r a glacier-like
exterior, conveyed, somehow, the impression of the ardent heat of a
thousand suns. His large gray eyes were mainly responsible for this
feeling, and they blazed out feverishly from what was almost a
death's-head, so thin was the face, the skin of which was a ghastly,
dull, dead white. Not more than fifty, thatched with a sparse growth
of iron-gray hair, he looked several times the age of Dowsett. Yet
Nathaniel Letton possessed control--Daylight could see that plainly.
He was a thin-faced ascetic, living in a state of high, attenuated
calm--a molten planet under a transcontinental ice sheet. And yet,
above all most of all, Daylight was impressed by the terrific and
almost awful cleanness of the man. There was no dross in him. He had
all the seeming of having been purged by fire. Daylight had the
feeling that a healthy man-oath would be a deadly offence to his ears,
a sacrilege and a blasphemy.

They drank--that is, Nathaniel Letton took mineral water served by the
smoothly operating machine of a lackey who inhabited the place, while
Dowsett took Scotch and soda and Daylight a cocktail. Nobody seemed to
notice the unusualness of a Martini at midnight, though Daylight looked
sharply for that very thing; for he had long since learned that
Martinis had their strictly appointed times and places. But he liked
Martinis, and, being a natural man, he chose deliberately to drink when
and how he pleased. Others had noticed this peculiar habit of his, but
not so Dowsett and Letton; and Daylight's secret thought was: "They
sure wouldn't bat an eye if I called for a glass of corrosive
sublimate."

Leon Guggenhammer arrived in the midst of the drink, and ordered
Scotch. Daylight studied him curiously. This was one of the great
Guggenhammer family; a younger one, but nevertheless one of the crowd
with which he had locked grapples in the North. Nor did Leon
Guggenhammer fail to mention cognizance of that old affair. He
complimented Daylight on his prowess--"The echoes of Ophir came down to
us, you know. And I must say, Mr. Daylight--er, Mr. Harnish, that you
whipped us roundly in that affair."

Echoes! Daylight could not escape the shock of the phrase--echoes had
come down to them of the fight into which he had flung all his strength
and the strength of his Klondike millions. The Guggenhammers sure must
go some when a fight of that dimension was no more than a skirmish of
which they deigned to hear e