lace changed with his coming. He seemed to fill
it with his tremendous vitality. Men who entered from the street felt
it immediately, and in response to their queries the barkeepers nodded
at the back room, and said comprehensively, "Burning Daylight's on the
tear." And the men who entered remained, and kept the barkeepers
busy. The gamblers took heart of life, and soon the tables were
filled, the click of chips and whir of the roulette-ball rising
monotonously and imperiously above the hoarse rumble of men's voices
and their oaths and heavy laughs.

Few men knew Elam Harnish by any other name than Burning Daylight, the
name which had been given him in the early days in the land because of
his habit of routing his comrades out of their blankets with the
complaint that daylight was burning. Of the pioneers in that far
Arctic wilderness, where all men were pioneers, he was reckoned among
the oldest. Men like Al Mayo and Jack McQuestion antedated him; but
they had entered the land by crossing the Rockies from the Hudson Bay
country to the east. He, however, had been the pioneer over the
Chilcoot and Chilcat passes. In the spring of 1883, twelve years
before, a stripling of eighteen, he had crossed over the Chilcoot with
five comrades.

In the fall he had crossed back with one. Four had perished by
mischance in the bleak, uncharted vastness. And for twelve years Elam
Harnish had continued to grope for gold among the shadows of the Circle.

And no man had groped so obstinately nor so enduringly. He had grown
up with the land. He knew no other land. Civilization was a dream of
some previous life. Camps like Forty Mile and Circle City were to him
metropolises. And not alone had he grown up with the land, for, raw as
it was, he had helped to make it. He had made history and geography,
and those that followed wrote of his traverses and charted the trails
his feet had broken.

Heroes are seldom given to hero-worship, but among those of that young
land, young as he was, he was accounted an elder hero. In point of
time he was before them. In point of deed he was beyond them. In
point of endurance it was acknowledged that he could kill the hardiest
of them. Furthermore, he was accounted a nervy man, a square man, and
a white man.

In all lands where life is a hazard lightly played with and lightly
flung aside, men turn, almost automatically, to gambling for diversion
and relaxation. In the Yukon men gambled