ngs. Why,
d'ye know, he gave me such a feeling that he knew everything, that I
was plumb ashamed of myself."

"I guess I could give him cards and spades when it comes to driving a
dog-team, though," Daylight observed, after a meditative pause. "And I
really believe I could put him on to a few wrinkles in poker and placer
mining, and maybe in paddling a birch canoe. And maybe I stand a
better chance to learn the game he's been playing all his life than he
would stand of learning the game I played up North."

CHAPTER II

It was not long afterward that Daylight came on to New York. A letter
from John Dowsett had been the cause--a simple little typewritten
letter of several lines. But Daylight had thrilled as he read it. He
remembered the thrill that was his, a callow youth of fifteen, when, in
Tempas Butte, through lack of a fourth man, Tom Galsworthy, the
gambler, had said, "Get in, Kid; take a hand." That thrill was his
now. The bald, typewritten sentences seemed gorged with mystery. "Our
Mr. Howison will call upon you at your hotel. He is to be trusted. We
must not be seen together. You will understand after we have had our
talk." Daylight conned the words over and over. That was it. The big
game had arrived, and it looked as if he were being invited to sit in
and take a hand. Surely, for no other reason would one man so
peremptorily invite another man to make a journey across the continent.

They met--thanks to "our" Mr. Howison,--up the Hudson, in a magnificent
country home. Daylight, according to instructions, arrived in a
private motor-car which had been furnished him. Whose car it was he did
not know any more than did he know the owner of the house, with its
generous, rolling, tree-studded lawns. Dowsett was already there, and
another man whom Daylight recognized before the introduction was begun.
It was Nathaniel Letton, and none other. Daylight had seen his face a
score of times in the magazines and newspapers, and read about his
standing in the financial world and about his endowed University of
Daratona. He, likewise, struck Daylight as a man of power, though he
was puzzled in that he could find no likeness to Dowsett. Except in
the matter of cleanness,--a cleanness that seemed to go down to the
deepest fibers of him,--Nathaniel Letton was unlike the other in every
particular. Thin to emaciation, he seemed a cold flame of a man, a man
of a mysterious, chemic sort of flame, who, unde