Jasper County Democrat, Volume 15, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 May 1912 — BURNING DAYLINGT [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

BURNING DAYLINGT

By JACK LONDON

Author Or'THE Call Or The WwF Illustrations ByDeabbornM®ll J

(Copyright, 1910, by the New York Herald Company ) (Copyright. 1910, by the MacMillan Company.

CHAPTER X. Back in San Francisco, Daylight quickly added to his reputation. In ways it was not an enviable reputation. Men were afraid of him. He became known as a fighter, a fiend, a tiger. His play was a ripping and smashing one, and no one knew where or how his next blow would fall. The clement of surprise was large. He balked on the unexpected, and, fresh from the wild North, his mind not operating in stereotyped channels, he was able in unusual degree to devise 'new tricks and stratagems. And once he won the advantage, he' pressed it remorselessly. “As relentless as a Red Indian,” was said of him, and it was said truly. He was a free lance, and had no friendly business associations. Such alliances as were formed from time to time were purely affairs of expediency, and he regarded his allies as men who would give him the double-cross or ruin him if. a profitable chance presented. In spite of this point of view, he was faithful to his allies. But he was faithful just as long as they were and no donger. The treason had to come from them, and then it was ’Ware Daylight. The biisiness men and financiers of the Pacific coast never forgot the lesson of Charles Klinkner and the California & Altamont Trust Company. Klinkner was the president. In partnership with Daylight, the pair raided the San Jose Interurban. The powerful Lake Power & Electric Lighting corporation came to the rescue, and Klinkner, seeing w'hat he thought was the opportunity, w r ent over to the enemy in the thick of the pitched battle. Daylight lost three millions before he was done with it, and before he was done with It he saw the California & Altamont Trust Company hopelessly wrecked, and Charles Klinkner a sulside in a felon’s celk So it was that Daylight became a successful financier. He did not go in for swindling the workers. Not only did he not have the heart for it, but it did not strike him as a sporting proposition. The workers were so easy, so stupid. It was more like slaughtering fat, hand-reared pheasants on the English preserves he had read about. The sport, to him, was in waylaying the successful robbers and taking- their spoils from them. The grim Yukon life had failed to make Daylight hard. It required civ-' illzation 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. He still had recrudescences of geniality, but they were largely periodical and forced, and they were usually due to the cocktails he took prior to mealtime. In the North he had drunk deeply and at irregular intervals; but now his drinking became systematic and disciplined. It was an unconscious development, but it was based upon physical and mental conditions. The cocktails served as an inhibition. Without reasoning or thinking about it, the strain of the office, which was essentially due to the daring and audacity of his ventures, required check or cessation; and he found, through the weeks and months, that the cocktails supplied this very thing. They constituted a stone wall. He never drank during the morning, nor in office hours; but the instant he left the office he proceeded to rear this wall of alcoholic inhibition athwart his consciousness. The office became immediately a closed affair. It ceased to exist. In the afternoon, after lunch, it lived again for one 65 two hours, when, leaving it, he rebuilt the wall of inhibition. Of course, there were exceptions to this; and, such was the rigor of his discipline, that if he had a dinner or a conference before him in which, in a business way, he encountered enemies or allies and planned or prosecuted campaigns, he. abstained from drinking. But the instant the business was settled, his everlasting call went out for a Martini, and for a double-Martini at that, in a long glass so as not to excite comment. Into Daylight’s life came Dede Mason. She came rather imperceptibly. He had accepted her inipersonally along with the office furnishing, the office boy, Morrison, the chief, confidential, and only clerk, and all the rest of the accessories of a superman’s gambling place of business, iiad he been asked any time during the first months she was in his employ, he would have been unable to tell the color of her eyes. From the fact that she was a demi-blonde, there resided dimly In his subconsciousness a conception that she was a brunette. Likewise he had an idea that she was not thin, while there was an absence in his mind of any idea that she was fat. And how she dressed, he had no idea at all. He had no trained eye in such matters, nor was he interested. He took it for granted, in the lack of any impression to the contrary, that she was dressed somehow. He knew her as “Miss Mason,” and that was all. though he was aware that as a

stenographer she was quick and accurate. He watched her leaving one gfternoon, and was aware for the first time that she was well-formed, and that her manner of dress was satisfying. He knew none of the details of woman’s dress, and he saw none of the details of her neat shirt waist and well-cut tailor suit. He saw only the effect in a general, sketchy way. She looked right. This was in the absence of anything wrong or out of the way. “She’s a trim little good-looker,” was his verdict, when the outer office door closed on her. The next morning, dictating, he concluded that he liked the way she did her hair, though for the life of him he could have given no description of it. The impression was pleasing, that was all. She sat between him and the window, and he noted that, her hair was light brown, with hints of golden bronze. A pale sun", shining in, touched the golden bronze into smouldering fires that were very pleasing. He discovered that in the intervals, when she had nothing to do, she read books and magazines, or worked on some sort of feminine fancy work. Passing her desk, once, he picked up a volume of Kipling's poems and glanced bepuzzled through the pages. “You like reading, Miss Mason?” he said, laying the book down. “Oh, yes,” was the answer; “very much.”

Another time it was a book of Wells’, “The Wheels of Chance.” “What’s it all about?” Daylight asked. “Oh, it’s just a novel, a love-story.” She stopped, but he still stood waiting, and she felt it incumbent to go on. “It’s about a little Cockney draper’s assistant, who takes a vacation on his bicycle, and falls in with a young girl very much above him. Her mother is a popular writer and all that. And the situation is very curious, and sad, too, and tragic. Would you care to read it?” “Does he get her?” Daylight demanded. “No; that’s the point of it. He wasn’t —” “And he doesn't get her, and you’ve read all them pages, hundreds of them, to find that out?” Daylight muttered in amazement. Miss Mason was nettled as well as amusqd. “But you read the mining and financial news by the hour,” she retorted. “But I sure get something out of that. It’s business, a'rid it’s differ-

ent. I get money out of it. What do you get out of’books?” "points of view, new ideas, life.” "Not worth a cent cash.” “But life’s worth more than cash,” she argued. 1 ' “Oh, well,” he said, with easy masculine tolerance, “so long as you enjoy it. That’s what counts, I suppose; and there's no accounting for tdste.” Despite his own superior point of view, he had an idea that she knew a lot, and he experienced a fleecing feeling like that of a barbarian face to face with the evidence of some tremendous culture. To Daylight culture was a worthless thing, and yet, somehow, he was vaguely troubled by a sense that there was more in culture than he imagined. Again, on her desk, in passing, he noticed a book with which he was familiar. This time he did not stop, for he had recognized the cover. It was a magazine correspondent’s book on the Klondike, and he knew that he and his photograph figured in it, and he knew, also, of a certain sensational chapter concerned with a woman’s suicide, and with one “To Much Daylight.” After that he did not talk with her again about books'. He imagined what erroneous conclusions she had drawn from that particular chapter, and it stung him the more in that they were undeserved. He pumped Morrison, the clerk, who had first to vent his personal grievance against Miss

Mason Before he could tell Chat little he knew of her. “She comes from Siskiyou County. She's very nice. to work with in the office, of course, but she’s rather stuck on herself —exclusive, you know.” “How do youj make that out?” Daylight queried. “Well, she thinks too much of herself to associate with those she works with, in the office here, for Instance. She won't have anything to do with a fellow, you see. I've asked her out repeatedly, to the theater and the chutes and such things. But nothing doing. Says she likes plenty of sleep, and can't stay up late, and has to go all the way to Berkeley—that’s where she lives. But that’s all hot air» She’s running with the Uni-; versity boys, that's what she's doing. She needs lots of sleep, and can’t go to the theater with me. but she can dance all hours with them. I've heard it pretty straight that she goes to all their hops arid such things. Rather stylish and high-toned for a stenographer, I’d say. And she keeps a horse, too. She rides astride all over those hills out there. I saw her one Sunday myself. Oh, she's a high-, flyer, and 1 wonder how she does It. Sixty-five a month don't go far. Then she has a sick brother, too.” “Live with her people?” Daylight asked.

“No; hasn't got any. They were well to do. I've heard. They must have been, or that brother or hers couldn’t have gone to the University of California. Her father had a big cattleranch, but he got to fooling with mines or something, and went broke before he died. Her mother died long before that. Her brother must cost a lot of money. He was a husky once, played football, was great on hunting arid being out in the mountains and such things. He got his accident breaking horses, and then rheumatism or something got into him. One leg is shorter than the other, and withered up some. He has to walk on crutches. I saw her out with him once—crossing the ferry. The doctors have been experimenting on him for years, and he’s in the French Hospital now, I think.” All of which side-lights on Miss Mason went to Increase Daylight’s interest in her. Yet, much as he desired, he failed to get acquainted with her. He had thoughts of asking her to luncheon, but his was the innate chivalry of the frontiersman, and the thoughts never came to anything. He knew a self-respecting, square-dealing man was not supposed to take his stenographer to luncheon. Such things did happen, he knew, for he heard the chaffing gossip of the club; but he did not think much of such men and felt sorry for the girls. (To be Continued.)

The Cocktails Served as an Inhibition.