Лучшие рассказы О. Генри = The Best of O. Henry

And well we knew the habits of the Badgers[93 - the Badgers – the nickname of the residents of Wisconsin, the US state in the Midwest], 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.

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.

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[94 - Chilcoot – a mountain pass in the Rocky Mountains in Alaska; served as a way to the lands rich in gold.] yet powdering his shoulders. And then he strewed the table with the nuggets, stuffed ptarmigans, bead work and seal pelts of the returned Klondiker[95 - Klondiker – here: a gold prospector; gold was found on the Klondike River in the late 1890s.

“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.