nothing but my salary and that I'd always lived a lap ahead of
it."

"But what do you do now?" was Daylight's query. "You must need
cash to buy clothes and magazines?"

"A week's work or a month's work, now and again, ploughing in the
winter, or picking grapes in the fall, and there's always odd
jobs with the farmers through the summer. I don't need much, so
I don't have to work much. Most of my time I spend fooling
around the place. I could do hack work for the magazines and
newspapers; but I prefer the ploughing and the grape picking.
Just look at me and you can see why. I'm hard as rocks. And I
like the work. But I tell you a chap's got to break in to it.
It's a great thing when he's learned to pick grapes a whole long
day and come home at the end of it with that tired happy feeling,
instead of being in a state of physical collapse. That
fireplace--those big stones--I was soft, then, a little, anemic,
alcoholic degenerate, with the spunk of a rabbit and about one
per cent as much stamina, and some of those big stones nearly
broke my back and my heart. But I persevered, and used my body
in the way Nature intended it should be used--not bending over a
desk and swilling whiskey... and, well, here I am, a better man
for it, and there's the fireplace, fine and dandy, eh?

"And now tell me about the Klondike, and how you turned San
Francisco upside down with that last raid of yours. You're a
bonny fighter, you know, and you touch my imagination, though my
cooler reason tells me that you are a lunatic like the rest. The
lust for power! It's a dreadful affliction. Why didn't you stay