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 element 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.
On the other hand, he was known as "square." His word was as good as
his bond, and this despite the fact that he accepted nobody's word. He
always shied at propositions based on gentlemen's agreements, and a man
who ventured his honor as a gentleman, in dealing with Daylight,
inevitably was treated to an unpleasant time. Daylight never gave his
own word unless he held the whip-hand. It was a case with the other
fellow taking it or nothing.
Legitimate investment had no place in Daylight's play. It tied up his
money, and reduced the element of risk. It was the gambling side of
business that fascinated him, and to play in his slashing manner
required that his money must be ready to hand. It was never tied up
save for short intervals, for he was principally engaged in turning it
over and over, raiding here, there, and everywhere, a veritable pirate
of the financial main. A five-per cent safe investment had no
attraction for him; but to risk millions in sharp, harsh skirmish,
standing to lose everything or to win fifty or a hundred per cent, was
the savor of life to him. He played according to the rules of the
game, but he played mercilessly. When he got a man or a corporation
down and they squealed, he gouged no less hard. Appeals for financial
mercy fell on deaf ears. 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 longer.
The treason had to come from them, and then it was 'Ware Daylight.
The business 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 what he
thought was the opportunity, went 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 suicide in a
felon's cell. Not only did Daylight lose his grip on San Jose
Interurban, but in the crash of his battle front he lost heavily all
along the line. It was conceded by those competent to judge that he
could have compromised and saved much. But, instead, he deliberately
threw up the battle with San Jose Interurban and Lake Power, and,
apparently defeated, with Napoleonic suddenness struck at Klinkner. It
was the last unexpected thing Klinkner would have dreamed of, and
Daylight knew it. He knew, further, that the California & Altamont
Trust Company has an intrinsically sound institution, but that just
then it was in a precarious condition due to Klinkner's speculations
with its money. He knew, also, that in a few months the Trust Company
would be more firmly on its feet than ever, thanks to those same
speculations, and that if he were to strike he must strike immediately.
"It's just that much money in pocket and a whole lot more," he was
reported to have said in connection with his heavy losses. "It's just
so much insurance against the future. Henceforth, men who go in with
me on deals will think twice before they try to double-cross me, and
then some."
The reason for his savageness was that he despised the men with whom he
played. He had a conviction that not one in a hundred of them was
intrinsically square; and as for the square ones, he prophesied that,
playing in a crooked game, they were sure to lose and in the long run
go broke. His New York experience had opened his eyes. He tore the
veils of illusion from the business game, and saw its nakedness. He
generalized upon industry and society somewhat as follows:--
Society, as organized, was a vast bunco game. There were many
hereditary inefficients--men and women who were not weak enough to be
confined in feeble-minded homes, but who were not strong enough to be
ought else than hewers of wood and drawers of water.
Then there were the fools who took the organized bunco game seriously,
honoring and respecting it. They were easy game for the others, who
saw clearly and knew the bunco game for what it was.
Work, legitimate work, was the source of all wealth. That was to say,
whether it was a sack of potatoes, a grand piano, or a seven-passenger
touring car, it came into being only by the performance of work. Where
the bunco came in was in the distribution of these things after labor
had created them. He failed to see the horny-handed sons of toil
enjoying grand pianos or riding in automobiles. How this came about
was explained by the bunco. By tens of thousands and hundreds of
thousands men sat up nights and schemed how they could get between the
workers and the things the workers produced. These schemers were the
business men. When they got between the worker and his product, they
took a whack out of it for themselves The size of the whack was
determined by no rule of equity; but by their own strength and
swinishness. It was always a case of "all the traffic can bear." He
saw all men in the business game doing this.
One day, in a mellow mood (induced by a string of cocktails and a
hearty lunch), he started a conversation with Jones, the elevator boy.
Jones was a slender, mop-headed, man-grown, truculent flame of an
individual who seemed to go out of his way to insult his passengers.
It was this that attracted Daylight's interest, and he was not long in
finding out what was the matter with Jones. He was a proletarian,
according to his own aggressive classification, and he had wanted to
write for a living. Failing to win with the magazines, and compelled
to find himself in food and shelter, he had gone to the little valley
of Petacha, not a hundred miles from Los Angeles. Here, toiling in the
day-time, he planned to write and study at night. But the railroad
charged all the traffic would bear. Petacha was a desert valley, and
produced only three things: cattle, fire-wood, and charcoal. For
freight to Los Angeles on a carload of cattle the railroad charged
eight dollars. This, Jones explained, was due to the fact that the
cattle had legs and could be driven to Los Angeles at a cost equivalent
to the charge per car load. But firewood had no legs, and the railroad
charged just precisely twenty-four dollars a carload.
This was a fine adjustment, for by working hammer-and-tongs through a
twelve-hour day, after freight had been deducted from the selling price
of the wood in Los Angeles, the wood-chopper received one dollar and
sixty cents. Jones had thought to get ahead of the game by turning his
wood into charcoal. His estimates were satisfactory. But the railroad
also made estimates. It issued a rate of forty-two dollars a car on
charcoal. At the end of three months, Jones went over his figures, and
found that he was still making one dollar and sixty cents a day.
"So I quit," Jones concluded. "I went hobbling for a year, and I got
back at the railroads. Leaving out the little things, I came across
the Sierras in the summer and touched a match to the snow-sheds. They
only had a little thirty-thousand-dollar fire. I guess that squared up
all balances due on Petacha."
"Son, ain't you afraid to be turning loose such information?" Daylight
gravely demanded.
"Not on your life," quoth Jones. "They can't prove it. You could say
I said so, and I could say I didn't say so, and a hell of a lot that
evidence would amount to with a jury."
Daylight went into his office and meditated awhile. That was it: all
the traffic would bear. From top to bottom, that was the rule of the
game; and what kept the game going was the fact that a sucker was born
every minute. If a Jones were born every minute, the game wouldn't
last very long. Lucky for the players that the workers weren't Joneses.
But there were other and larger phases of the game. Little business
men, shopkeepers, and such ilk took what whack they could out of the
product of the worker; but, after all, it was the large business men
who formed the workers through the little business men. When all was
said and done, the latter, like Jones in Petacha Valley, got no more
than wages out of their whack. In truth, they were hired men for the
large business men. Still again, higher up, were the big fellows.
They used vast and complicated paraphernalia for the purpose, on a
large scale of getting between hundreds of thousands of workers and
their products. These men were not so much mere robbers as gamblers.
And, not content with their direct winnings, being essentially
gamblers, they raided one another. They called this feature of the
game HIGH FINANCE. They were all engaged primarily in robbing the
worker, but every little while they formed combinations and robbed one
another of the accumulated loot. This explained the
fifty-thousand-dollar raid on him by Holdsworthy and the
ten-million-dollar raid on him by Dowsett, Letton, and Guggenhammer.
And when he raided Panama Mail he had done exactly the same thing.
Well, he concluded, it was finer sport robbing the robbers than robbing
the poor stupid workers.
Thus, all unread in philosophy, Daylight preempted for himself the
position and vocation of a twentieth-century superman. He found, with
rare and mythical exceptions, that there was no noblesse oblige among
the business and financial supermen. As a clever traveler had
announced in an after-dinner speech at the Alta-Pacific, "There was
honor amongst thieves, and this was what distinguished thieves from
honest men." That was it. It hit the nail on the head. These modern
supermen were a lot of sordid banditti who had the successful
effrontery to preach a code of right and wrong to their victims which
they themselves did not practise. With them, a man's word was good
just as long as he was compelled to keep it. THOU SHALT NOT STEAL was
only applicable to the honest worker. They, the supermen, were above
such commandments. They certainly stole and were honored by their
fellows according to the magnitude of their stealings.
The more Daylight played the game, the clearer the situation grew.
Despite the fact that every robber was keen to rob every other robber,
the band was well organized. It practically controlled the political
machinery of society, from the ward politician up to the Senate of the
United States. It passed laws that gave it privilege to rob. It
enforced these laws by means of the police, the marshals, the militia
and regular army, and the courts. And it was a snap. A superman's
chiefest danger was his fellow-superman. The great stupid mass of the
people did not count. They were constituted of such inferior clay that
the veriest chicanery fooled them. The superman manipulated the
strings, and when robbery of the workers became too slow or monotonous,
they turned loose and robbed one another.
Daylight was philosophical, but not a philosopher. He had never read
the books. He was a hard-headed, practical man, and farthest from him
was any intention of ever reading the books. He had lived life in the
simple, where books were not necessary for an understanding of life,
and now life in the complex appeared just as simple. He saw through
its frauds and fictions, and found it as elemental as on the Yukon.
Men were made of the same stuff. They had the same passions and
desires. Finance was poker on a larger scale. The men who played were
the men who had stakes. The workers were the fellows toiling for
grubstakes. He saw the game played out according to the everlasting
rules, and he played a hand himself. The gigantic futility of humanity
organized and befuddled by the bandits did not shock him. It was the
natural order. Practically all human endeavors were futile. He had
seen so much of it. His partners had starved and died on the Stewart.
Hundreds of old-timers had failed to locate on Bonanza and Eldorado,
while Swedes and chechaquos had come in on the moose-pasture and
blindly staked millions. It was life, and life was a savage
proposition at best. Men in civilization robbed because they were so
made. They robbed just as cats scratched, famine pinched, and frost
bit.
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 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-trampling man-conqueror. His battles with
elemental nature had been, in a way, impersonal; his present battles
were wholly with the males of his species, and the hardships of the
trail, the river, and the frost marred him far less than the bitter
keenness of the struggle with his fellows.
He still had recrudescence of geniality, but they were largely
periodical and forced, and they were usually due to the cocktails he
took prior to meal-time. 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 condition. 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 or 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, served in a long glass so as not to excite comment.