“And now for the grub. This will include flour, corn-meal, yeast in cakes and baking powder; evaporated fruits, potatoes, onions and vegetables; sugar and saccharin tablets; ham, bacon and salt pork; about a hundred pounds of Alaska strawberries and hardtack for emergency rations, also a lot of pemmican for the same purpose; some tea, coffee and condensed milk, soap and oleomargarine; salt and pepper, and a few other little things I shall not forget to put in. You have a medicine case? What have you got in it?” he asked, for Jack McQuesten had taken a great interest in these two ‘down east’ boys and he intended to see that they had enough of everything and the right kind of things—that is if they ever started.
Jack told him it had bottles containing quinine, pepsin, cathartic pills, calomel and migrain.
“No drug kit is complete up here unless you have arnica for stiff joints and strained muscles and boracic acid for blistered and aching feet.”
The old trader was in no hurry to get the outfit together that day for he knew there was going to be a fight to the finish in the evening and knowing Black Pete better than he cared to and not knowing Bill Adams at all, he allowed that, like as not, the boys wouldn’t need anything further unless it was one or two spruce boxes.
“Looks to me as if Mr. Jack is tryin’ to sell us his store and is goin’ off to new diggin’s,” yawped Bill when he looked over the list Jack had made as the storekeeper called off the items. “An’ what’s the quicksilver for anyway—to fill up the thermometer tube when the bottom drops out o’ it?”
Jack laughed at his pal’s little joke. “No, to dissolve out the gold when we find it in quartz.”
“I suppose we’ll have to take it and pay for it and all them other prospectin’ tools just to make things look regular, but we’ll throw them away as soon as we gets outer sight. We’re after gold in sacks, not in handfuls,” said Bill. “Why man alive it ’ud take a freight car to transport all the stuff he’s goin’ to sell us; and besides, think o’ the skads o’ spondulicks we’re goin’ to have to cough up fer it all, too.”
“You must remember that we’ve got to live all winter, Bill, and McQuesten knows just what he’s about.”
“An’ what’s them Alaska strawberries?—a hundred pounds o’ them!—he must think we’re goin’ to a Fourth Ward Picnic or a strawberry festible. Do you know, Jack, I’m goin’ to have some o’ them night-bloomin’ strawberries for supper if I has to tip that slant-eyed, Hong-Kong cook at the hotel a four bit piece.
“I suppose you’ve eaten pemmican, haven’t you Bill?”