Purdick came up with a snap. “Gee!” he yawned; “I sure did cork it orf in me ’ammick that time! How long have we been at it?”
“Six hours solid. And I’m as hungry as a wolf. Let’s see what you’ve got in that haversack.”
The eatables were produced and they fell to like famished savages. Purdick had provided pretty liberally, but what with the early breakfast, the hard travelling that had followed it, and the lapse of time, they didn’t leave much of what Purdick had thought would suffice for at least two meals.
“It doesn’t make any difference,” said Larry, meaning the gorging which left only a couple of bacon sandwiches for that possible second meal. “We’ll catch up with our supplies by late supper-time, at the very worst, and I know you’d rather carry your share of the grub under your belt than in the haversack.”
“I sure would,” Purdick admitted. He had never before known what it was to have such a gorgeous appetite as the mountain air was already giving him. “I see where we’re never going to be able to stay out all summer without back-tracking to civilization for more eats every few minutes.”
Larry laughed and sprang afoot.
“Just now we’re going to back-track to Mule-Ear Pass. Feel up to it?”
“I feel up to anything. As the fellow says in that old English stuff that the English Prof. made us take for side-reading last winter: ‘Fate can not harm me—I have dined.’ Let’s get a move and have it over with.”
That was a simple way of stating it: “Let’s get a move and have it over with,” like swallowing a dose of medicine. But there were a good many wearisome moves to be made before they won up to the final ascending loop in the snow trail, and they saw now—had been seeing ever since they struck the snow path—how impossible it would have been to get the burros up the mountain in the thawing daytime.