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seven-passenger touring car, it came into being only by the
performance of work. Where the bunco came in was in the
distribution of these things after labor had created them. He
failed to see the horny-handed sons of toil enjoying grand pianos
or riding in automobiles. How this came about was explained by
the bunco. By tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands men
sat up nights and schemed how they could get between the workers
and the things the workers produced. These schemers were the
business men. When they got between the worker and his product,
they took a whack out of it for themselves The size of the whack
was determined by no rule of equity; but by their own strength
and swinishness. It was always a case of "all the traffic can
bear." He saw all men in the business game doing this.
One day, in a mellow mood (induced by a string of cocktails and
a hearty lunch), he started a conversation with Jones, the
elevator boy. Jones was a slender, mop-headed, man-grown,
truculent flame of an individual who seemed to go out of his way
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to insult his passengers. It was this that attracted Daylight's
interest, and he was not long in finding out what was the matter
with Jones. He was a proletarian, according to his own
aggressive classification, and he had wanted to write for a
living. Failing to win with the magazines, and compelled to find
himself in food and shelter, he had gone to the little valley of
Petacha, not a hundred miles from Los Angeles. Here, toiling in
the day-time, he planned to write and study at night. But the
railroad charged all the traffic would bear. Petacha was a
desert valley, and produced only three things: cattle, fire-wood,
and charcoal. For freight to Los Angeles on a carload of
cattle the railroad charged eight dollars. This, Jones
explained, was due to the fact that the cattle had legs and could
be driven to Los Angeles at a cost equivalent to the charge per
car load. But firewood had no legs, and the railroad charged
just precisely twenty-four dollars a carload.
This was a fine adjustment, for by working hammer-and- tongs
through a twelve-hour day, after freight had been deducted from
the selling price of the wood in Los Angeles, the wood-chopper
received one dollar and sixty cents. Jones had thought to get
ahead of the game by turning his wood into charcoa. His
Burning Daylight
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106
estimates
were satisfactory. But the railroad also made estimates. It
issued a rate of forty-two dollars a car on charcoal. At the end
of three months, Jones went over his figures, and found that he
was
still making one dollar and sixty cents a day.
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"So I quit," Jones concluded. "I went hobbling for a year, and I
got back at the railroads. Leaving out the little things, I came
across the Sierras in the summer and touched a match to the
snow-sheds. They only had a little thirty- thousand-dollar fire.
I guess that squared up all balances due on Petacha."
"Son, ain't you afraid to be turning loose such information?"
Daylight gravely demanded.
"Not on your life," quoth Jones. "They can't prove it. You
could say I said so, and I could say I didn't say so, and a hell
of a lot that evidence would amount to with a jury."
Daylight went into his office and meditated awhile. That was it:
all the traffic would bear. From top to bottom, that was the
rule of the game; and what kept the game going was the fact that
a sucker was born every minute. If a Jones were born every
minute, the game wouldn't last very long. Lucky for the players
that the workers weren't Joneses.
But there were other and larger phases of the game. Little
business men, shopkeepers, and such ilk took what whack they
could out of the product of the worker; but, after all, it was
the large business men who formed the workers through the little
business men. When all was said and done, the latter, like Jones
in Petacha Valley, got no more than wages out of their whack. In
truth, they were hired men for the large business men. Still
again, higher up, were the big fellows. They used vast and
complicated paraphernalia for the purpose, on a large scale of
getting between hundreds of thousands of workers and their
products. These men were not so much mere robbers as gamblers.
And, not content with their direct winnings, being essentially
gamblers, they raided one another. They called this feature of
the game HIGH FINANCE. They were all engaged primarily in
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robbing the worker, but every little while they formed
combinations and robbed one another of the accumulated loot.
This explained the fifty-thousand-dollar raid on him by
Holdsworthy and the ten-million-dollar raid on him by Dowsett,
Letton, and Guggenhammer. And when he raided Panama Mail he had
done exactly the same thing. Well, he concluded, it was finer
sport robbing the robbers than robbing the poor stupid workers.
Thus, all unread in philosophy, Daylight preempted for himself
the position and vocation of a twentieth-century superman. He
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107
found, with rare and mythical exceptions, that there was no
noblesse oblige among the business and financial supermen. As
a clever traveler had announced in an after-dinner speech at the
Alta-Pacific, "There was honor amongst thieves, and this was what
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