by Jack London
CHAPTER XII
Despite his many sources of revenue, Daylight's pyramiding kept himpinched for cash throughout the first winter. The pay-gravel, thawedon bed-rock and hoisted to the surface, immediately froze again. Thushis dumps, containing several millions of gold, were inaccessible. Notuntil the returning sun thawed the dumps and melted the water to washthem was he able to handle the gold they contained. And then he foundhimself with a surplus of gold, deposited in the two newly organizedbanks; and he was promptly besieged by men and groups of men to enlisthis capital in their enterprises.
But he elected to play his own game, and he entered combinations onlywhen they were generally defensive or offensive. Thus, though he hadpaid the highest wages, he joined the Mine-owners' Association,engineered the fight, and effectually curbed the growinginsubordination of the wage-earners. Times had changed. The old dayswere gone forever. This was a new era, and Daylight, the wealthymine-owner, was loyal to his class affiliations. It was true, theold-timers who worked for him, in order to be saved from the club ofthe organized owners, were made foremen over the gang of chechaquos;but this, with Daylight, was a matter of heart, not head. In his hearthe could not forget the old days, while with his head he played theeconomic game according to the latest and most practical methods.
But outside of such group-combinations of exploiters, he refused tobind himself to any man's game. He was playing a great lone hand, andhe needed all his money for his own backing. The newly foundedstock-exchange interested him keenly. He had never before seen such aninstitution, but he was quick to see its virtues and to utilize it.Most of all, it was gambling, and on many an occasion not necessary forthe advancement of his own schemes, he, as he called it, went thestock-exchange a flutter, out of sheer wantonness and fun.
"It sure beats faro," was his comment one day, when, after keeping theDawson speculators in a fever for a week by alternate bulling andbearing, he showed his hand and cleaned up what would have been afortune to any other man.
Other men, having made their strike, had headed south for the States,taking a furlough from the grim Arctic battle. But, asked when he wasgoing Outside, Daylight always laughed and said when he had finishedplaying his hand. He also added that a man was a fool to quit a gamejust when a winning hand had been dealt him.
It was held by the thousands of hero-worshipping chechaquos thatDaylight was a man absolutely without fear. But Bettles and DanMacDonald and other sourdoughs shook their heads and laughed as theymentioned women. And they were right. He had always been afraid ofthem from the time, himself a lad of seventeen, when Queen Anne, ofJuneau, made open and ridiculous love to him. For that matter, henever had known women. Born in a mining-camp where they were rare andmysterious, having no sisters, his mother dying while he was an infant,he had never been in contact with them. True, running away from QueenAnne, he had later encountered them on the Yukon and cultivated anacquaintance with them--the pioneer ones who crossed the passes on thetrail of the men who had opened up the first diggings. But no lamb hadever walked with a wolf in greater fear and trembling than had hewalked with them. It was a matter of masculine pride that he shouldwalk with them, and he had done so in fair seeming; but women hadremained to him a closed book, and he preferred a game of solo orseven-up any time.
And now, known as the King of the Klondike, carrying several otherroyal titles, such as Eldorado King, Bonanza King, the Lumber Baron,and the Prince of the Stampeders, not to omit the proudest appellationof all, namely, the Father of the Sourdoughs, he was more afraid ofwomen than ever. As never before they held out their arms to him, andmore women were flocking into the country day by day. It mattered notwhether he sat at dinner in the gold commissioner's house, called forthe drinks in a dancehall, or submitted to an interview from the womanrepresentative of the New York Sun, one and all of them held out theirarms.
There was one exception, and that was Freda, the girl that danced, andto whom he had given the flour. She was the only woman in whosecompany he felt at ease, for she alone never reached out her arms. Andyet it was from her that he was destined to receive next to hisseverest fright. It came about in the fall of 1897. He was returningfrom one of his dashes, this time to inspect Henderson, a creek thatentered the Yukon just below the Stewart. Winter had come on with arush, and he fought his way down the Yukon seventy miles in a frailPeterborough canoe in the midst of a run of mush-ice. Hugging therim-ice that had already solidly formed, he shot across the ice-spewingmouth of the Klondike just in time to see a lone man dancing excitedlyon the rim and pointing into the water. Next, he saw the fur-clad bodyof a woman, face under, sinking in the midst of the driving mush-ice.A lane opening in the swirl of the current, it was a matter of secondsto drive the canoe to the spot, reach to the shoulder in the water, anddraw the woman gingerly to the canoe's side. It was Freda. And allmight yet have been well with him, had she not, later, when broughtback to consciousness, blazed at him with angry blue eyes and demanded:"Why did you? Oh, why did you?"
This worried him. In the nights that followed, instead of sinkingimmediately to sleep as was his wont, he lay awake, visioning her faceand that blue blaze of wrath, and conning her words over and over.They rang with sincerity. The reproach was genuine. She had meantjust what she said. And still he pondered.
The next time he encountered her she had turned away from him angrilyand contemptuously. And yet again, she came to him to beg his pardon,and she dropped a hint of a man somewhere, sometime,--she said nothow,--who had left her with no desire to live. Her speech was frank,but incoherent, and all he gleaned from it was that the event, whateverit was, had happened years before. Also, he gleaned that she had lovedthe man.
That was the thing--love. It caused the trouble. It was more terriblethan frost or famine. Women were all very well, in themselves good tolook upon and likable; but along came this thing called love, and theywere seared to the bone by it, made so irrational that one could neverguess what they would do next.
This Freda-woman was a splendid creature, full-bodied, beautiful, andnobody's fool; but love had come along and soured her on the world,driving her to the Klondike and to suicide so compellingly that she wasmade to hate the man that saved her life.
Well, he had escaped love so far, just as he had escaped smallpox; yetthere it was, as contagious as smallpox, and a whole lot worse inrunning its course. It made men and women do such fearful andunreasonable things. It was like delirium tremens, only worse. And ifhe, Daylight, caught it, he might have it as badly as any of them. Itwas lunacy, stark lunacy, and contagious on top of it all. A halfdozen young fellows were crazy over Freda. They all wanted to marryher. Yet she, in turn, was crazy over that some other fellow on theother side of the world, and would have nothing to do with them.
But it was left to the Virgin to give him his final fright. She wasfound one morning dead in her cabin. A shot through the head had doneit, and she had left no message, no explanation. Then came the talk.Some wit, voicing public opinion, called it a case of too muchDaylight. She had killed herself because of him. Everybody knew this,and said so. The correspondents wrote it up, and once more BurningDaylight, King of the Klondike, was sensationally featured in theSunday supplements of the United States. The Virgin had straightenedup, so the feature-stories ran, and correctly so. Never had sheentered a Dawson City dance-hall. When she first arrived from CircleCity, she had earned her living by washing clothes. Next, she hadbought a sewing-machine and made men's drill parkas, fur caps, andmoosehide mittens. Then she had gone as a clerk into the First YukonBank. All this, and more, was known and told, though one and all wereagreed that Daylight, while the cause, had been the innocent cause ofher untimely end.
And the worst of it was that Daylight knew it was true. Always wouldhe remember that last night he had seen her. He had thought nothing ofit at the time; but, looking back, he was haunted by every little thingthat had happened. In the light of the tragic event, he couldunderstand everyth
ing--her quietness, that calm certitude as if allvexing questions of living had been smoothed out and were gone, andthat certain ethereal sweetness about all that she had said and donethat had been almost maternal. He remembered the way she had looked athim, how she had laughed when he narrated Mickey Dolan's mistake instaking the fraction on Skookum Gulch. Her laughter had been lightlyjoyous, while at the same time it had lacked its oldtime robustness.Not that she had been grave or subdued. On the contrary, she had beenso patently content, so filled with peace.
She had fooled him, fool that he was. He had even thought that nightthat her feeling for him had passed, and he had taken delight in thethought, and caught visions of the satisfying future friendship thatwould be theirs with this perturbing love out of the way.
And then, when he stood at the door, cap in hand, and said good night.It had struck him at the time as a funny and embarrassing thing, herbending over his hand and kissing it. He had felt like a fool, but heshivered now when he looked back on it and felt again the touch of herlips on his hand. She was saying good-by, an eternal good-by, and hehad never guessed. At that very moment, and for all the moments of theevening, coolly and deliberately, as he well knew her way, she had beenresolved to die. If he had only known it! Untouched by the contagiousmalady himself, nevertheless he would have married her if he had hadthe slightest inkling of what she contemplated. And yet he knew,furthermore, that hers was a certain stiff-kneed pride that would nothave permitted her to accept marriage as an act of philanthropy. Therehad really been no saving her, after all. The love-disease had fastenedupon her, and she had been doomed from the first to perish of it.
Her one possible chance had been that he, too, should have caught it.And he had failed to catch it. Most likely, if he had, it would havebeen from Freda or some other woman. There was Dartworthy, the collegeman who had staked the rich fraction on Bonanza above Discovery.Everybody knew that old Doolittle's daughter, Bertha, was madly in lovewith him. Yet, when he contracted the disease, of all women, it hadbeen with the wife of Colonel Walthstone, the great Guggenhammer miningexpert. Result, three lunacy cases: Dartworthy selling out his mine forone-tenth its value; the poor woman sacrificing her respectability andsheltered nook in society to flee with him in an open boat down theYukon; and Colonel Walthstone, breathing murder and destruction, takingout after them in another open boat. The whole impending tragedy hadmoved on down the muddy Yukon, passing Forty Mile and Circle and losingitself in the wilderness beyond. But there it was, love, disorganizingmen's and women's lives, driving toward destruction and death, turningtopsy-turvy everything that was sensible and considerate, making bawdsor suicides out of virtuous women, and scoundrels and murderers out ofmen who had always been clean and square.
For the first time in his life Daylight lost his nerve. He was badlyand avowedly frightened. Women were terrible creatures, and thelove-germ was especially plentiful in their neighborhood.
And they were so reckless, so devoid of fear. THEY were not frightenedby what had happened to the Virgin. They held out their arms to himmore seductively than ever. Even without his fortune, reckoned as amere man, just past thirty, magnificently strong and equallygood-looking and good-natured, he was a prize for most normal women.But when to his natural excellences were added the romance that linkedwith his name and the enormous wealth that was his, practically everyfree woman he encountered measured him with an appraising and delightedeye, to say nothing of more than one woman who was not free. Other menmight have been spoiled by this and led to lose their heads; but theonly effect on him was to increase his fright. As a result he refusedmost invitations to houses where women might be met, and frequentedbachelor boards and the Moosehorn Saloon, which had no dance-hallattached.