onged--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 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
cafe, stuffing his pockets with his embalmed birds and indigestible
nuggets.

There he rumbled a roughly good-humour