The Four Million
“trail,” he said, at one of the North River ferries. I fancied I could
see the snow dust of Chilcoot yet powdering his shoulders. And then he
strewed the table with the nuggets, stuffed ptarmigans, bead work and
seal pelts of the returned Klondiker, 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 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—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 back to Cypher’s 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 Cypher’s. 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,” and the figure seemed to fill all
out-of-doors. But of all the picture’s 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 didn’t know,” I said to him.
“We’ve bought a cottage in the Bronx with the money,” said he. “Any
evening at 7.”
“Then,” said I, “when you led us against the lumberman—the—Klondiker—it
wasn’t altogether on account of the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of
Nature?”
“Well, not altogether,” said Kraft, with a grin.
MEMOIRS OF A YELLOW DOG
I don’t suppose it will knock any of you people off your perch to read
a contribution from an animal. Mr. Kipling 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 and the Mont Pélee horror.
But you needn’t look for any stuck-up literature in my piece, such as
Bearoo, the bear, and Snakoo, the snake, and Tammanoo, the tiger, talk
in the jungle books. A yellow dog that’s 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 Longshoremen’s banquet),
mustn’t 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 gros grain
flannelette in her shopping bag till she cornered it, and gave up. From
that moment I was a pet—a mamma’s own wootsey squidlums. Say, gentle
reader, did you ever have a 200-pound woman breathing a flavour of
Camembert cheese and Peau d’Espagne pick you up and wallop her nose all
over you, remarking all the time in an Emma Eames tone of voice: “Oh,
oo’s 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 for the Siberian bloodhound prize.
I’ll 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 flat 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.
If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone they’d never
marry. Laura Lean Jibbey, peanut brittle, a little almond cream on the
neck muscles, dishes unwashed, half an hour’s talk with the iceman,
reading a package of old letters, a couple of pickles and two bottles
of malt extract, one hour peeking through a hole in the window shade
into the flat across the air-shaft—that’s about all there is to it.
Twenty minutes before time for him to come home from work she
straightens up the house, fixes her rat so it won’t show, and gets out
a lot of sewing for a ten-minute bluff.
I led a dog’s life in that flat. ‘Most all day I lay there in my corner
watching that fat woman kill time. I slept sometimes and had pipe
dreams about being out chasing cats into basements and growling at old
ladies with black mittens, as a dog was intended to do. Then she would
pounce upon me with a lot of that drivelling poodle palaver and kiss me
on the nose—but what could I do? A dog can’t chew cloves.
I began to feel sorry for Hubby, dog my cats if I didn’t. We looked so
much alike that people noticed it when we went out; so we shook the
streets that Morgan’s cab drives down, and took to climbing the piles
of last December’s snow on the streets where cheap people live.
One evening when we were thus promenading, and I was trying to look
like a prize St. Bernard, and the old man was trying to look like he
wouldn’t have murdered the first organ-grinder he heard play
Mendelssohn’s wedding-march, I looked up at him and said, in my way:
“What are you looking so sour about, you oakum trimmed lobster? She
don’t kiss you. You don’t have to sit on her lap and listen to talk
that would make the book of a musical comedy sound like the maxims of
Epictetus. You ought to be thankful you’re not a dog. Brace up,
Benedick, and bid the blues begone.”
The matrimonial mishap looked down at me with almost canine
intelligence in his face.
“Why, doggie,” says he, “good doggie. You almost look like you could
speak. What is it, doggie—Cats?”
Cats! Could speak!
But, of course, he couldn’t understand. Humans were denied the speech
of animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and
men can get together is in fiction.
In the flat across the hall from us lived a lady with a black-and-tan
terrier. Her husband strung it and took it out every evening, but he
always came home cheerful and whistling. One day I touched noses with
the black-and-tan in the hall, and I struck him for an elucidation.
“See, here, Wiggle-and-Skip,” I says, “you know that it ain’t the
nature of a real man to play dry nurse to a dog in public. I never saw
one leashed to a bow-wow yet that didn’t look like he’d like to lick
every other man that looked at him. But your boss comes in every day as
perky and set up as an amateur prestidigitator doing the egg trick. How
does he do it? Don’t tell me he likes it.”
“Him?” says the black-and-tan. “Why, he uses Nature’s Own Remedy. He
gets spifflicated. At first when we go out he’s as shy as the man on
the steamer who would rather play pedro when they make ’em all
jackpots. By the time we’ve been in eight saloons he don’t care whether
the thing on the end of his line is a dog or a catfish. I’ve lost two
inches of my tail trying to sidestep those swinging doors.”
The pointer I got from that terrier—vaudeville please copy—set me to
thinking.
One evening about 6 o’clock my mistress ordered him to get busy and do
the ozone act for Lovey. I have concealed it until now, but that is
what she called me. The black-and-tan was called “Tweetness.” I
consider that I have the bulge on him as far as you could chase a
rabbit. Still “Lovey” is something of a nomenclatural tin can on the
tail of one’s self respect.
At a quiet place on a safe street I tightened the line of my custodian
in front of an attractive, refined saloon. I made a dead-ahead scramble
for the doors, whining like a dog in the press despatches that lets the
family know that little Alice is bogged while gathering lilies in the
brook.
“Why, darn my eyes,” says the old man, with a grin; “darn my eyes if
the saffron-coloured son of a seltzer lemonade ain’t asking me in to
take a drink. Lemme see—how long’s it been since I saved shoe leather
by keeping one foot on the foot-rest? I believe I’ll—”
I knew I had him. Hot Scotches he took, sitting at a table. For an hour
he kept the Campbells coming. I sat by his side rapping for the waiter
with my tail, and eating free lunch such as mamma in her flat never
equalled with her homemade truck bought at a delicatessen store eight
minutes before papa comes home.
When the products of Scotland were all exhausted except the rye bread