ing for half an hour. And it was at this
moment that Jack Kearns suggested poker. Jack Kearns was a big,
bluff-featured man, who, along with Bettles, had made the disastrous
attempt to found a post on the head-reaches of the Koyokuk, far inside
the Arctic Circle. After that, Kearns had fallen back on his posts at
Forty Mile and Sixty Mile and changed the direction of his ventures by
sending out to the States for a small sawmill and a river steamer. The
former was even then being sledded across Chilcoot Pass by Indians and
dogs, and would come down the Yukon in the early summer after the
ice-run. Later in the summer, when Bering Sea and the mouth of the
Yukon cleared of ice, the steamer, put together at St. Michaels, was to
be expected up the river loaded to the guards with supplies.

Jack Kearns suggested poker. French Louis, Dan MacDonald, and Hal
Campbell (who had make a strike on Moosehide), all three of whom were
not dancing because there were not girls enough to go around, inclined
to the suggestion. They were looking for a fifth man when Burning
Daylight emerged from the rear room, the Virgin on his arm, the train
of dancers in his wake. In response to the hail of the poker-players,
he came over to their table in the corner.

"Want you to sit in," said Campbell. "How's your luck?"

"I sure got it to-night," Burning Daylight answered with enthusiasm,
and at the same time felt the Virgin press his arm warningly. She
wanted him for the dancing. "I sure got my luck with me, but I'd
sooner dance. I ain't hankerin' to take the money away from you-all."

Nobody urged. They took his refusal as final, and the Virgin was
pressing his arm to turn him away in pursuit of the supper-seekers,
when he experienced a change of heart. It was not that he did not want
to dance, nor that he wanted to hurt her; but that insistent pressure
on his arm put his free man-nature in revolt. The thought in his mind
was that he did not want any woman running him. Himself a favorite
with women, nevertheless they did not bulk big with him. They were
toys, playthings, part of the relaxation from the bigger game of life.
He met women along with the whiskey and gambling, and from observation
he had found that it was far easier to break away from the drink and
the cards than from a woman once the man was properly entangled.

He was a slave to himself, which was natural in one with a healthy ego,
but he rebelled in ways either murd