for chechaquos. Well,
there's the summer and fall rush of 1897 to commence with. What are
you-all going to do about it?"

"What are you going to do about it?" a friend demanded.

"Nothing," he answered. "I've sure already done it. I've got a dozen
gangs strung out up the Yukon getting out logs. You-all'll see their
rafts coming down after the river breaks. Cabins! They sure will be
worth what a man can pay for them next fall. Lumber! It will sure go to
top-notch. I've got two sawmills freighting in over the passes.
They'll come down as soon as the lakes open up. And if you-all are
thinking of needing lumber, I'll make you-all contracts right
now--three hundred dollars a thousand, undressed."

Corner lots in desirable locations sold that winter for from ten to
thirty thousand dollars. Daylight sent word out over the trails and
passes for the newcomers to bring down log-rafts, and, as a result, the
summer of 1897 saw his sawmills working day and night, on three shifts,
and still he had logs left over with which to build cabins. These
cabins, land included, sold at from one to several thousand dollars.
Two-story log buildings, in the business part of town, brought him from
forty to fifty thousand dollars apiece. These fresh accretions of
capital were immediately invested in other ventures. He turned gold
over and over, until everything that he touched seemed to turn to gold.

But that first wild winter of Carmack's strike taught Daylight many
things. Despite the prodigality of his nature, he had poise. He
watched the lavish waste of the mushroom millionaires, and failed quite
to understand it. According to his nature and outlook, it was all very
well to toss an ante away in a night's frolic. That was what he had
done the night of the poker-game in Circle City when he lost fifty
thousand--all that he possessed. But he had looked on that fifty
thousand as a mere ante. When it came to millions, it was different.
Such a fortune was a stake, and was not to be sown on bar-room floors,
literally sown, flung broadcast out of the moosehide sacks by drunken
millionaires who had lost all sense of proportion. There was McMann,
who ran up a single bar-room bill of thirty-eight thousand dollars; and
Jimmie the Rough, who spent one hundred thousand a month for four
months in riotous living, and then fell down drunk in the snow one
March night and was frozen to death; and Swiftwater Bill, who, after
spending three va