The time passed, and Daylight played on at the game. But the game had
entered upon a new phase. The lust for power in the mere gambling and
winning was metamorphosing into the lust for power in order to revenge.
There were many men in San Francisco against whom he had registered
black marks, and now and again, with one of his lightning strokes, he
erased such a mark. He asked no quarter; he gave no quarter. Men
feared and hated him, and no one loved him, except Larry Hegan, his
lawyer, who would have laid down his life for him. But he was the only
man with whom Daylight was really intimate, though he was on terms of
friendliest camaraderie with the rough and unprincipled following of
the bosses who ruled the Riverside Club.
On the other hand, San Francisco's attitude toward Daylight had
undergone a change. While he, with his slashing buccaneer methods, was
a distinct menace to the more orthodox financial gamblers, he was
nevertheless so grave a menace that they were glad enough to leave him
alone. He had already taught them the excellence of letting a sleeping
dog lie. Many of the men, who knew that they were in danger of his big
bear-paw when it reached out for the honey vats, even made efforts to
placate him, to get on the friendly side of him. The Alta-Pacific
approached him confidentially with an offer of reinstatement, which he
promptly declined. He was after a number of men in that club, and,
whenever opportunity offered, he reached out for them and mangled them.
Even the newspapers, with one or two blackmailing exceptions, ceased
abusing him and became respectful. In short, he was looked upon as a
bald-faced grizzly from the Arctic wilds to whom it was considered
expedient to give the trail. At the time he raided the steamship
companies, they had yapped at him and worried him, the whole pack of
them, only to have him whirl around and whip them in the fiercest
pitched battle San Francisco had ever known. Not easily forgotten was
the Pacific Slope Seaman's strike and the giving over of the municipal
government to the labor bosses and grafters. The destruction of
Charles Klinkner and the California and Altamont Trust Company had been
a warning. But it was an isolated case; they had been confident in
strength in numbers--until he taught them better.
Daylight still engaged in daring speculations, as, for instance, at the
impending outbreak of the Japanese-Russian War, when, in the face of
the experience and power of the shipping gamblers, he reached out and
clutched practically a monopoly of available steamer-charters. There
was scarcely a battered tramp on the Seven Seas that was not his on
time charter. As usual, his position was, "You've got to come and see
me"; which they did, and, to use another of his phrases, they "paid
through the nose" for the privilege. And all his venturing and
fighting had now but one motive. Some day, as he confided to Hegan,
when he'd made a sufficient stake, he was going back to New York and
knock the spots out of Messrs. Dowsett, Letton, and Guggenhammer. He'd
show them what an all-around general buzz-saw he was and what a mistake
they'd made ever to monkey with him. But he never lost his head, and
he knew that he was not yet strong enough to go into death-grapples
with those three early enemies. In the meantime the black marks
against them remained for a future easement day.
Dede Mason was still in the office. He had made no more overtures,
discussed no more books and no more grammar. He had no active interest
in her, and she was to him a pleasant memory of what had never
happened, a joy, which, by his essential nature, he was barred from
ever knowing. Yet, while his interest had gone to sleep and his energy
was consumed in the endless battles he waged, he knew every trick of
the light on her hair, every quick denote mannerism of movement, every
line of her figure as expounded by her tailor-made gowns. Several
times, six months or so apart, he had increased her salary, until now
she was receiving ninety dollars a month. Beyond this he dared not go,
though he had got around it by making the work easier. This he had
accomplished after her return from a vacation, by retaining her
substitute as an assistant. Also, he had changed his office suite, so
that now the two girls had a room by themselves.
His eye had become quite critical wherever Dede Mason was concerned.
He had long since noted her pride of carriage. It was unobtrusive, yet
it was there. He decided, from the way she carried it, that she deemed
her body a thing to be proud of, to be cared for as a beautiful and
valued possession. In this, and in the way she carried her clothes, he
compared her with her assistant, with the stenographers he encountered
in other offices, with the women he saw on the sidewalks. "She's sure
well put up," he communed with himself; "and she sure knows how to
dress and carry it off without being stuck on herself and without
laying it on thick."
The more he saw of her, and the more he thought he knew of her, the
more unapproachable did she seem to him. But since he had no intention
of approaching her, this was anything but an unsatisfactory fact. He
was glad he had her in his office, and hoped she'd stay, and that was
about all.
Daylight did not improve with the passing years. The life was not good
for him. He was growing stout and soft, and there was unwonted
flabbiness in his muscles. The more he drank cocktails, the more he
was compelled to drink in order to get the desired result, the
inhibitions that eased him down from the concert pitch of his
operations. And with this went wine, too, at meals, and the long
drinks after dinner of Scotch and soda at the Riverside. Then, too,
his body suffered from lack of exercise; and, from lack of decent human
associations, his moral fibres were weakening. Never a man to hide
anything, some of his escapades became public, such as speeding, and of
joy-rides in his big red motor-car down to San Jose with companions
distinctly sporty--incidents that were narrated as good fun and
comically in the newspapers.
Nor was there anything to save him. Religion had passed him by. "A
long time dead" was his epitome of that phase of speculation. He was
not interested in humanity. According to his rough-hewn sociology, it
was all a gamble. God was a whimsical, abstract, mad thing called
Luck. As to how one happened to be born--whether a sucker or a
robber--was a gamble to begin with; Luck dealt out the cards, and the
little babies picked up the hands allotted them. Protest was vain.
Those were their cards and they had to play them, willy-nilly,
hunchbacked or straight backed, crippled or clean-limbed, addle-pated
or clear-headed. There was no fairness in it. The cards most picked
up put them into the sucker class; the cards of a few enabled them to
become robbers. The playing of the cards was life--the crowd of
players, society.
The table was the earth, and the earth, in lumps and chunks, from
loaves of bread to big red motor-cars, was the stake. And in the end,
lucky and unlucky, they were all a long time dead.
It was hard on the stupid lowly, for they were coppered to lose from
the start; but the more he saw of the others, the apparent winners, the
less it seemed to him that they had anything to brag about. They, too,
were a long time dead, and their living did not amount to much. It was
a wild animal fight; the strong trampled the weak, and the strong, he
had already discovered,--men like Dowsett, and Letton, and
Guggenhammer,--were not necessarily the best. He remembered his miner
comrades of the Arctic. They were the stupid lowly, they did the hard
work and were robbed of the fruit of their toil just as was the old
woman making wine in the Sonoma hills; and yet they had finer qualities
of truth, and loyalty, and square-dealing than did the men who robbed
them. The winners seemed to be the crooked ones, the unfaithful ones,
the wicked ones. And even they had no say in the matter. They played
the cards that were given them; and Luck, the monstrous, mad-god thing,
the owner of the whole shebang, looked on and grinned. It was he who
stacked the universal card-deck of existence.
There was no justice in the deal. The little men that came, the little
pulpy babies, were not even asked if they wanted to try a flutter at
the game. They had no choice. Luck jerked them into life, slammed
them up against the jostling table, and told them: "Now play, damn you,
play!" And they did their best, poor little devils. The play of some
led to steam yachts and mansions; of others, to the asylum or the
pauper's ward. Some played the one same card, over and over, and made
wine all their days in the chaparral, hoping, at the end, to pull down
a set of false teeth and a coffin. Others quit the game early, having
drawn cards that called for violent death, or famine in the Barrens, or
loathsome and lingering disease. The hands of some called for kingship
and irresponsible and numerated power; other hands called for ambition,
for wealth in untold sums, for disgrace and shame, or for women and
wine.
As for himself, he had drawn a lucky hand, though he could not see all
the cards. Somebody or something might get him yet. The mad god,
Luck, might be tricking him along to some such end. An unfortunate set
of circumstances, and in a month's time the robber gang might be
war-dancing around his financial carcass. This very day a street-car
might run him down, or a sign fall from a building and smash in his
skull. Or there was disease, ever rampant, one of Luck's grimmest
whims. Who could say? To-morrow, or some other day, a ptomaine bug, or
some other of a thousand bugs, might jump out upon him and drag him
down. There was Doctor Bascom, Lee Bascom who had stood beside him a
week ago and talked and argued, a picture of magnificent youth, and
strength, and health. And in three days he was dead--pneumonia,
rheumatism of the heart, and heaven knew what else--at the end
screaming in agony that could be heard a block away. That had been
terrible. It was a fresh, raw stroke in Daylight's consciousness. And
when would his own turn come? Who could say?
In the meantime there was nothing to do but play the cards he could see
in his hand, and they were BATTLE, REVENGE, AND COCKTAILS. And Luck
sat over all and grinned.