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 Cyphers 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 back to Cyphers went we three, and, finding customers scarce, we joined hands and did an Indian dance with Milly in the centre.
This, I say, happened three years ago. And about that time a little luck descended upon us three, and we were enabled to buy costlier and less wholesome food than Cyphers. Our paths separated, and I saw Kraft no more and Judkins seldom.
He will never find Cyphers 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 back to Cyphers went we three, and, finding customers scarce, we joined hands and did an Indian dance with Milly in the centre.
This, I say, happened three years ago. And about that time a little luck descended upon us three, and we were enabled to buy costlier and less wholesome food than Cyphers. Our paths separated, and I saw Kraft no more and Judkins seldom.
But, as I said, I saw a painting the other day that was sold for $5,000. The title was Boadicea[98], and the figure seemed to fill all out-of-doors. But of all the pictures admirers who stood before it, I believe I was the only one who longed for Boadicea to stalk from her frame, bringing me corned-beef hash with poached egg.
I hurried away to see Kraft. His satanic eyes were the same, his hair was worse tangled, but his clothes had been made by a tailor.
I didnt know, I said to him.
Weve bought a cottage in the Bronx[99] with the money, said he. Any evening at 7.
Then, said I, when you led us against the lumberman the Klondiker it wasnt altogether on account of the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature?
Well, not altogether, said Kraft, with a grin.
Memoirs of a Yellow Dog
I dont suppose it will knock any of you people off your perch to read a contribution from an animal. Mr. Kipling[100] and a good many others have demonstrated the fact that animals can express themselves in remunerative English, and no magazine goes to press nowadays without an animal story in it, except the old-style monthlies that are still running pictures of Bryan[101] and the Mont Pelée[102] horror.
But you neednt look for any stuck-up literature in my piece, such as Bearoo[103], the bear, and Snakoo[104], the snake, and Tammanoo[105], the tiger, talk in the jungle books. A yellow dog thats spent most of his life in a cheap New York flat, sleeping in a corner on an old sateen underskirt (the one she spilled port wine on at the Lady Longshoremens banquet), mustnt be expected to perform any tricks with the art of speech.
I was born a yellow pup; date, locality, pedigree and weight unknown. The first thing I can recollect, an old woman had me in a basket at Broadway and Twenty-third trying to sell me to a fat lady. Old Mother Hubbard was boosting me to beat the band as a genuine Pomeranian-Hambletonian-Red-Irish-Cochin-China-Stoke-Pogis fox terrier. The fat lady chased a V around among the samples of gross grain flannelette in her shopping bag till she cornered it, and gave up. From that moment I was a pet a mammas own wootsey squidlums[106]. Say, gentle reader, did you ever have a 200-pound woman breathing a flavour of Camembert cheese and Peau dEspagne[107] pick you up and wallop her nose all over you, remarking all the time in an Emma Eames tone of voice: Oh, oos um oodlum, doodlum, woodlum, toodlum, bitsy-witsy skoodlums?
From a pedigreed yellow pup I grew up to be an anonymous yellow cur looking like a cross between an Angora cat and a box of lemons. But my mistress never tumbled. She thought that the two primeval pups that Noah chased into the ark were but a collateral branch of my ancestors. It took two policemen to keep her from entering me at the Madison Square Garden[108] for the Siberian bloodhound prize.
Ill tell you about that flat. The house was the ordinary thing in New York, paved with Parian marble in the entrance hall and cobblestones above the first floor. Our fiat was three well, not flights climbs up. My mistress rented it unfurnished, and put in the regular things 1903 antique unholstered parlour set, oil chromo of geishas in a Harlem tea house, rubber plant and husband.
By Sirius! there was a biped I felt sorry for. He was a little man with sandy hair and whiskers a good deal like mine. Henpecked? well, toucans and flamingoes and pelicans all had their bills in him. He wiped the dishes and listened to my mistress tell about the cheap, ragged things the lady with the squirrel-skin coat on the second floor hung out on her line to dry. And every evening while she was getting supper she made him take me out on the end of a string for a walk.