their lives for gold, and
those that won gold from the ground gambled for it with one another.
Nor was Elam Harnish an exception. He was a man's man primarily, and
the instinct in him to play the game of life was strong. Environment
had determined what form that game should take. He was born on an Iowa
farm, and his father had emigrated to eastern Oregon, in which mining
country Elam's boyhood was lived. He had known nothing but hard knocks
for big stakes. Pluck and endurance counted in the game, but the great
god Chance dealt the cards. Honest work for sure but meagre returns
did not count. A man played big. He risked everything for everything,
and anything less than everything meant that he was a loser. So for
twelve Yukon years, Elam Harnish had been a loser. True, on Moosehide
Creek the past summer he had taken out twenty thousand dollars, and
what was left in the ground was twenty thousand more. But, as he
himself proclaimed, that was no more than getting his ante back. He
had ante'd his life for a dozen years, and forty thousand was a small
pot for such a stake--the price of a drink and a dance at the Tivoli,
of a winter's flutter at Circle City, and a grubstake for the year to
come.

The men of the Yukon reversed the old maxim till it read: hard come,
easy go. At the end of the reel, Elam Harnish called the house up to
drink again. Drinks were a dollar apiece, gold rated at sixteen
dollars an ounce; there were thirty in the house that accepted his
invitation, and between every dance the house was Elam's guest. This
was his night, and nobody was to be allowed to pay for anything.

Not that Elam Harnish was a drinking man. Whiskey meant little to him.
He was too vital and robust, too untroubled in mind and body, to
incline to the slavery of alcohol. He spent months at a time on trail
and river when he drank nothing stronger than coffee, while he had gone
a year at a time without even coffee. But he was gregarious, and since
the sole social expression of the Yukon was the saloon, he expressed
himself that way. When he was a lad in the mining camps of the West,
men had always done that. To him it was the proper way for a man to
express himself socially. He knew no other way.

He was a striking figure of a man, despite his garb being similar to
that of all the men in the Tivoli. Soft-tanned moccasins of
moose-hide, beaded in Indian designs, covered his feet. His trousers
were ordinary overall