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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!"
I've written to him about you our cypher's ready now and said that you'd had the most curious effect on me. I'd tried to resist you, but I couldn't, not even to please him or myself. I told him I'd promised to wait for you to help me; and though I didn't see what you could possibly do, still, your faith was contagious.
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.
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.
Pinckney boarded a passing caboose and was soon on his way to Tacoma. It is believed by Northern Pacific engineers that Thomas Cypher's spirit still hovers near Eagle gorge. "There is as much superstition in New-England to-day as there was in those old times when they slashed Quakers and built bonfires for witches." It was a New York man who gave expression to this rather startling statement.
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.
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.
"Oh, it's nothing. It's what I saw back at the gorge. It's Tom Cypher's engine, No. 33. There's no danger of a collision. The man who is running that ahead of us can run it faster backward than I can this one forward. Have I seen it before? Yes, twenty times. Every engineer on the road knows that engine, and he's always watching for it when he gets to the gorge."
Hereafter he could think of Katy in the row-boat the other figure was a dim unreality which might have come to mean something, but which never did mean anything to him. I wonder who keeps the tavern at Cypher's Lake now? In those old days it was not a very reputable place; it was said that many a man had there been fleeced at poker.
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.
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