But, as he himself
proclaimed, that was no more than getting his ante back. He had
ante'd his life for a dozen years, and forty thousand was a small
pot for such a stake--the price of a drink and a dance at the
Tivoli, of a winter's flutter at Circle City, and a grubstake for
the year to come.
The men of the Yukon reversed the old maxim till it read: hard
come, easy go. At the end of the reel, Elam Harnish called the
house up to drink again. 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. He was too vital and robust, too untroubled in mind and
body, to incline to the slavery of alcohol. He spent months at a
time on trail and river when he drank nothing stronger than
coffee, while he had gone a year at a time without even coffee.
But he was gregarious, and since the sole social expression of
the Yukon was the saloon, he expressed himself that way. When he
was a lad in the mining camps of the West, men had always done
that.
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