“Maybe I’d better go along,” said Wayne, giving June the nickel.
“No, sir, you stay right here an’ rest yourself, Mas’ Wayne. I can ’tend to that man without no help. Jus’ you get them victuals ready—— What’s the matter, Mas’ Wayne?”
“Oh, nothing,” groaned Wayne, setting down the paper bag he had untied. “Only I forgot to ask them to grind the coffee, June!”
“Lawsy-y-y!”
They gazed dejectedly at each other for a moment. Then June chuckled. “I reckon I’ll jus’ have to ask that Mister Man to throw in a coffee grinder, too!” he said. “Ain’ there no way to make coffee out of that, Mas’ Wayne?”
“There must be,” was the answer. “If we can’t do it any other way, we’ll grind it with our teeth! You run along and see what you can find, June, and I’ll try to think up a way of grinding the coffee.”
So June departed again and Wayne faced his problem, and when, some twenty minutes later, the darkey returned in triumph with a tin coffee-pot, a tin dish, a tin spoon, and several more sheets of the metal dug from the waste heap enough coffee for the evening meal was ready and Wayne was grinding the rest of their supply between two flat stones! “There’s more than one way to grind coffee,” he laughed, as June paused in the doorway to regard the proceeding in pardonable surprise. “I just remembered the way the Indians used to grind their corn. Or was it the Egyptians? Someone, anyhow. I had a dickens of a time finding these stones, though. There, that’s the last. It isn’t very fine, but I guess it will do well enough.”
“Don’ it smell jus’ gran’?” asked June, sniffing the fragrance. “An’ look what I fetched, please, Mas’ Wayne. Look yere! Ain’ that a pretty fine coffee-pot? An’ ain’ that a pretty fine little dish? An’ look yere at the spoon! All them for a nickel, Mas’ Wayne! That man certainly was good to me, yes, sir! I done tell him I ain’ got but a nickel an’ he say: ‘Nickel’s enough, nigger. What-all you wantin’?’ He say these yere things is ‘second,’ whatever he mean, but I reckon they goin’ to suit us all righty, ain’ they?”
“They’re fine, June! You surely know how to get your money’s worth. But where are the blankets I told you to fetch?”