pers and magazines, and one and all, using unlimited
space, they wrote Daylight up; so that, so far as the world was
concerned, Daylight loomed the largest figure in Alaska. Of course,
after several months, the world became interested in the Spanish War,
and forgot all about him; but in the Klondike itself Daylight still
remained the most prominent figure. Passing along the streets of
Dawson, all heads turned to follow him, and in the saloons chechaquos
watched him awesomely, scarcely taking their eyes from him as long as
he remained in their range of vision. Not alone was he the richest man
in the country, but he was Burning Daylight, the pioneer, the man who,
almost in the midst of antiquity of that young land, had crossed the
Chilcoot and drifted down the Yukon to meet those elder giants, Al Mayo
and Jack McQuestion. He was the Burning Daylight of scores of wild
adventures, the man who carried word to the ice-bound whaling fleet
across the tundra wilderness to the Arctic Sea, who raced the mail from
Circle to Salt Water and back again in sixty days, who saved the whole
Tanana tribe from perishing in the winter of '91--in short, the man who
smote the chechaquos' imaginations more violently than any other dozen
men rolled into one.

He had the fatal facility for self-advertisement. Things he did, no
matter how adventitious or spontaneous, struck the popular imagination
as remarkable. And the latest thing he had done was always on men's
lips, whether it was being first in the heartbreaking stampede to
Danish Creek, in killing the record baldface grizzly over on Sulphur
Creek, or in winning the single-paddle canoe race on the Queen's
Birthday, after being forced to participate at the last moment by the
failure of the sourdough representative to appear. Thus, one night in
the Moosehorn, he locked horns with Jack Kearns in the long-promised
return game of poker. The sky and eight o'clock in the morning were
made the limits, and at the close of the game Daylight's winnings were
two hundred and thirty thousand dollars. To Jack Kearns, already a
several-times millionaire, this loss was not vital. But the whole
community was thrilled by the size of the stakes, and each one of the
dozen correspondents in the field sent out a sensational article.

[6] To copper: a term in faro, meaning to play a card to lose.

CHAPTER XII

Despite his many sources of revenue, Daylight's pyramiding kept him
pinched for cash th