others knelt in mock humility, scooping snow upon their heads and
claiming the rite accomplished. But a group of five stood
upright, backwoodsmen and frontiersmen, they, eager to contest
any man's birthday.

Graduates of the hardest of man-handling schools, veterans of
multitudes of rough-and-tumble battles, men of blood and sweat
and endurance, they nevertheless lacked one thing that Daylight
possessed in high degree--namely, an almost perfect brain and
muscular coordination. It was simple, in its way, and no virtue
of his. He had been born with this endowment. His nerves
carried messages more quickly than theirs; his mental processes,
culminating in acts of will, were quicker than theirs; his
muscles themselves, by some immediacy of chemistry, obeyed the
messages of his will quicker than theirs. He was so made, his
muscles were high-power explosives. The levers of his body
snapped into play like the jaws of steel traps. And in addition
to all this, his was that super-strength that is the dower of but
one human in millions--a strength depending not on size but on
degree, a supreme organic excellence residing in the stuff of the
muscles themselves. Thus, so swiftly could he apply a stress,
that, before an opponent could become aware and resist, the aim
of the stress had been accomplished. In turn, so swiftly did he
become aware of a stress applied to him, that he saved himself by
resistance or by delivering a lightning counter-stress.

"It ain't no use you-all standing there," Daylight addressed the
waiting group. "You-all might as well get right down and take
your baptizing. You-all might down me any other day in the year,
but on my birthday I want you-all to know I'm the best man. Is