luable claims in an extravagance of debauchery,
borrowed three thousand dollars with which to leave the country, and
who, out of this sum, because the lady-love that had jilted him liked
eggs, cornered the one hundred and ten dozen eggs on the Dawson market,
paying twenty-four dollars a dozen for them and promptly feeding them
to the wolf-dogs.

Champagne sold at from forty to fifty dollars a quart, and canned
oyster stew at fifteen dollars. Daylight indulged in no such luxuries.
He did not mind treating a bar-room of men to whiskey at fifty cents a
drink, but there was somewhere in his own extravagant nature a sense of
fitness and arithmetic that revolted against paying fifteen dollars for
the contents of an oyster can. On the other hand, he possibly spent
more money in relieving hard-luck cases than did the wildest of the new
millionaires on insane debauchery. Father Judge, of the hospital,
could have told of far more important donations than that first ten
sacks of flour. And old-timers who came to Daylight invariably went
away relieved according to their need. But fifty dollars for a quart of
fizzy champagne! That was appalling.

And yet he still, on occasion, made one of his old-time hell-roaring
nights. But he did so for different reasons. First, it was expected of
him because it had been his way in the old days. And second, he could
afford it. But he no longer cared quite so much for that form of
diversion. He had developed, in a new way, the taste for power. It
had become a lust with him. By far the wealthiest miner in Alaska, he
wanted to be still wealthier. It was a big game he was playing in, and
he liked it better than any other game. In a way, the part he played
was creative. He was doing something. And at no time, striking
another chord of his nature, could he take the joy in a million-dollar
Eldorado dump that was at all equivalent to the joy he took in watching
his two sawmills working and the big down river log-rafts swinging into
the bank in the big eddy just above Moosehide Mountain. Gold, even on
the scales, was, after all, an abstraction. It represented things and
the power to do. But the sawmills were the things themselves, concrete
and tangible, and they were things that were a means to the doing of
more things. They were dreams come true, hard and indubitable
realizations of fairy gossamers.

With the summer rush from the Outside came special correspondents for
the big newspa