"Fifty," he said.

The faro-dealer slipped two cards. The high card won. He
scribbled the amount on a pad, and the weigher at the bar
balanced fifty dollars' worth of dust in the gold-scales and
poured it into Burning Daylight's sack. The waltz in the back
room being finished, the three couples, followed by the fiddler
and the pianist and heading for the bar, caught Daylight's eye.

"Surge along, you-all" he cried. "Surge along and name it. This
is my night, and it ain't a night that comes frequent. Surge up,
you Siwashes and Salmon-eaters. It's my night, I tell you-all--"

"A blame mangy night," Charley Bates interpolated.

"You're right, my son," Burning Daylight went on gaily.

"A mangy night, but it's MY night, you see. I'm the mangy old
he-wolf. Listen to me howl."

And howl he did, like a lone gray timber wolf, till the Virgin
thrust her pretty fingers in her ears and shivered. A minute
later she was whirled away in his arms to the dancing-floor,
where, along with the other three women and their partners, a
rollicking Virginia reel was soon in progress. Men and women
danced in moccasins, and the place was soon a-roar, Burning
Daylight the centre of it and the animating spark, with quip and
jest and rough merriment rousing them out of the slough of
despond in which he had found them.