“If you have finished and all is settled, I would like to offer a few remarks,” said Alex, grinning as he rose from his chair with a twinkle in his eye. He paused for a moment while the other two looked up at him expectantly. “Gentlemen,” he began, “it gives me great pleasure to look over this vast sea of upturned faces. In them I see resolve, a resolution to do or die, a determination to conquer a frozen wilderness and wrench from it its golden treasures. Gentlemen, I propose a toast. Here’s to——”
“Whew! Don’t you smell something?” interrupted Case.
“Smell! Why I can almost hear it,” grinned Clay. “It seems to come from the kitchen.”
Alex, his speech forgotten, flew for the kitchen. In a moment he was back with a sheepish grin on his face. “Most of the coffee has boiled over, but there are two inches of stew which hasn’t stuck onto the pot,” he announced.
“You seem to forget everything else when you get to talking,” commented Case, gloomily.
“Oh! Alex means all right,” Clay said cheerfully. “The only trouble with Alex is that he is like the steamboat Abe Lincoln used to tell about. She had a four-foot engine and a five-foot whistle, so every time she blew the whistle the engine would stop.”
“I suppose your crude sarcasm is meant to imply that when I talk I have to stop everything else. Why, my dear companion, that’s a virtue. A man should not try to do more than one thing at a time,” Alex retorted impudently. “Why, if you two could whistle as well as I, you wouldn’t do anything else. Case does blow his own whistle a good deal, but it generally sounds like a fog horn with a frog in its throat—dismal—dismal—dismal.”
“Away with you and get us something to eat, you little imp,” laughed Case.
“Why, don’t you want to try some of this stew?” asked Alex hopefully. “It’s rich and there’s fully two inches of it that isn’t fast to the pan.”
“No, I don’t want to taste it, the smell is enough. Open up a can of beans and a can of salmon for Clay and I. You can keep all the stew for yourself. I don’t think there is enough of it for more than one anyway.”