easy, so stupid. It was more like slaughtering fat hand-reared
pheasants on the English preserves he had heard about. The sport to
him, was in waylaying the successful robbers and taking their spoils
from them. There was fun and excitement in that, and sometimes they
put up the very devil of a fight. Like Robin Hood of old, Daylight
proceeded to rob the rich; and, in a small way, to distribute to the
needy.

But he was charitable after his own fashion. The great mass of human
misery meant nothing to him. That was part of the everlasting order.
He had no patience with the organized charities and the professional
charity mongers. Nor, on the other hand, was what he gave a conscience
dole. He owed no man, and restitution was unthinkable. What he gave
was a largess, a free, spontaneous gift; and it was for those about
him. He never contributed to an earthquake fund in Japan nor to an
open-air fund in New York City. Instead, he financed Jones, the
elevator boy, for a year that he might write a book. When he learned
that the wife of his waiter at the St. Francis was suffering from
tuberculosis, he sent her to Arizona, and later, when her case was
declared hopeless, he sent the husband, too, to be with her to the end.
Likewise, he bought a string of horse-hair bridles from a convict in a
Western penitentiary, who spread the good news until it seemed to
Daylight that half the convicts in that institution were making bridles
for him. He bought them all, paying from twenty to fifty dollars each
for them. They were beautiful and honest things, and he decorated all
the available wall-space of his bedroom with them.

The grim Yukon life had failed to make Daylight hard. It required
civilization to produce this result. In the fierce, savage game he now
played, his habitual geniality imperceptibly slipped away from him, as
did his lazy Western drawl. As his speech became sharp and nervous, so
did his mental processes. In the swift rush of the game he found less
and less time to spend on being merely good-natured. The change marked
his face itself.

The lines grew sterner. Less often appeared the playful curl of his
lips, the smile in the wrinkling corners of his eyes. The eyes
themselves, black and flashing, like an Indian's, betrayed glints of
cruelty and brutal consciousness of power. His tremendous vitality
remained, and radiated from all his being, but it was vitality under
the new aspect of the man-tramplin