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An Adjustment of Nature

Short Stories

"Fox-in-the-Morning"

A Bird of Bagdad

A Blackjack Bargainer

A Call Loan

A Chaparral Christmas Gift

A Chaparral Prince

A Comedy in Rubber

A Cosmopolite in a Cafe

A Departmental Case

A Dinner at--------*

A Double-Dyed Deceiver

A Fog in Santone

A Harlem Tragedy

A Lickpenny Lover

A Little Local Colour

A Little Talk about Mobs

A Madison Square Arabian Night

A Matter of Mean Elevation

A Midsummer Knight's Dream

A Midsummer Masquerade

A Municipal Report

A Newspaper Story

A Night in New Arabia

A Philistine in Bohemia

A Poor Rule

A Ramble in Aphasia

A Retrieved Reformation

A Ruler of Men

A Sacrifice Hit

A Service of Love

A Snapshot at the President

A Strange Story

A Technical Error

A Tempered Wind

According to Their Lights

After Twenty Years

An Adjustment of Nature

An Afternoon Miracle

An Apology

An Unfinished Christmas Story

An Unfinished Story

Aristocracy Versus Hash

Art and the Bronco

At Arms With Morpheus

Babes in the Jungle

Best-Seller

Between Rounds

Bexar Scrip No. 2692

Blind Man's Holiday

Brickdust Row

Buried Treasure

By Courier

Calloway's Code

Caught

Cherchez La Femme

Christmas by Injunction

Compliments of the Season

Confessions of a Humorist

Conscience in Art

Cupid a La Carte

Cupid's Exile Number Two

Dickey

Dougherty's Eye-Opener

Elsie in New York

Extradited from Bohemia

Fickle Fortune or How Gladys Hustled

Friends in San Rosario

From Each According to His Ability

From the Cabby's Seat

Georgia's Ruling

Girl

He Also Serves

Hearts and Crosses

Hearts and Hands

Helping the Other Fellow

Holding Up a Train

Hostages to Momus

Hygeia at the Solito

Innocents of Broadway

Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet

Jimmy Hayes and Muriel

Law and Order

Let Me Feel Your Pulse

Little Speck in Garnered Fruit

Lord Oakhurst's Curse

Lost on Dress Parade

Madame Bo-Peep, of the Ranches

Makes the Whole World Kin

Mammon and the Archer

Man About Town

Masters of Arts

Memoirs of a Yellow Dog

Modern Rural Sports

Money Maze

Nemesis and the Candy Man

New York by Camp Fire Light

Next to Reading Matter

No Story

October and June

On Behalf of the Management

One Dollar's Worth

One Thousand Dollars

Out of Nazareth

Past One at Rooney's

Phoebe

Proof of the Pudding

Psyche and the Pskyscraper

Queries and Answers

Roads of Destiny

Roses, Ruses and Romance

Rouge et Noir

Round the Circle

Rus in Urbe

Schools and Schools

Seats of the Haughty

Shearing the Wolf

Ships

Shoes

Sisters of the Golden Circle

Smith

Sociology in Serge and Straw

Sound and Fury

Springtime a La Carte

Squaring the Circle

Strictly Business

Strictly Business

Suite Homes and Their Romance

Telemachus, Friend

The Admiral

The Adventures of Shamrock Jolnes

The Assessor of Success

The Atavism of John Tom Little Bear

The Badge of Policeman O'Roon

The Brief Debut of Tildy

The Buyer From Cactus City

The Caballero's Way

The Cactus

The Caliph and the Cad

The Caliph, Cupid and the Clock

The Call of the Tame

The Chair of Philanthromathematics

The Champion of the Weather

The Church with an Overshot-Wheel

The City of Dreadful Night

The Clarion Call

The Coming-Out of Maggie

The Complete Life of John Hopkins

The Cop and the Anthem

The Count and the Wedding Guest

The Country of Elusion

The Day Resurgent

The Day We Celebrate

The Defeat of the City

The Detective Detector

The Diamond of Kali

The Discounters of Money

The Dog and the Playlet

The Door of Unrest

The Dream

The Duel

The Duplicity of Hargraves

The Easter of the Soul

The Emancipation of Billy

The Enchanted Kiss

The Enchanted Profile

The Ethics of Pig

The Exact Science of Matrimony

The Ferry of Unfulfilment

The Fifth Wheel

The Flag Paramount

The Fool-Killer

The Foreign Policy of Company 99

The Fourth in Salvador

The Friendly Call

The Furnished Room

The Gift of the Magi

The Girl and the Graft

The Girl and the Habit

The Gold That Glittered

The Greater Coney

The Green Door

The Guardian of the Accolade

The Guilty Party - An East Side Tragedy

The Halberdier of the Little Rheinschloss

The Hand that Riles the World

The Handbook of Hymen

The Harbinger

The Head-Hunter

The Hiding of Black Bill

The Higher Abdication

The Higher Pragmatism

The Hypotheses of Failure

The Indian Summer of Dry Valley Johnson

The Lady Higher Up

The Last Leaf

The Last of the Troubadours

The Lonesome Road

The Lost Blend

The Lotus And The Bottle

The Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein

The Making of a New Yorker

The Man Higher Up

The Marionettes

The Marquis and Miss Sally

The Marry Month of May

The Memento

The Missing Chord

The Moment of Victory

The Octopus Marooned

The Passing of Black Eagle

The Pendulum

The Phonograph and the Graft

The Pimienta Pancakes

The Plutonian Fire

The Poet and the Peasant

The Pride of the Cities

The Princess and the Puma

The Prisoner of Zembla

The Proem

The Purple Dress

The Ransom of Mack

The Ransom of Red Chief

The Rathskeller and the Rose

The Red Roses of Tonia

The Reformation of Calliope

The Remnants of the Code

The Renaissance at Charleroi

The Roads We Take

The Robe of Peace

The Romance of a Busy Broker

The Rose of Dixie

The Rubaiyat of a Scotch Highball

The Rubber Plant's Story

The Shamrock and the Palm

The Shocks of Doom

The Skylight Room

The Sleuths

The Snow Man

The Social Triangle

The Song and the Sergeant

The Sparrows in Madison Square

The Sphinx Apple

The Tale of a Tainted Tenner

The Theory and the Hound

The Thing's the Play

The Third Ingredient

The Trimmed Lamp

The Unknown Quantity

The Unprofitable Servant

The Venturers

The Vitagraphoscope

The Voice of the City

The Whirligig of Life

The World and the Door

Thimble, Thimble

Tictocq

To Him Who Waits

Tobin's Palm

Tommy's Burglar

Tracked to Doom

Transformation of Martin Burney

Transients in Arcadia

Two Recalls

Two Renegades

Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen

Ulysses and the Dogman

Vanity and Some Sables

What You Want

While the Auto Waits

Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking

Witches' Loaves







In an art exhibition the other day I saw a painting that had been
sold for $5,000. The painter was a young scrub out of the West named
Kraft, who had a favourite food and a pet theory. His pabulum was an
unquenchable belief in the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature.
His theory was fixed around corned-beef hash with poached egg. There
was a story behind the picture, so I went home and let it drip out of
a fountain-pen. The idea of Kraft--but that is not the beginning of
the story.

Three years ago Kraft, Bill Judkins (a poet), and I took our meals at
Cypher's, on Eighth Avenue. I say "took." When we had money, Cypher
got it "off of" us, as he expressed it. We had no credit; we went
in, called for food and ate it. We paid or we did not pay. We had
confidence in Cypher's sullenness end smouldering ferocity. Deep
down in his sunless soul he was either a prince, a fool or an artist.
He sat at a worm-eaten desk, covered with files of waiters' checks so
old that I was sure the bottomest one was for clams that Hendrik
Hudson had eaten and paid for. Cypher had the power, in common with
Napoleon III. and the goggle-eyed perch, of throwing a film over his
eyes, rendering opaque the windows of his soul. Once when we left
him unpaid, with egregious excuses, I looked back and saw him shaking
with inaudible laughter behind his film. Now and then we paid up
back scores.

But the chief thing at Cypher's was Milly. Milly was a waitress.
She was a grand example of Kraft's theory of the artistic adjustment
of nature. She belonged, largely, to waiting, as Minerva did to the
art of scrapping, or Venus to the science of serious flirtation.
Pedestalled and in bronze she might have stood with the noblest of
her heroic sisters as "Liver-and-Bacon Enlivening the World." She
belonged to Cypher's. You expected to see her colossal figure loom
through that reeking blue cloud of smoke from frying fat just as you
expect the Palisades to appear through a drifting Hudson River fog.
There amid the steam of vegetables and the vapours of acres of "ham
and," the crash of crockery, the clatter of steel, the screaming of
"short orders," the cries of the hungering and all the horrid tumult
of feeding man, surrounded by swarms of the buzzing winged beasts
bequeathed us by Pharaoh, Milly steered her magnificent way like some
great liner cleaving among the canoes of howling savages.

Our Goddess of Grub was built on lines so majestic that they could be
followed only with awe. Her sleeves were always rolled above her
elbows. She could have taken us three musketeers in her two hands
and dropped us out of the window. She had seen fewer years than any
of us, but she was of such superb Evehood and simplicity that she
mothered us from the beginning. Cypher's store of eatables she
poured out upon us with royal indifference to price and quantity, as
from a cornucopia that knew no exhaustion. Her voice rang like a
great silver bell; her smile was many-toothed and frequent; she
seemed like a yellow sunrise on mountain tops. I never saw her but I
thought of the Yosemite. And yet, somehow, I could never think of
her as existing outside of Cypher's. There nature had placed her,
and she had taken root and grown mightily. She seemed happy, and
took her few poor dollars on Saturday nights with the flushed
pleasure of a child that receives an unexpected donation.

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 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
boliworm, the chorus girl has her Pittsburger, the summer boarder has
his poison ivy, the hero has his Carnegie medal, art has its Morgan,
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 T, 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, 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 yet powdering his shoulders. And
then he strewed the table with the nuggets, stuffed ptarmigans, bead
work and seal pelts of the returned Kiondiker, 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 Kiondiker 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-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.




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