g man-conqueror. His battles with
elemental nature had been, in a way, impersonal; his present battles
were wholly with the males of his species, and the hardships of the
trail, the river, and the frost marred him far less than the bitter
keenness of the struggle with his fellows.

He still had recrudescence of geniality, but they were largely
periodical and forced, and they were usually due to the cocktails he
took prior to meal-time. In the North, he had drunk deeply and at
irregular intervals; but now his drinking became systematic and
disciplined. It was an unconscious development, but it was based upon
physical and mental condition. The cocktails served as an inhibition.
Without reasoning or thinking about it, the strain of the office, which
was essentially due to the daring and audacity of his ventures,
required check or cessation; and he found, through the weeks and
months, that the cocktails supplied this very thing. They constituted
a stone wall. He never drank during the morning, nor in office hours;
but the instant he left the office he proceeded to rear this wall of
alcoholic inhibition athwart his consciousness. The office became
immediately a closed affair. It ceased to exist. In the afternoon,
after lunch, it lived again for one or two hours, when, leaving it, he
rebuilt the wall of inhibition. Of course, there were exceptions to
this; and, such was the rigor of his discipline, that if he had a
dinner or a conference before him in which, in a business way, he
encountered enemies or allies and planned or prosecuted campaigns, he
abstained from drinking. But the instant the business was settled, his
everlasting call went out for a Martini, and for a double-Martini at
that, served in a long glass so as not to excite comment.

CHAPTER VI

Into Daylight's life came Dede Mason. She came rather imperceptibly.
He had accepted her impersonally along with the office furnishing, the
office boy, Morrison, the chief, confidential, and only clerk, and all
the rest of the accessories of a superman's gambling place of business.
Had he been asked any time during the first months she was in his
employ, he would have been unable to tell the color of her eyes. From
the fact that she was a demiblonde, there resided dimly in his
subconsciousness a conception that she was a brunette. Likewise he had
an idea that she was not thin, while there was an absence in his mind
of any idea that she was fat. As to ho