He was the Burning Daylight of scores of wild adventures, the man who carried word to the ice-bound whaling fleet across the tundra wilderness to the Arctic Sea, who raced the mail from Circle to Salt Water and back again in sixty days, who saved the whole Tanana tribe from perishing in the winter of '91--in short, the man who smote the chechaquos' imaginations more violently than any other dozen men rolled into one.
He had the fatal facility for self-advertisement.

Things he did, no matter how adventitious or spontaneous, struck the popular imagination as remarkable.

And the latest thing he had done was always on men's lips, whether it was being first in the heartbreaking stampede to Danish Creek, in killing the record baldface grizzly over on Sulphur Creek, or in winning the single-paddle canoe race on the Queen's Birthday, after being forced to participate at the last moment by the failure of the sourdough representative to appear.

Thus, one night in the Moosehorn, he locked horns with Jack Kearns in the long-promised return game of poker.

The sky and eight o'clock in the morning were made the limits, and at the close of the game Daylight's winnings were two hundred and thirty thousand dollars.