room, remarked to the pianist, "It's Burning Daylight," the
waltz-time perceptibly quickened, and the dancers, catching the
contagion, began to whirl about as if they really enjoyed it. It was
known to them of old time that nothing languished when Burning Daylight
was around.

He turned from the bar and saw the woman by the stove and the eager
look of welcome she extended him.

"Hello, Virgin, old girl," he called. "Hello, Charley. What's the
matter with you-all? Why wear faces like that when coffins cost only
three ounces? Come up, you-all, and drink. Come up, you unburied
dead, and name your poison. Come up, everybody. This is my night, and
I'm going to ride it. To-morrow I'm thirty, and then I'll be an old
man. It's the last fling of youth. Are you-all with me? Surge along,
then. Surge along.

"Hold on there, Davis," he called to the faro-dealer, who had shoved
his chair back from the table. "I'm going you one flutter to see
whether you-all drink with me or we-all drink with you."

Pulling a heavy sack of gold-dust from his coat pocket, he dropped it
on the HIGH CARD.

"Fifty," he said.

The faro-dealer slipped two cards. The high card won. He scribbled
the amount on a pad, and the weigher at the bar balanced fifty dollars'
worth of dust in the gold-scales and poured it into Burning Daylight's
sack. The waltz in the back room being finished, the three couples,
followed by the fiddler and the pianist and heading for the bar, caught
Daylight's eye.

"Surge along, you-all" he cried. "Surge along and name it. This is my
night, and it ain't a night that comes frequent. Surge up, you
Siwashes and Salmon-eaters. It's my night, I tell you-all--"

"A blame mangy night," Charley Bates interpolated.

"You're right, my son," Burning Daylight went on gaily.

"A mangy night, but it's MY night, you see. I'm the mangy old he-wolf.
Listen to me howl."

And howl he did, like a lone gray timber wolf, till the Virgin thrust
her pretty fingers in her ears and shivered. A minute later she was
whirled away in his arms to the dancing-floor, where, along with the
other three women and their partners, a rollicking Virginia reel was
soon in progress. Men and women danced in moccasins, and the place was
soon a-roar, Burning Daylight the centre of it and the animating spark,
with quip and jest and rough merriment rousing them out of the slough
of despond in which he had found them.

The atmosphere of the p