t's mouth. Here he was already locked in grapples with the
great Guggenhammers, and winning, fiercely winning. Possibly the
severest struggle was waged on Ophir, the veriest of moose-pastures,
whose low-grade dirt was valuable only because of its vastness. The
ownership of a block of seven claims in the heart of it gave Daylight
his grip and they could not come to terms. The Guggenhammer experts
concluded that it was too big for him to handle, and when they gave him
an ultimatum to that effect he accepted and bought them out.

The plan was his own, but he sent down to the States for competent
engineers to carry it out. In the Rinkabilly watershed, eighty miles
away, he built his reservoir, and for eighty miles the huge wooden
conduit carried the water across country to Ophir. Estimated at three
millions, the reservoir and conduit cost nearer four. Nor did he stop
with this. Electric power plants were installed, and his workings were
lighted as well as run by electricity. Other sourdoughs, who had
struck it rich in excess of all their dreams, shook their heads
gloomily, warned him that he would go broke, and declined to invest in
so extravagant a venture.

But Daylight smiled, and sold out the remainder of his town-site
holdings. He sold at the right time, at the height of the placer boom.
When he prophesied to his old cronies, in the Moosehorn Saloon, that
within five years town lots in Dawson could not be given away, while
the cabins would be chopped up for firewood, he was laughed at roundly,
and assured that the mother-lode would be found ere that time. But he
went ahead, when his need for lumber was finished, selling out his
sawmills as well. Likewise, he began to get rid of his scattered
holdings on the various creeks, and without thanks to any one he
finished his conduit, built his dredges, imported his machinery, and
made the gold of Ophir immediately accessible. And he, who five years
before had crossed over the divide from Indian River and threaded the
silent wilderness, his dogs packing Indian fashion, himself living
Indian fashion on straight moose meat, now heard the hoarse whistles
calling his hundreds of laborers to work, and watched them toil under
the white glare of the arc-lamps.

But having done the thing, he was ready to depart. And when he let the
word go out, the Guggenhammers vied with the English concerns and with
a new French company in bidding for Ophir and all its plant. The
G