By-and-by Towzer came round, but his eyes were wild and his mouth twitched, so that he could hardly speak distinctly. Wharton noticed Frank's face as he watched his brother, and, coming over to him, he laid a great knotted fist on the elder Winthrop's shoulder:
'Look here, my lad,' he said, 'I saw what you wrote, and I let it go, because I knowed that if we didn't get the boy up to-night we'd never see him again: but don't you get thinking hard things about your brother. He's got grit enough for anything. Pluck's a matter of constitootion, and his is just upon played out. He'll be better when he has had some grub and a sleep. Now give us a match,' and, selecting one from the bundle offered to him, he solemnly lifted a leg, rubbed the match smartly on the seat of his trousers, and applied it to the bottom of one of the provision tins before alluded to.
'Well,' Snap said, 'that's ingenious; how did you know how to manage them?'
'How?' replied Dick, 'I guess if you'd lived the life I have you'd know all a man can know about tinned meat. Why, blow me if I don't think you could start a dividend-paying tin-mine where we first lived when we started ranching on the Rosebud, and all the tin you'd ever find there came outside our grub.'
'Oh, I've seen tinned meats before, Dick,' answered Snap, 'but a tinned fire to cook it by, that's what gets over me.'
The tin in question was an ingenious contrivance with a roll of wick saturated with spirit underneath the tin pot, which held (in this instance) an excellent curried fowl. A roll of soft lead covers the saturated wick, and all the traveller has to do is to tear off the lead and light the wick. In ten minutes' time the curry will be ready, and if then he is not satisfied with his supper the traveller must be very hard to please. Whoever invented these ingenious tins deserves a monument to be erected to his memory by the hunters, travellers, mountaineers, and others whom he has fed.
After doing substantial justice to the fare before them, or, as Dick put it, 'after wolfing two of them tins,' and drinking more whisky neat than they had ever done at one sitting before, even Towzer began to recover. But Dick wouldn't hear of his talking, and at the first attempt rolled him up in a buffalo-rug and, sitting solemnly down on his legs, lit the great pipe of the German professor.
In ten minutes, to all intents and purposes, Dick was alone, for, though the bodies of the three boys breathed at his side, their minds were far away in the land of dreams and slumber. For some time the old man puffed away in silence—the stars above winking solemnly down at him as he kept that one bright spark alight with infinite care, close to the end of his nose.
'I'm jiggered if I don't think they're a-laughin' at us,' he muttered, looking at the stars, 'and I don't wonder. It's been a pretty tough job gettin' here, but how we're goin' to get out beats me. Howsomdever, Dick, my lad, bed!—bed-rock it is, my hearty!' and, grumbling and growling, he poked his finger into his pipe, extinguished the ashes, and crawled under a corner of Towzer's robe.