put many a strong man on his back. But after a few
minutes it was clear that he, and not Daylight, was going.

For a while longer they spun around, and then Daylight suddenly stood
still, released his partner, and stepped back, reeling himself, and
fluttering his hands aimlessly, as if to support himself against the
air. But Davis, a giddy smile of consternation on his face, gave
sideways, turned in an attempt to recover balance, and pitched headlong
to the floor. Still reeling and staggering and clutching at the air
with his hands, Daylight caught the nearest girl and started on in a
waltz. Again he had done the big thing. Weary from two thousand miles
over the ice and a run that day of seventy miles, he had whirled a
fresh man down, and that man Ben Davis.

Daylight loved the high places, and though few high places there were
in his narrow experience, he had made a point of sitting in the highest
he had ever glimpsed. The great world had never heard his name, but it
was known far and wide in the vast silent North, by whites and Indians
and Eskimos, from Bering Sea to the Passes, from the head reaches of
remotest rivers to the tundra shore of Point Barrow. Desire for
mastery was strong in him, and it was all one whether wrestling with
the elements themselves, with men, or with luck in a gambling game. It
was all a game, life and its affairs. And he was a gambler to the
core. Risk and chance were meat and drink. True, it was not
altogether blind, for he applied wit and skill and strength; but behind
it all was the everlasting Luck, the thing that at times turned on its
votaries and crushed the wise while it blessed the fools--Luck, the
thing all men sought and dreamed to conquer. And so he. Deep in his
life-processes Life itself sang the siren song of its own majesty, ever
a-whisper and urgent, counseling him that he could achieve more than
other men, win out where they failed, ride to success where they
perished. It was the urge of Life healthy and strong, unaware of
frailty and decay, drunken with sublime complacence, ego-mad, enchanted
by its own mighty optimism.

And ever in vaguest whisperings and clearest trumpet-calls came the
message that sometime, somewhere, somehow, he would run Luck down, make
himself the master of Luck, and tie it and brand it as his own. When
he played poker, the whisper was of four aces and royal flushes. When
he prospected, it was of gold in the grass-roots, gold on bed-ro