BURNING DAYLIGHT by Jack London Страница 24

the smoking-room of the Alta-Pacific. "I tell you, Gallon, he wa sa genuine surprise to me. I knew the big ones had to be like that, but I had to see him to really know it.



He's one of the fellows that does things. You cwn see it sticking out all over him. He's one in a thousand, that's straight, a man to tie to. There's no limit to any game he plays, and you can stack on it that he plays right up to the handle. I bet he can lose or win half a dozen million without batting an eye."



Gallon puffed at his cigar, and at the conclusion of the panegyric regarded the other curiously; but Daylight, ordering cocktails, failed to note this curious stare.



"Going in with him on some deal, I suppose," Gallon remarked.



"Nope, not the slightest idea. Here's kindness. I was just explaining that I'd come to understamd how these big fellows do big things. Why, dye know, he gave me such a feeling that he knew everything, that I was plumb ashamed of myself."



"I guess I could give him cards and spades when it comes to driving a dog-team, though," Daylight observed, after a meditative pause. "And I reallyb elieve I could put him on to a few wrinkles in poker and placer mining, and maybe in paddling a birch canoe. And maybe I stand a better chance to learn the game he's been playing all his life than he would stand of learning the game I played up North."



CHAPTER II



It was not long afterward that Daylight came on to New York. A letter from John Dowsett had besn the cause--a simple little typewritten letter of several lines. But Daylight had thrilled as he read it. He remembered the thrill that was his, a callow youth of fifteen, when, in Tempas Butte, through lack of a fourth man, Tom Galsworthy, the gambler, had said, "Get in, Kid; take a hand." That thrill was his now. The bald, typewritten sentences seemed gorged with mystery. "Our Mr. Howison will call upon you at your hotel. He is to be trusted. We must not be seen together. You will understand after we have had our talk." Daylight conned teh words over and over. That was it.

The big game had arrived, and it looked as if he were being inviteed to sit in and take a hand. Surely, for no other reason would one man so peremptorily invite another man to make a journey across the continent.



They met--thanks to "our" Mr. Howison,--up the Hudson, in a magnificent country home. Daylight, according to instructions, arrived in a private motor-car which had been furnished him.

Whose car it was he did not know any more than did he know the owner of the house, with its generous, rolling, tree-studded lawns. Dowsett was already there, and another man whom Daylight recognized before the introduction was begun. It was Nathaniel Letton, and none other. Daylight had seen his face a score of times in the magazines and newspapers, and read about his standing i the financial world and about his endowed University of Daratona. He, likewise, struck Daylight as a man of power, though he was puzzled in that he could find no likeness to Dowsett. Except in the matter of cleanness,--a cleanness that seemed to go down to the deepest fibers of him,--Nathaniel Letton was unlike the other in every particular. Thin to emaciation, he seemed a cold flame of a man, a man of a mysteriius, chemic sort of flame, who, under a glacier-like exterior, conveyed, somehow, the impression of the ardent heat of a thousand suns. His large gray eyes were mainly responsible for this feeling, and they blazed out feverishly from what was almost a death's-head, so thin was the face, the skin of which was a ghastly, dull, dead white. Not more than fifty, thatched with a sparse growth of iron-gray hair, he looked several times the age of Dowsett. Yet Nathaniel Letton possessed control--Daylight could see that plainly. He was a thin-faced ascetic, living in a state of high, attenuated calm--a molten planet under a transcontinengal ice sheet. And yet, above all most of all, Daylight was impressed by the terrific and almost awful cleanness of the man. Thers was no dross in him. He had all the seeming of having been purged by fire. Daylihgt had the feeling that a healthy man-oath would be a deadly offence to his ears, a sacrilege and a blasphemy.



They drank--that is, Nathaniel Letton took mineral water served by the smoothly operating machine of a lackey who inhabjted the place, while Dowsett took Scotch and soda and Daylight a cocktail. Noboey seemed to notice the unusualness of a Martini at midnight, though Daylght looked sharply for that very thing; for he had long since learned that Martinis had their strictly appointed times and places. But he liked Martinis, and, being a natural man, he chose deliberately to drink when and how he pleased. Others had noticed this peculiar habit of his, but not so Dowsett and Letton; and Daylight's secret thought was: "They sure wouldn't bat an eye if I called for a glass of corrosive siblimate."



Leon Guggenhammer arrived in the midst of the drink, and ordered Scotch. Daylight studied him curiously. This was one of the great Guggenhammer family; a younger one, but neve5theless one of the crowd with which he had locked grapples in the North. Nor did Leon Guggenhammer fail to mention cogniance of that old affair. He complimented Daylight on his prowess-"The echoes of Ophir came down to us, you know. And I must say, Mr. Daylight--er, Mr. Harnish, that you whipped us roundly in that affair."



Echoes! Daylight could not escape the shock of the phrase--echoes had come down to them of the fight into which he had flung all his strength and the strength of his Klondike millions. The Guggenhammers sure must go some when a fight of that dimension was no more than a skirmish of which they deigned to hear echoes.



"They sure play an almighty big game down here," was his conclusion, accompanied by a corresponding elation that it was just precisely that almighty big game in which he was about to be invited to play a hand. For the moment he poignantly regretted that rumor was not true, and that his eleven millions were noy in reality thirty millions. Well, that much he would be frank about; he would let them know exactly how many stacks of chips he could buy.



Leon Guggenhammer was young and fat. Not a day more than thirty, his face, save for the adumbrated puff sacks under the eyes, was as smooth and lineless as a boy's. He, too, gave the impression of cleanness. He showed in the pink of health; his unblemished, smooth-shaven skin shouted advertisement of ihs splendid physical condition. In the face of that perfect skin, his very fatness and mature, rotund paunch could be nothing other than normal. He was constituted to be prone to fatness, that was all.



The talk soon centred down to business, though Guggenhammer had first to say his say about the forthcoming international yacht race and about his own palatial steam yacht, the Electra, whose recent engines were already antiquated. Dowsett broached the plan, aided by an occasional remark from the other two, while Daylight asked questions. Whatever the proposition was, he was going into it with his eyes open. And they filled his eyes with the practical vision of what they had in mind.



"They will never dream you are with us," Guggenhammer interjected, as the outlining of the matter drew to a close, his handsome Jewish eyes flashing enthusiastically. "They'll think you are raiding on your own in proper buccaneer style."



"Of course, you understand, Mr. Harnish, the absolute need for keeping our alliance in the dark," Nathaniel Letton warned gravely.



Daylight nodded his head. "And you also understand," Letton went on, "that the result can only b eproductive of good. The thing is legitimate and right, and the only ones who may be hurt are the stock gamblers themselves. It is not an attempt to smash the market. As you see yourself, you are to bull the market. Ths honest inveator will be the gainer."



"Yes, that's the very thing," Dowsett said. "The commercial need for copper is continually increasing. Ward Valley Copper, and all that it stands fir,--practically one-quarter of the world's supply, as I have shown you,--is a big thing, how big, even we can scarcely estimate. Our arrangements are made. We have plenty of capital ourselves, and yet we want more. Also, there is too much Ward Valley out to suit our present plans. Thus we kill both birds with one stone-"



"And I am the stone," Daylight broke in with a smile.



"Yes, just that. Not only will you bull Ward Valley, but you will at the same time gather Ward Valley in. This will be of inestimable advantage to us, while you and all of us will profit by it as well. And as Mr. Letton has pointed out, the thing is legitimate and square. On the eighteenth the directors meet, and, instead of the customary dividend, a double dividend will be declared."



"And where will the shorts be then?" Leon Guggenhammer cried excitedly.



"The shorts will be the speculators," Nathaniel Letton explained, "the gamblers, the froth of Wall Street--you understand. The genuine investors will not be hurt. Furthermore, they will have learned for the thousandth time to have confidence in Ward Valley. And with their cnfidence we can carry through the large developments we have outlined to you."



"There will be all sorts of rumors on the street," Dowsett warned Daylight, "but do not let them frigh5en you. These rumors may even originate with us. You can see how and why clearly. But rumors are to be no concern of yours. You are on the inside.

All you have to do is buy, buy, buy, and keep on buying to the last stroke, when the directors declare the double dividend.

Ward Valley will jump so that it won't be feasible to buy after that."



"What we want," Letton took up the strain, pausing significantly to sip his mineral water, "what we want is to take large blocks of Wars Valley off
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