Left to themselves, Purdick and Dick didn’t go to sleep again; they groped around and got more wood and built up a good fire so as to have a bed of cooking coals if Larry should happen to bring something that needed cooking. That done, they sat around and waited, and about the time they were thinking that Larry might possibly have reached Natrolia, he came tramping back into the circle of firelight, with the haversack loaded to bursting dimensions, and with an armful of packages besides.
“Already?” Dick shouted, jumping up to relieve the burden-bearer.
“You said it. It’s less than a mile—just around the shoulder of this butte behind us. The store was shut, but I found the proprietor over at the hotel, and he opened up for me. Get out your pots and pans, Purdy. I’ve got some stuff here that’ll warm the cockles of your cookee heart.”
Charles Purdick, Lawrence Donovan and Richard Maxwell, junior, may live to sit down to many banquets—at least we hope they may—but it is safe to say that that late supper, cooked and eaten under the stars in the little valley back of Natrolia, will always figure for them as the most gorgeous meal of a lifetime. Larry had not stinted his buying. There were potatoes to fry, and a thick, juicy beefsteak to be cut into squares and broiled on forked twigs, hunter fashion, before the fire, and more coffee to brew, with sugar to sweeten it and the unheard-of luxury of a can of condensed milk for cream, and bread—two loaves of good, home-made bread that the storekeeper’s wife had made Larry take when she heard his story of their starving time. And to top off with, Purdick fried flapjacks made out of the carton of prepared pancake flour that Larry had thoughtfully added to the haversack load.
By all the rules of the eating game they should have made themselves beautifully sick, stuffing this way at the end of three days of short rations and no rations. But youth, Mother Nature, and a healthy, vigorous, outdoor life—taking them all together—can sometimes defy all rules; and the only result of the big feed was to make the feeders sleep like logs; and even Purdick, the lightest sleeper of the three, didn’t awaken until a long freight train, clattering past on the near-by track a little after sunrise, aroused him.
Being so near to Natrolia, they decided not to wait to cook a camp breakfast, and, loading the jacks, they trailed into the little cattle-shipping town, gave the burros a feed in the shipping corral, and then made an assault upon the so-called “hotel,” taking it by storm and putting away a breakfast of ham and eggs and potatoes and coffee and cakes with near-maple syrup quite as heartily as if the gorgeous banquet of the night before had already vanished into a limbo of dim but precious memories.
After breakfast came the re-stocking of provisions for a return to the field on the other side of the mountains, and from the genial, “old-timer” storekeeper who supplied them they learned that they had gone a long way around to miss a perfectly good and practicable trail over the Little Hophras; one which would take them back—as it would have brought them over—in something less than a day’s tramping.
Dick laughed when the good-natured, bearded man behind the counter told them this. “I guess we ought to be bored for the hollow-horn, all of us, Mr. Wilkins,” he said, “for not looking around a little before we struck out. But the Government maps don’t show any such trail.”
“No,” replied the storekeeper; “there wasn’t any when the maps were made.”
“You’re sure it’s passable?” Larry asked.