“Uhhh!” says I.
“You always read about cowboys drinking it,” he says, “in wild-west stories.”
“Let’s see what we can find,” says I.
We didn’t find much that was useful. But we did make out a breakfast after a fashion. The difficulty was opening cases without making a racket, and the way we did it was to cut into them with our jackknives. It was slow, but it worked. There were some crackers like hardtack, only harder, and there was a case of cans of corned beef, and I found a big box of sweet cookies. It saved us from starving clean to death, but it didn’t help the thirst any.
“Let’s try the tomatoes,” says Catty.
“You take the first swig,” says I, “and if you live through it, I’ll come next.”
“Nope,” says he, “we’ll open two cans. I’ll count three and we both drink at once.”
So we got out a couple of cans and bored two holes in the tops, and Catty says, “One—two—three.” Neither of us made a move.
“Bad start,” he says. “Try again.”
It’s lucky few things are as bad as you think they are going to be. This wasn’t. Tomato juice wouldn’t be an awful punishment if it wasn’t for the seeds. You kind of have to drink through your teeth so as to screen the seeds out. When we got used to it we could do it pretty accurate, and the juice was wet. It was mighty refreshing, too, when we finally got it down, and right off I felt a lot better.