“Did you hit him?” asked Clay, still grinning.
“I reckon I’m getting an old fellow. I aimed for the lobe of his ear and only just nicked it.”
“We’re mighty grateful to you for defending our property,” Clay said. “Stay and have supper with us,” he urged. “We are fixing to have quite a spread.”
“No, thankee,” refused the old man. “I’ve got a pot of bacon and beans cooked up down at my cabin. I’ve eaten them and pertatoes and now and then a piece of moose meat for forty years, and I’ve got so a meal don’t taste right without ’em.”
“We have got beans, plenty of them,” urged Clay.
“I know the kind,” said the man, scornfully. “Come in a can with a little slice of bacon on top that you can see through, it’s so thin, and the beans below ’em are so weak and pale that they always color ’em up with tomato juice to make ’em look healthy and deceive you. No, no such kind of beans for me; just the raw kind. Put ’em in a pot with at least a third of their bulk in sizable cubes of bacon. Then fill the pot plumb full of water and sit on the fire to simmer. When they are done you have got beans what is beans. Come right handy on the trail in winter, too. You can freeze them into sticks an’ pack ’em on your sled an’ when you want to cook dinner, just chop off as much as you want and thaw it out in the frying pan. Well, good-night. Reckon I’ll see you afore you leave.”
Clay turned back to his friends, a gentle smile on his lips, for the quaint, honest Old Timer. He found his three companions washing and doing up Captain Joe’s numerous wounds, while the dog licked their hands in dumb gratitude.
“It does not need all three of you to fix up Captain Joe,” he observed. “Someone got into our cabin while we were gone and messed up things a good bit, though I don’t believe they got away with anything. I should like Ike to put things back in their place. All I can see that he’s doing is to look at Captain Joe’s teeth to see if there are any gold fillings. When you get through with Joe, both of you come up and help me for we are going to have the biggest feast we ever have had in the Rambler, tonight. We are going to have a visitor to supper.”
“Who?” Alex asked, smearing ointment over one of Captain Joe’s wounds while Case applied a clean white bandage to another.
“The Yukon Kid,” said Clay. “I invited him down and he accepted.”