red, he was a prize for most normal women.
But when to his natural excellences were added the romance that linked
with his name and the enormous wealth that was his, practically every
free woman he encountered measured him with an appraising and delighted
eye, to say nothing of more than one woman who was not free. Other men
might have been spoiled by this and led to lose their heads; but the
only effect on him was to increase his fright. As a result he refused
most invitations to houses where women might be met, and frequented
bachelor boards and the Moosehorn Saloon, which had no dance-hall
attached.

CHAPTER XIII

Six thousand spent the winter of 1897 in Dawson, work on the creeks
went on apace, while beyond the passes it was reported that one hundred
thousand more were waiting for the spring. Late one brief afternoon,
Daylight, on the benches between French Hill and Skookum Hill, caught a
wider vision of things. Beneath him lay the richest part of Eldorado
Creek, while up and down Bonanza he could see for miles. It was a
scene of a vast devastation. The hills, to their tops, had been shorn
of trees, and their naked sides showed signs of goring and perforating
that even the mantle of snow could not hide. Beneath him, in every
direction were the cabins of men. But not many men were visible. A
blanket of smoke filled the valleys and turned the gray day to
melancholy twilight. Smoke arose from a thousand holes in the snow,
where, deep down on bed-rock, in the frozen muck and gravel, men crept
and scratched and dug, and ever built more fires to break the grip of
the frost. Here and there, where new shafts were starting, these fires
flamed redly. Figures of men crawled out of the holes, or disappeared
into them, or, on raised platforms of hand-hewn timber, windlassed the
thawed gravel to the surface, where it immediately froze. The wreckage
of the spring washing appeared everywhere--piles of sluice-boxes,
sections of elevated flumes, huge water-wheels,--all the debris of an
army of gold-mad men.

"It-all's plain gophering," Daylight muttered aloud.

He looked at the naked hills and realized the enormous wastage of wood
that had taken place. From this bird's-eye view he realized the
monstrous confusion of their excited workings. It was a gigantic
inadequacy. Each worked for himself, and the result was chaos. In
this richest of diggings it cost out by their feverish, unthinking
methods another dolla