabled to purchase
the materials through a lucky sale of a number of his hair
bridles. The work he did himself, though more than once he was
forced to call in Dede to hold tight with a pipe-wrench. And in
the end, when the bath-tub and the stationary tubs were installed
and in working order, he could scarcely tear himself away from
the contemplation of what his hands had wrought. The first
evening, missing him, Dede sought and found him, lamp in hand,
staring with silent glee at the tubs. He rubbed his hand over
their smooth wooden lips and laughed aloud, and was as shamefaced
as any boy when she caught him thus secretly exulting in his own
prowess.
It was this adventure in wood-working and plumbing that brought
about the building of the little workshop, where he slowly
gathered a collection of loved tools. And he, who in the old
days, out of his millions, could purchase immediately whatever he
might desire, learned the new joy of the possession that follows
upon rigid economy and desire long delayed. He waited three
months before daring the extravagance of a Yankee screw-driver,
and his glee in the marvelous little mechanism was so keen that
Dede conceived forthright a great idea. For six months she saved
her egg-money, which was hers by right of allotment, and on his
birthday presented him with a turning-lathe of wonderful
simplicity and multifarious efficiencies. And their mutual
delight in the tool, which was his, was only equalled by their
delight in Mab's first foal, which was Dede's special private
property.
It was not until the second summer that Daylight built the huge
fireplace that outrivalled Ferguson's across the valley. For all
these things took time, and Dede and Daylight were not in a
hurry. Theirs was not the mistake of the average city-dweller
who flees in ultra-modern innocence to the soil. They did not
essay too much. Neither did they have a mortgage to clear, nor
did they desire wealth. They wanted little in the way of food,
and they had no rent to pay. So they planned unambiguously,
reserving their lives for each other and for the compensations of
country-dwelling from which the average country-dweller is
barred. From Ferguson's example, too, they profited much. Here
was a man who asked for but the plainest fare; who ministered to
his own simple needs with his own hands; who worked out as a
laborer only when he needed money to buy books and magazines; and
who saw to it that the major portion of his waking time was for
enjoyment. He loved to loaf long afternoons in the shade with
his books or to be up with the dawn and away over the hills.
On occasion he accompanied Dede and Daylight on deer hunts
through the wild canons and over the rugged steeps of Hood
Mountain, though more often Dede and Daylight were out alone.
This riding was one of their chief joys. Every wrinkle and
crease in the hills they explored, and they came to know every
secret spring and hidden dell in the whole surrounding wall of
the valley. They learned all the trails and cow-paths; but
nothing delighted them more than to essay the roughest and most
impossible rides, where they were glad to crouch and crawl along
the narrowest deer-runs, Bob and Mab struggling and forcing their
way along behind. Back from their rides they brought the seeds
and bulbs of wild flowers to plant in favoring nooks on the
ranch. Along the foot trail which led down the side of the big
canon to the intake of the water-pipe, they established their
fernery. It was not a formal affair, and the ferns were left to
themselves. Dede and Daylight merely introduced new ones from
time to time, changing them from one wild habitat to another. It
was the same with the wild lilac, which Daylight had sent to him
from Mendocino County. It became part of the wildness of the
ranch, and, after being helped for a season, was left to its own
devices. they used to gather the seeds of the California poppy
and scatter them over their own acres, so that the orange-colored
blossoms spangled the fields of mountain hay and prospered in
flaming drifts in the fence corners and along the edges of the
clearings.
Dede, who had a fondness for cattails, established a fringe of
them along the meadow stream, where they were left to fight it
out with the water-cress. And when the latter was threatened
with extinction, Daylight developed one of the shaded springs
into his water-cress garden and declared war upon any invading
cattail. On her wedding day Dede had discovered a long dog-tooth
violet by the zigzag trail above the redwood spring, and here she
continued to plant more and more. The open hillside above the
tiny meadow became a colony of Mariposa lilies. This was due
mainly to her efforts, while Daylight, who rode with a
short-handled ax on his saddle-bow, cleared the little manzanita
wood on the rocky hill of all its dead and dying and overcrowded
weaklings.
They did not labor at these tasks. Nor were they tasks. Merely
in passing, they paused, from time to time, and lent a hand to
nature. These flowers and shrubs grew of themselves, and their
presence was no violation of the natural environment. The man
and the woman made no effort to introduce a flower or shrub that
did not of its own right belong. Nor did they protect them from
their enemies. The horses and the colts and the cows and the
calves ran at pasture among them or over them, and flower or
shrub had to take its chance. But the beasts were not noticeably
destructive, for they were few in number and the ranch was large.
On the other hand, Daylight could have taken in fully a dozen
horses to pasture, which would have earned him a dollar and a
half per head per month. But this he refused to do, because of
the devastation such close pasturing would produce.
Ferguson came over to celebrate the housewarming that followed
the achievement of the great stone fireplace. Daylight had
ridden across the valley more than once to confer with him about
the undertaking, and he was the only other present at the sacred
function of lighting the first fire. By removing a partition,
Daylight had thrown two rooms into one, and this was the big
living-room where Dede's treasures were placed--her books, and
paintings and photographs, her piano, the Crouched Venus, the
chafing-dish and all its glittering accessories. Already, in
addition to her own wild-animal skins, were those of deer and
coyote and one mountain-lion which Daylight had killed. The
tanning he had done himself, slowly and laboriously, in frontier
fashion.
He handed the match to Dede, who struck it and lighted the fire.
The crisp manzanita wood crackled as the flames leaped up and
assailed the dry bark of the larger logs. Then she leaned in the
shelter of her husband's arm, and the three stood and looked in
breathless suspense. When Ferguson gave judgment, it was with
beaming face and extended hand.
"She draws! By crickey, she draws" he cried.
He shook Daylight's hand ecstatically, and Daylight shook his
with equal fervor, and, bending, kissed Dede on the lips. They
were as exultant over the success of their simple handiwork as
any great captain at astonishing victory. In Ferguson's eyes was
actually a suspicious moisture while the woman pressed even more
closely against the man whose achievement it was. He caught her
up suddenly in his arms and whirled her away to the piano, crying
out: "Come on, Dede! The Gloria! The Gloria!"
And while the flames in the fireplace that worked, the triumphant
strains of the Twelfth Mass rolled forth.
CHAPTER XXVI
Daylight had made no assertion of total abstinence though he had
not taken a drink for months after the day he resolved to let his
business go to smash. Soon he proved himself strong enough to
dare to take a drink without taking a second. On the other hand,
with his coming to live in the country, had passed all desire and
need for drink. He felt no yearning for it, and even forgot that
it existed. Yet he refused to be afraid of it, and in town, on
occasion, when invited by the storekeeper, would reply: "All
right, son. If my taking a drink will make you happy here goes.
Whiskey for mine."
But such a drink began no desire for a second. It made no
impression. He was too profoundly strong to be affected by a
thimbleful. As he had prophesied to Dede, Burning Daylight, the
city financier, had died a quick death on the ranch, and his
younger brother, the Daylight from Alaska, had taken his place.
The threatened inundation of fat had subsided, and all his
old-time Indian leanness and of muscle had returned. So,
likewise, did the old slight hollows in his cheeks come back.
For him they indicated the pink of physical condition. He became
the acknowledged strong man of Sonoma Valley, the heaviest lifter
and hardest winded among a husky race of farmer folk. And once a
year he celebrated his birthday in the old-fashioned frontier
way, challenging all the valley to come up the hill to the ranch
and be put on its back. And a fair portion of the valley
responded, brought the women-folk and children along, and
picnicked for the day.
At first, when in need of ready cash, he had followed Ferguson's
example of working at day's labor; but he was not long in
gravitating to a form of work that was more stimulating and more
satisfying, and that allowed him even more time for Dede and the
ranch and the perpetual riding through the hills. Having been
challenged by the blacksmith, in a spirit of banter, to attempt
the breaking of a certain incorrigible colt, he succeeded so
signally as to earn quite a reputation as a horse-breaker. And
soon he was able to earn whatever money he desired at this, to
him, agreeable work.
A sugar king, whose breeding farm and training stables were at
Caliente, three miles away, sent for him in time of need, and,
before the year was out, offered him the management of the
stables. But Daylight smiled and shook his head. Furthermore,
he refused to undertake the breaking of as many animals as were
offered. "I'm sure not going to die from overwork," he assured
Dede; and he accepted such work only when he had to have money.
Later, he fenced off a small run in the pasture, where, from time
to time, he took in a limited number of incorrigibles.
"We've got the ranch and each other," he told his wife, "and I'd
sooner ride with you to Hood Mountain any day than earn forty
dollars. You can't buy sunsets, and loving wives, and cool
spring water, and such folderols, with forty dollars; and forty
million dollars can't buy back for me one day that I didn't ride
with you to Hood Mountain."
His life was eminently wholesome and natural. Early to bed, he
slept like an infant and was up with the dawn. Always with
something to do, and with a thousand little things that enticed
but did not clamor, he was himself never overdone. Nevertheless,
there were times when both he and Dede were not above confessing
tiredness at bedtime after seventy or eighty miles in the saddle.
Sometimes, when he had accumulated a little money, and when the
season favored, they would mount their horses, with saddle-bags
behind, and ride away over the wall of the valley and down into
the other valleys. When night fell, they put up at the first
convenient farm or village, and on the morrow they would ride on,
without definite plan, merely continuing to ride on, day after
day, until their money gave out and they were compelled to
return. On such trips they would be gone anywhere from a week to
ten days or two weeks, and once they managed a three weeks' trip.
They even planned ambitiously some day when they were
disgracefully prosperous, to ride all the way up to Daylight's
boyhood home in Eastern Oregon, stopping on the way at Dede's
girlhood home in Siskiyou. And all the joys of anticipation were
theirs a thousand times as they contemplated the detailed
delights of this grand adventure.
One day, stopping to mail a letter at the Glen Ellen post office,
they were hailed by the blacksmith.
"Say, Daylight," he said, "a young fellow named Slosson sends you
his regards. He came through in an auto, on the way to Santa
Rosa. He wanted to know if you didn't live hereabouts, but the
crowd with him was in a hurry. So he sent you his regards and
said to tell you he'd taken your advice and was still going on
breaking his own record."
Daylight had long since told Dede of the incident.
"Slosson?" he meditated, "Slosson? That must be the
hammer-thrower. He put my hand down twice, the young scamp."
He turned suddenly to Dede. "Say, it's only twelve miles to
Santa Rosa, and the horses are fresh."
She divined what was in his mind, of which his twinkling eyes and
sheepish, boyish grin gave sufficient advertisement, and she
smiled and nodded acquiescence.
"We'll cut across by Bennett Valley," he said. "It's nearer that
way."
There was little difficulty, once in Santa Rosa, of finding
Slosson. He and his party had registered at the Oberlin Hotel,
and Daylight encountered the young hammer-thrower himself in the
office.
"Look here, son," Daylight announced, as soon as he had
introduced Dede, "I've come to go you another flutter at that
hand game. Here's a likely place."
Slosson smiled and accepted. The two men faced each other, the
elbows of their right arms on the counter, the hands clasped.
Slosson's hand quickly forced backward and down.
"You're the first man that ever succeeded in doing it," he said.
"Let's try it again."
"Sure," Daylight answered. "And don't forget, son, that you're
the first man that put mine down. That's why I lit out after you
to-day."
Again they clasped hands, and again Slosson's hand went down. He
was a broad-shouldered, heavy-muscled young giant, at least half
a head taller than Daylight, and he frankly expressed his chagrin
and asked for a third trial. This time he steeled himself to the
effort, and for a moment the issue was in doubt. With flushed
face and set teeth he met the other's strength till his crackling
muscles failed him. The air exploded sharply from his tensed
lungs, as he relaxed in surrender, and the hand dropped limply
down.
"You're too many for me," he confessed. "I only hope you'll keep
out of the hammer-throwing game."
Daylight laughed and shook his head.
"We might compromise, and each stay in his own class. You stick
to hammer-throwing, and I'll go on turning down hands."
But Slosson refused to accept defeat.
"Say," he called out, as Daylight and Dede, astride their horses,
were preparing to depart. "Say--do you mind if I look you up
next year? I'd like to tackle you again."
"Sure, son. You're welcome to a flutter any time. Though I give
you fair warning that you'll have to go some. You'll have to
train up, for I'm ploughing and chopping wood and breaking colts
these days."
Now and again, on the way home, Dede could hear her big
boy-husband chuckling gleefully. As they halted their horses on
the top of the divide out of Bennett Valley, in order to watch
the sunset, he ranged alongside and slipped his arm around her
waist.
"Little woman," he said, "you're sure responsible for it all.
And I leave it to you, if all the money in creation is worth as
much as one arm like that when it's got a sweet little woman like
this to go around."
For of all his delights in the new life, Dede was his greatest.
As he explained to her more than once, he had been afraid of love
all his life only in the end to come to find it the greatest
thing in the world. Not alone were the two well mated, but in
coming to live on the ranch they had selected the best soil in
which their love would prosper. In spite of her books and music,
there was in her a wholesome simplicity and love of the open and
natural, while Daylight, in every fiber of him, was essentially
an open-air man.
Of one thing in Dede, Daylight never got over marveling about,
and that was her efficient hands--the hands that he had first
seen
taking down flying shorthand notes and ticking away at the
typewriter; the hands that were firm to hold a magnificent brute
like Bob, that wonderfully flashed over the keys of the piano,
that were unhesitant in household tasks, and that were twin
miracles to caress and to run rippling fingers through his hair.
But Daylight was not unduly uxorious. He lived his man's life
just as she lived her woman's life. There was proper division of
labor in the work they individually performed. But the whole was
entwined and woven into a fabric of mutual interest and
consideration. He was as deeply interested in her cooking and
her music as she was in his agricultural adventures in the
vegetable garden. And he, who resolutely declined to die of
overwork, saw to it that she should likewise escape so dire a
risk.
In this connection, using his man's judgment and putting his
man's foot down, he refused to allow her to be burdened with the
entertaining of guests. For guests they had, especially in the
warm, long summers, and usually they were her friends from the
city, who were put to camp in tents which they cared for
themselves, and where, like true campers, they had also to cook
for themselves. Perhaps only in California, where everybody
knows camp life, would such a program have been possible. But
Daylight's steadfast contention was that his wife should not
become cook, waitress, and chambermaid because she did not happen
to possess a household of servants. On the other hand,
chafing-dish suppers in the big living-room for their camping
guests were a common happening, at which times Daylight allotted
them their chores and saw that they were performed. For one who
stopped only for the night it was different. Likewise it was
different with her brother, back from Germany, and again able to
sit a horse. On his vacations he became the third in the family,
and to him was given the building of the fires, the sweeping, and
the washing of the dishes.
Daylight devoted himself to the lightening of Dede's labors, and
it was her brother who incited him to utilize the splendid
water-power of the ranch that was running to waste. It required
Daylight's breaking of extra horses to pay for the materials, and
the brother devoted a three weeks' vacation to assisting, and
together they installed a Pelting wheel. Besides sawing wood and
turning his lathe and grindstone, Daylight connected the power
with the churn; but his great triumph was when he put his arm
around Dede's waist and led her out to inspect a washing-machine,
run by the Pelton wheel, which really worked and really washed
clothes.
Dede and Ferguson, between them, after a patient struggle, taught
Daylight poetry, so that in the end he might have been often
seen, sitting slack in the saddle and dropping down the mountain
trails through the sun-flecked woods, chanting aloud Kipling's
"Tomlinson," or, when sharpening his ax, singing into the
whirling grindstone Henley's "Song of the Sword." Not that he
ever became consummately literary in the way his two teachers
were. Beyond "Fra Lippo Lippi" and "Caliban and Setebos," he
found nothing in Browning, while George Meredith was ever his
despair. It was of his own initiative, however, that he invested
in a violin, and practised so assiduously that in time he and
Dede beguiled many a happy hour playing together after night had
fallen.
So all went well with this well-mated pair. Time never dragged.
There were always new wonderful mornings and still cool twilights
at the end of day; and ever a thousand interests claimed him, and
his interests were shared by her. More thoroughly than he knew,
had he come to a comprehension of the relativity of things. In
this new game he played he found in little things all the
intensities of gratification and desire that he had found in the
frenzied big things when he was a power and rocked half a
continent with the fury of the blows he struck. With head and
hand, at risk of life and limb, to bit and break a wild colt and
win it to the service of man, was to him no less great an
achievement. And this new table on which he played the game was
clean. Neither lying, nor cheating, nor hypocrisy was here. The
other game had made for decay and death, while this new one made
for clean strength and life. And so he was content, with Dede at
his side, to watch the procession of the days and seasons from
the farm-house perched on the canon-lip; to ride through crisp
frosty mornings or under burning summer suns; and to shelter in
the big room where blazed the logs in the fireplace he had built,
while outside the world shuddered and struggled in the
storm-clasp of a southeaster.
Once only Dede asked him if he ever regretted, and his answer was
to crush her in his arms and smother her lips with his. His
answer, a minute later, took speech.
"Little woman, even if you did cost thirty millions, you are sure
the cheapest necessity of life I ever indulged in." And then
he added, "Yes, I do have one regret, and a monstrous big one,
too. I'd sure like to have the winning of you all over again.
I'd like to go sneaking around the Piedmont hills looking for
you. I'd like to meander into those rooms of yours at Berkeley
for the first time. And there's no use talking, I'm plumb
soaking with regret that I can't put my arms around you again
that time you leaned your head on my breast and cried in the wind
and rain."
CHAPTER XXVII
But there came the day, one year, in early April, when Dede sat
in an easy chair on the porch, sewing on certain small garments,
while Daylight read aloud to her. It was in the afternoon, and a
bright sun was shining down on a world of new green. Along the
irrigation channels of the vegetable garden streams of water were
flowing, and now and again Daylight broke off from his reading to
run out and change the flow of water. Also, he was teasingly
interested in the certain small garments on which Dede worked,
while she was radiantly happy over them, though at times, when
his tender fun was too insistent, she was rosily confused or
affectionately resentful.
From where they sat they could look out over the world. Like the
curve of a skirting blade, the Valley of the Moon stretched
before them, dotted with farm-houses and varied by pasture-lands,
hay-fields, and vineyards. Beyond rose the wall of the valley,
every crease and wrinkle of which Dede and Daylight knew, and at
one place, where the sun struck squarely, the white dump of the
abandoned mine burned like a jewel. In the foreground, in the
paddock by the barn, was Mab, full of pretty anxieties for the
early spring foal that staggered about her on tottery legs. The
air shimmered with heat, and altogether it was a lazy, basking
day. Quail whistled to their young from the thicketed hillside
behind the house. there was a gentle cooing of pigeons, and from
the green depths of the big canon arose the sobbing wood note of
a mourning dove. Once, there was a warning chorus from the
foraging hens and a wild rush for cover, as a hawk, high in the
blue, cast its drifting shadow along the ground.
It was this, perhaps, that aroused old hunting memories in Wolf.
At any rate, Dede and Daylight became aware of excitement in the
paddock, and saw harmlessly reenacted a grim old tragedy of the
Younger World. Curiously eager, velvet-footed and silent as a
ghost, sliding and gliding and crouching, the dog that was mere
domesticated wolf stalked the enticing bit of young life that Mab
had brought so recently into the world. And the mare, her own
ancient instincts aroused and quivering, circled ever between the
foal and this menace of the wild young days when all her ancestry
had known fear of him and his hunting brethren. Once, she
whirled and tried to kick him, but usually she strove to strike
him with her fore-hoofs, or rushed upon him with open mouth and
ears laid back in an effort to crunch his backbone between her
teeth. And the wolf-dog, with ears flattened down and crouching,
would slide silkily away, only to circle up to the foal from the
other side and give cause to the mare for new alarm. Then
Daylight, urged on by Dede's solicitude, uttered a low
threatening cry; and Wolf, drooping and sagging in all the body
of him in token of his instant return to man's allegiance, slunk
off behind the barn.
It was a few minutes later that Daylight, breaking off from his
reading to change the streams of irrigation, found that the water
had ceased flowing. He shouldered a pick and shovel, took a
hammer and a pipe-wrench from the tool-house, and returned to
Dede on the porch.
"I reckon I'll have to go down and dig the pipe out," he told
her. "It's that slide that's threatened all winter. I guess
she's come down at last."
"Don't you read ahead, now," he warned, as he passed around the
house and took the trail that led down the wall of the canon.
Halfway down the trail, he came upon the slide. It was a small
affair, only a few tons of earth and crumbling rock; but,
starting from fifty feet above, it had struck the water pipe with
force sufficient to break it at a connection. Before proceeding
to work, he glanced up the path of the slide, and he glanced with
the eye of the earth-trained miner. And he saw what made his
eyes startle and cease for the moment from questing farther.
"Hello," he communed aloud, "look who's here."
His glance moved on up the steep broken surface, and across it
from side to side. Here and there, in places, small twisted
manzanitas were rooted precariously, but in the main, save for
weeds and grass, that portion of the canon was bare. There were
signs of a surface that had shifted often as the rains poured a
flow of rich eroded soil from above over the lip of the canon.
"A true fissure vein, or I never saw one," he proclaimed softly.
And as the old hunting instincts had aroused that day in the
wolf-dog, so in him recrudesced all the old hot desire of
gold-hunting. Dropping the hammer and pipe-wrench, but retaining
pick and shovel, he climbed up the slide to where a vague line of
outputting but mostly soil-covered rock could be seen. It was
all but indiscernible, but his practised eye had sketched the
hidden formation which it signified. Here and there, along this
wall of the vein, he attacked the crumbling rock with the pick
and shoveled the encumbering soil away. Several times he
examined this rock. So soft was some of it that he could break
it in his fingers. Shifting a dozen feet higher up, he again
attacked with pick and shovel. And this time, when he rubbed the
soil from a chunk of rock and looked, he straightened up
suddenly, gasping with delight. And then, like a deer at a
drinking pool in fear of its enemies, he flung a quick glance
around to see if any eye were gazing upon him. He grinned at his
own foolishness and returned to his examination of the chunk. A
slant of sunlight fell on it, and it was all aglitter with tiny
specks of unmistakable free gold.
"From the grass roots down," he muttered in an awestricken voice,
as he swung his pick into the yielding surface.
He seemed to undergo a transformation. No quart of cocktails had
ever put such a flame in his cheeks nor such a fire in his eyes.
As he worked, he was caught up in the old passion that had ruled
most of his life. A frenzy seized him that markedly increased
from moment to moment. He worked like a madman, till he panted
from his exertions and the sweat dripped from his face to the
ground. He quested across the face of the slide to the opposite
wall of the vein and back again. And, midway, he dug down
through the red volcanic earth that had washed from the
disintegrating hill above, until he uncovered quartz, rotten
quartz, that broke and crumbled in his hands and showed to be
alive with free gold.
Sometimes he started small slides of earth that covered up his
work and compelled him to dig again. Once, he was swept fifty
feet down the canon-side; but he floundered and scrambled up
again without pausing for breath. He hit upon quartz that was so
rotten that it was almost like clay, and here the gold was richer
than ever. It was a veritable treasure chamber. For a hundred
feet up and down he traced the walls of the vein. He even
climbed over the canon-lip to look along the brow of the hill for
signs of the outcrop. But that could wait, and he hurried back
to his find.
He toiled on in the same mad haste, until exhaustion and an
intolerable ache in his back compelled him to pause. He
straightened up with even a richer piece of gold-laden quartz.
Stooping, the sweat from his forehead had fallen to the ground.
It now ran into his eyes, blinding him. He wiped it from him
with the back of his hand and returned to a scrutiny of the gold.
It would run thirty thousand to the ton, fifty thousand, anything
-
-he knew that. And as he gazed upon the yellow lure, and
panted for air, and wiped the sweat away, his quick vision leaped
and set to work. He saw the spur-track that must run up from the
valley and across the upland pastures, and he ran the grades and
built the bridge that would span the canon, until it was real
before his eyes. Across the canon was the place for the mill,
and there he erected it; and he erected, also, the endless chain
of buckets, suspended from a cable and operated by gravity, that
would carry the ore across the canon to the quartz-crusher.
Likewise, the whole mine grew before him and beneath him-tunnels,
shafts, and galleries, and hoisting plants. The blasts of the
miners were in his ears, and from across the canon he could hear
the roar of the stamps. The hand that held the lump of quartz
was trembling, and there was a tired, nervous palpitation
apparently in the pit of his stomach. It came to him abruptly
that what he wanted was a drink--whiskey, cocktails, anything, a
drink. And even then, with this new hot yearning for the alcohol
upon him, he heard, faint and far, drifting down the green abyss
of the canon, Dede's voice, crying:--
"Here, chick, chick, chick, chick, chick! Here, chick, chick,
chick!"
He was astounded at the lapse of time. She had left her sewing
on the porch and was feeding the chickens preparatory to getting
supper. The afternoon was gone. He could not conceive that he
had been away that long.
Again came the call: "Here, chick, chick, chick, chick, chick!
Here, chick, chick, chick!"
It was the way she always called--first five, and then three. He
had long since noticed it. And from these thoughts of her arose
other thoughts that caused a great fear slowly to grow in his
face. For it seemed to him that he had almost lost her. Not
once had he thought of her in those frenzied hours, and for that
much, at least, had she truly been lost to him.
He dropped the piece of quartz, slid down the slide, and started
up the trail, running heavily. At the edge of the clearing he
eased down and almost crept to a point of vantage whence he could
peer out, himself unseen. She was feeding the chickens, tossing
to them handfuls of grain and laughing at their antics.
The sight of her seemed to relieve the panic fear into which he
had been flung, and he turned and ran back down the trail. Again
he climbed the slide, but this time he climbed higher, carrying
the pick and shovel with him. And again he toiled frenziedly,
but this time with a different purpose. He worked artfully,
loosing slide after slide of the red soil and sending it
streaming down and covering up all he had uncovered, hiding from
the light of day the treasure he had discovered. He even went
into the woods and scooped armfuls of last year's fallen leaves
which he scattered over the slide. But this he gave up as a vain
task; and he sent more slides of soil down upon the scene of his
labor, until no sign remained of the out-jutting walls of the
vein.
Next he repaired the broken pipe, gathered his tools together,
and started up the trail. He walked slowly, feeling a great
weariness, as of a man who had passed through a frightful crisis.
He put the tools away, took a great drink of the water that again
flowed through the pipes, and sat down on the bench by the open
kitchen door. Dede was inside, preparing supper, and the sound
of her footsteps gave him a vast content.
He breathed the balmy mountain air in great gulps, like a diver
fresh-risen from the sea. And, as he drank in the air, he gazed
with all his eyes at the clouds and sky and valley, as if he were
drinking in that, too, along with the air.
Dede did not know he had come back, and at times he turned his
head and stole glances in at her--at her efficient hands, at the
bronze of her brown hair that smouldered with fire when she
crossed the path of sunshine that streamed through the window, at
the promise of her figure that shot through him a pang most
strangely sweet and sweetly dear. He heard her approaching the
door, and kept his head turned resolutely toward the valley. And
next, he thrilled, as he had always thrilled, when he felt the
caressing gentleness of her fingers through his hair.
"I didn't know you were back," she said. "Was it serious?"
"Pretty bad, that slide," he answered, still gazing away and
thrilling to her touch. "More serious than I reckoned. But I've
got the plan. Do you know what I'm going to do?--I'm going to
plant eucalyptus all over it. They'll hold it. I'll plant them
thick as grass, so that even a hungry rabbit can't squeeze
between them; and when they get their roots agoing, nothing in
creation will ever move that dirt again."
"Why, is it as bad as that?"
He shook his head.
"Nothing exciting. But I'd sure like to see any blamed old slide
get the best of me, that's all. I'm going to seal that slide
down so that it'll stay there for a million years. And when the
last trump sounds, and Sonoma Mountain and all the other
mountains pass into nothingness, that old slide will be still
a-standing there, held up by the roots."
He passed his arm around her and pulled her down on his knees.
"Say, little woman, you sure miss a lot by living here on the
ranch--music, and theatres, and such things. Don't you ever have
a hankering to drop it all and go back?"
So great was his anxiety that he dared not look at her, and when
she laughed and shook her head he was aware of a great relief.
Also, he noted the undiminished youth that rang through that same
old-time boyish laugh of hers.
"Say," he said, with sudden fierceness, "don't you go fooling
around that slide until after I get the trees in and rooted.
It's mighty dangerous, and I sure can't afford to lose you now."
He drew her lips to his and kissed her hungrily and passionately.
"What a lover!" she said; and pride in him and in her own
womanhood was in her voice.
"Look at that, Dede." He removed one encircling arm and swept
it in a wide gesture over the valley and the mountains beyond.
"The Valley of the Moon--a good name, a good name. Do you know,
when I look out over it all, and think of you and of all it
means, it kind of makes me ache in the throat, and I have things
in my heart I can't find the words to say, and I have a feeling
that I can almost understand Browning and those other high-flying
poet-fellows. Look at Hood Mountain there, just where the sun's
striking. It was down in that crease that we found the spring."
"And that was the night you didn't milk the cows till ten
o'clock," she laughed. "And if you keep me here much longer,
supper won't be any earlier than it was that night."
Both arose from the bench, and Daylight caught up the milk-pail
from the nail by the door. He paused a moment longer to look out
over the valley.
"It's sure grand," he said.
"It's sure grand," she echoed, laughing joyously at him and with
him and herself and all the world, as she passed in through the door.
And Daylight, like the old man he once had met, himself went down
the hill through the fires of sunset with a milk pail on his arm.