As a cook Roaring Bill Wagstaff had no cause to be ashamed of himself, and Hazel enjoyed the meal, particularly since she had eaten nothing since six in the morning. After a time, when her appetite was partially satisfied, she took to glancing over his kitchen. There seemed to be some adjunct of a kitchen missing. A fire burned on a hearth similar to the one in the living room. Pots stood about the edge of the fire. But there was no sign of a stove.
Bill finished eating, and resorted to cigarette material instead of his pipe.
"Well, little person," he said at last, "what do you think of this joint of mine, anyway?"
"I've just been wondering," she replied. "I don't see any stove, yet you have food here that looks as if it were baked, and biscuits that must have been cooked in an oven."
"You see no stove for the good and sufficient reason," he returned, "that you can't pack a stove on a horse—and we're three hundred odd miles from the end of any wagon road. With a Dutch oven or two—that heavy, round iron thing you see there—I can guarantee to cook almost anything you can cook on a stove. Anybody can if they know how. Besides, I like things better this way. If I didn't, I suppose I'd have a stove—and maybe a hot-water supply, and modern plumbing. As it is, it affords me a sort of prideful satisfaction, which you may or may not be able to understand, that this cabin and everything in it is the work of my hands—of stuff I've packed in here with all sorts of effort from the outside. Maybe I'm a freak. But I'm proud of this place. Barring the inevitable lonesomeness that comes now and then, I can be happier here than any place I've ever struck yet. This country grows on one."
"Yes—on one's nerves," Hazel retorted.
Bill smiled, and, rising, began to clear away the dishes. Hazel resisted an impulse to help. She would not work; she would not lift her finger to any task, she reminded herself. He had put her in her present position, and he could wait on her. So she rested an elbow on the table and watched him. In the midst of his work he stopped suddenly.
"There's oceans of time to do this," he observed. "I'm just a wee bit tired, if anybody should ask you. Let's camp in the other room. It's a heap more comfy."
He put more wood on the kitchen fire, and set a pot of water to heat. Out in the living-room Hazel drew her chair to one side of the hearth. Bill sprawled on the bearskin robe with another cigarette in his fingers.
"No," he began, after a long silence, "this country doesn't get on one's nerves—not if one is a normal human being. You'll find that. When I first came up here I thought so, too; it seemed so big and empty and forbidding. But the more I see of it the better it compares with the outer world, where the extremes of luxury and want are always in evidence. It began to seem like home to me when I first looked down into this little basin. I had a partner then. I said to him: 'Here's a dandy, fine place to winter.' So we wintered—in a log shack sixteen foot square that Silk and Satin and Nigger have for a stable now. When summer came my partner wanted to move on, so I stayed. Stayed and began to build for the next winter. And I've been working at it ever since, making little things like chairs and tables and shelves, and fixing up game heads whenever I got an extra good one. And maybe two or three times a year I'd go out. Get restless, you know. I'm not really a hermit by nature. Lord, the things I've packed in here from the outside! Books—I hired a whole pack train at Ashcroft once to bring in just books; they thought I was crazy, I guess. I've quit this place once or twice, but I always come back. It's got that home feel that I can't find anywhere else. Only it has always lacked one important home qualification," he finished softly. "Do you ever build air castles?"