It was Kraft who first voiced the fear that each of us must have held latently. It came up apropos, of course, of certain questions of art at which we were hammering. One of us compared the harmony existing between a Haydn[90] symphony and pistache ice cream to the exquisite congruity between Milly and Cypher’s.
“There is a certain fate hanging over Milly,” said Kraft, “and if it overtakes her she is lost to Cypher’s and to us.”
“She will grow fat?” asked Judkins, fearsomely.
“She will go to night school and become refined?” I ventured anxiously.
“It is this,” said Kraft, punctuating in a puddle of spilled coffee with a stiff forefinger. “Caesar had his Brutus – the cotton has its bollworm, the chorus girl has her Pittsburger, the summer boarder has his poison ivy, the hero has his Carnegie medal[91], art has its Morgan[92], the rose has its —”
“Speak,” I interrupted, much perturbed. “You do not think that Milly will begin to lace?”
“One day,” concluded Kraft, solemnly, “there will come to Cypher’s for a plate of beans a millionaire lumberman from Wisconsin, and he will marry Milly.”
“Never!” exclaimed Judkins and I, in horror.
“A lumberman,” repeated Kraft, hoarsely.
“And a millionaire lumberman!” I sighed, despairingly.
“From Wisconsin!” groaned Judkins.
We agreed that the awful fate seemed to menace her. Few things were less improbable. Milly, like some vast virgin stretch of pine woods, was made to catch the lumberman’s eye. And well we knew the habits of the Badgers[93], once fortune smiled upon them. Straight to New York they hie, and lay their goods at the feet of the girl who serves them beans in a beanery. Why, the alphabet itself connives. The Sunday newspaper’s headliner’s work is cut for him.
“Winsome Waitress Wins Wealthy Wisconsin Woodsman.”
For a while we felt that Milly was on the verge of being lost to us.
It was our love of the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature that inspired us. We could not give her over to a lumberman, doubly accursed by wealth and provincialism. We shuddered to think of Milly, with her voice modulated and her elbows covered, pouring tea in the marble teepee of a tree murderer. No! In Cypher’s she belonged – in the bacon smoke, the cabbage perfume, the grand, Wagnerian chorus of hurled ironstone china and rattling casters.
Our fears must have been prophetic, for on that same evening the wildwood discharged upon us Milly’s preordained confiscator – our fee to adjustment and order. But Alaska and not Wisconsin bore the burden of the visitation.
We were at our supper of beef stew and dried apples when he trotted in as if on the heels of a dog team, and made one of the mess at our table. With the freedom of the camps he assaulted our ears and claimed the fellowship of men lost in the wilds of a hash house. We embraced him as a specimen, and in three minutes we had all but died for one another as friends.
He was rugged and bearded and wind-dried. He had just come off the “trail,” he said, at one of the North River ferries. I fancied I could see the snow dust of Chilcoot[94] yet powdering his shoulders. And then he strewed the table with the nuggets, stuffed ptarmigans, bead work and seal pelts of the returned Klondiker[95], and began to prate to us of his millions.
“Bank drafts for two millions,” was his summing up, “and a thousand a day piling up from my claims. And now I want some beef stew and canned peaches. I never got off the train since I mushed out of Seattle, and I’m hungry. The stuff the niggers feed you on Pullmans[96] don’t count. You gentlemen order what you want.”
And then Milly loomed up with a thousand dishes on her bare arm – loomed up big and white and pink and awful as Mount Saint Elias[97] – with a smile like day breaking in a gulch. And the Klondiker threw down his pelts and nuggets as dross, and let his jaw fall half-way, and stared at her. You could almost see the diamond tiaras on Milly’s brow and the hand-embroidered silk Paris gowns that he meant to buy for her.
At last the bollworm had attacked the cotton – the poison ivy was reaching out its tendrils to entwine the summer boarder – the millionaire lumberman, thinly disguised as the Alaskan miner, was about to engulf our Milly and upset Nature’s adjustment.
Kraft was the first to act. He leaped up and pounded the Klondiker’s back. “Come out and drink,” he shouted. “Drink first and eat afterward.” Judkins seized one arm and I the other. Gaily, roaringly, irresistibly, in jolly-good-fellow style, we dragged him from the restaurant to a café, stuffing his pockets with his embalmed birds and indigestible nuggets.
There he rumbled a roughly good-humoured protest. “That’s the girl for my money,” he declared. “She can eat out of my skillet the rest of her life. Why, I never see such a fine girl. I’m going back there and ask her to marry me. I guess she won’t want to sling hash any more when she sees the pile of dust I’ve got.”
“You’ll take another whiskey and milk now,” Kraft persuaded, with Satan’s smile. “I thought you up-country fellows were better sports.”
Kraft spent his puny store of coin at the bar and then gave Judkins and me such an appealing look that we went down to the last dime we had in toasting our guest.
Then, when our ammunition was gone and the Klondiker, still somewhat sober, began to babble again of Milly, Kraft whispered into his ear such a polite, barbed insult relating to people who were miserly with their funds, that the miner crashed down handful after handful of silver and notes, calling for all the fluids in the world to drown the imputation.
Thus the work was accomplished. With his own guns we drove him from the field. And then we had him carted to a distant small hotel and put to bed with his nuggets and baby seal-skins stuffed around him.
“He will never find Cypher’s again,” said Kraft. “He will propose to the first white apron he sees in a dairy restaurant to-morrow. And Milly – I mean the Natural Adjustment – is saved!”
And