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Updated: May 22, 2025
Lucy, you an' Lucindy leave 'lone them strips; you're jes' hend'rin' yer brothah. Git yer nine patch pieces. Gre't, big gals lak you ortn't idle." "Some one's comin'!" exclaimed Mr. Rogers, the first to notice the barking of the dogs outside. "See who 'tis, Henry." "Heah, Lucy, gether up them twigs," bustled Mrs. Rogers, as she swept the hearth. "Rache, tek thet harnish out.
Drinks were a dollar apiece, gold rated at sixteen dollars an ounce; there were thirty in the house that accepted his invitation, and between every dance the house was Elam's guest. This was his night, and nobody was to be allowed to pay for anything. Not that Elam Harnish was a drinking man. Whiskey meant little to him.
Each man strove to appear his natural self, and each natural self was different. Hal Campbell affected his customary cautiousness. French Louis betrayed interest. MacDonald retained his whole-souled benevolence, though it seemed to take on a slightly exaggerated tone. Kearns was coolly dispassionate and noncommittal, while Elam Harnish appeared as quizzical and jocular as ever.
We made a slaughter o' them and smoke-cured the flesh for the harnish casks the Frenchmen are the clever ones at that work 'boucan, they would be saying; and, man, it aye minded me o' a bochan wi' the smoke and that"; and I was thinking while Angus McKinnon was speaking of the wee black huts that our folk will be calling bochans to this day, and wondering if the French had put that name on them, for smoky they are indeed.
Four had perished by mischance in the bleak, uncharted vastness. And for twelve years Elam Harnish had continued to grope for gold among the shadows of the Circle. And no man had groped so obstinately nor so enduringly. He had grown up with the land. He knew no other land. Civilization was a dream of some previous life. Camps like Forty Mile and Circle City were to him metropolises.
As a result, high play went on with small hands though no play lasted long. A filled straight belonging to French Louis gave him a pot of five thousand against two sets of threes held by Campbell and Kearns. One pot of eight hundred dollars was won by a pair of treys on a showdown. And once Harnish called Kearns for two thousand dollars on a cold steal.
And if it comes on Stewart, you-all watch the Elam Harnish town site boom. In them days, when you-all come around makin' poor mouths..." He heaved a sigh of resignation. "Well, I suppose I'll have to give you-all a grub-stake or soup, or something or other." Daylight had vision. His scope had been rigidly limited, yet whatever he saw, he saw big.
And I tell you-all clear and plain there's goin' to be stiff grades and fast goin' to-night before we win to that same lady. And somebody's goin' to bump...hard." Once started, it was a quiet game, with little or no conversation, though all about the players the place was a-roar. Elam Harnish had ignited the spark. More and more miners dropped in to the Tivoli and remained.
Few men knew Elam Harnish by any other name than Burning Daylight, the name which had been given him in the early days in the land because of his habit of routing his comrades out of their blankets with the complaint that daylight was burning. Of the pioneers in that far Arctic wilderness, where all men were pioneers, he was reckoned among the oldest.
He risked everything for everything, and anything less than everything meant that he was a loser. So for twelve Yukon years, Elam Harnish had been a loser. True, on Moosehide Creek the past summer he had taken out twenty thousand dollars, and what was left in the ground was twenty thousand more. But, as he himself proclaimed, that was no more than getting his ante back.
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