ve of mush-ice on the Yukon, and when she offered
a thousand dollars for ten sacks and could find no sellers, he sent the
flour to her as a present without ever seeing her. In the same way ten
sacks were sent to the lone Catholic priest who was starting the first
hospital.

His generosity was lavish. Others called it insane. At a time when,
riding his hunch, he was getting half a million for half a sack of
flour, it was nothing less than insanity to give twenty whole sacks to
a dancing-girl and a priest. But it was his way. Money was only a
marker. It was the game that counted with him. The possession of
millions made little change in him, except that he played the game more
passionately. Temperate as he had always been, save on rare occasions,
now that he had the wherewithal for unlimited drinks and had daily
access to them, he drank even less. The most radical change lay in
that, except when on trail, he no longer did his own cooking. A
broken-down miner lived in his log cabin with him and now cooked for
him. But it was the same food: bacon, beans, flour, prunes, dried
fruits, and rice. He still dressed as formerly: overalls, German socks,
moccasins, flannel shirt, fur cap, and blanket coat. He did not take
up with cigars, which cost, the cheapest, from half a dollar to a
dollar each. The same Bull Durham and brown-paper cigarette,
hand-rolled, contented him. It was true that he kept more dogs, and
paid enormous prices for them. They were not a luxury, but a matter of
business. He needed speed in his travelling and stampeding. And by
the same token, he hired a cook. He was too busy to cook for himself,
that was all. It was poor business, playing for millions, to spend
time building fires and boiling water.

Dawson grew rapidly that winter of 1896. Money poured in on Daylight
from the sale of town lots. He promptly invested it where it would
gather more. In fact, he played the dangerous game of pyramiding, and
no more perilous pyramiding than in a placer camp could be imagined.
But he played with his eyes wide open.

"You-all just wait till the news of this strike reaches the Outside,"
he told his old-timer cronies in the Moosehorn Saloon. "The news won't
get out till next spring. Then there's going to be three rushes. A
summer rush of men coming in light; a fall rush of men with outfits;
and a spring rush, the next year after that, of fifty thousand.
You-all won't be able to see the landscape