Burning Daylight | Page 3

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BURNING DAYLIGHT
by Jack London


CHAPTER I
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PART I
CHAPTER I
It was a quiet night in the Shovel. At the bar, which ranged along one
side of the large chinked-log room, leaned half a dozen men, two of
whom were discussing the relative merits of spruce-tea and lime-juice
as remedies for scurvy. They argued with an air of depression and with
intervals of morose silence. The other men scarcely heeded them. In a

row, against the opposite wall, were the gambling games. The
crap-table was deserted. One lone man was playing at the faro-table.
The roulette-ball was not even spinning, and the gamekeeper stood by
the roaring, red-hot stove, talking with the young, dark-eyed woman,
comely of face and figure, who was known from Juneau to Fort Yukon
as the Virgin. Three men sat in at stud-poker, but they played with
small chips and without enthusiasm, while there were no onlookers. On
the floor of the dancing-room, which opened out at the rear, three
couples were waltzing drearily to the strains of a violin and a piano.
Circle City was not deserted, nor was money tight. The miners were in
from Moseyed Creek and the other diggings to the west, the summer
washing had been good, and the men's pouches were heavy with dust
and nuggets. The Klondike had not yet been discovered, nor had the
miners of the Yukon learned the possibilities of deep digging and
wood-firing. No work was done in the winter, and they made a practice
of hibernating in the large camps like Circle City during the long Arctic
night. Time was heavy on their hands, their pouches were well filled,
and the only social diversion to be found was in the saloons. Yet the
Shovel was practically deserted, and the Virgin, standing by the stove,
yawned with uncovered mouth and said to Charley Bates:-
"If something don't happen soon, I'm gin' to bed. What's the matter with
the camp, anyway? Everybody dead?"
Bates did not even trouble to reply, but went on moodily rolling a
cigarette. Dan MacDonald, pioneer saloonman and gambler on the
upper Yukon, owner and proprietor of the Tivoli and all its games,
wandered forlornly across the great vacant space of floor and joined the
two at the stove.
"Anybody dead?" the Virgin asked him.
"Looks like it," was the answer.
"Then it must be the whole camp," she said with an air of finality and
with another yawn.

MacDonald grinned and nodded, and opened his mouth to speak, when
the front door swung wide and a man appeared in the light. A rush of
frost, turned to vapor by the heat of the room, swirled about him to his
knees and poured on across the floor, growing thinner and thinner, and
perishing a dozen feet from the stove. Taking the wisp broom from its
nail inside the door, the newcomer brushed the snow from his
moccasins and high German socks. He would have appeared a large
man had not a huge French-Canadian stepped up to him from the bar
and gripped his hand.
"Hello, Daylight!" was his greeting. "By Gar, you good for sore eyes!"
"Hello, Louis, when did you-all blow in?" returned the newcomer.
"Come up and have a drink and tell us all about Bone Creek. Why,
dog-gone you-all, shake again. Where's that pardner of yours? I'm
looking for him."
Another huge man detached himself from the bar to shake hands. Olaf
Henderson and French Louis, partners together on Bone Creek, were
the two largest men in the country, and though they were but half a
head taller than the newcomer, between them he was dwarfed
completely.
"Hello, Olaf, you're my meat, savvee that," said the one called Daylight.
"To-morrow's my birthday, and I'm going to put you-all on your
back--savvee? And you, too, Louis. I can put you-all on your back on
my birthday--savvee? Come up and drink, Olaf, and I'll tell you-all
about it."
The arrival of the newcomer seemed to