"Why, I used to help mother a good deal, and I have the timber brought up and cut and piled away, so it is easy to build a fire. I had a well driven down in the yard out there, and a pump attached to it. It is not as good water as that down at the spring, but it is better than the average well around through this State, and I didn't have to drive down but thirty feet, either."
"Good! If you were wrecked on a lone island, you would get along all right, my boy. What is the bill of fare at your hotel now?
"Just anything you want that the market affords. When I want fish I go but to the lake and get it. When I want quail or prairie chicken they come right up to the house to be shot."
"All right, Jack. We'll help you cook, and if anything more is needed than the market here affords, we will get it from Crabtree."
On further inspection they found that he didn't have a carpet in the house, but that he had good sheets and blankets and pillows and first-class mattresses.
"Fred," said Terry, "we'll have to live in this house until Jack gets his home finished. We'll measure the size of those two rooms back there, and one of us must go back to town to-morrow, buy carpets, have them made, and lay in all other necessaries for Evelyn's comfort, and let her invite some of the ladies up there to come down and rough it with us as long as they are willing to do so. Evelyn, of course, will go with us and assist us in making the purchases."
They went out into the stable lot, saw the horses kept there. Then they visited the cow lot and their barns, and saw that the milch-cows were looking well, and, of course, fat and yielding an abundant supply of milk, which Jack sent up to Crabtree every day, besides having plenty of butter and milk for all the cowboys in their employ.
Jack, too, had a good flock of chickens in his barn-yard, so he had plenty of eggs; but he stated that he had not killed a single chicken since Fred and Terry had gone North, as he preferred quail and prairie chicken. He also stated that he had been compelled to clip their wings very close, as his cowboys told him that if they got out they would find such abundant feed in grass seed and other products of the plain that they wouldn't come back home again.
"Don't you believe that, Jack. If a hen raises a flock of chickens and she and they are fed regularly, they will never leave the place; but chickens who are allowed to run everywhere, as most ranchmen let their chickens, will, of course, become wild like any other fowl."
There were about a score of little pigs on the lot that were as fat as butter and gentle as kittens.