“Poor ol’ Sam,” he would say, drawing his lean, gray face into an expression of pity. “Poor ol’ Sam. He cooks the best he knows how, maybe. But I’m afeard that sourdough uh his’n ’ll bring us all to an ontimely end, fin’ly.”
Let a logger complain of corns, and Jonah Wiles would remark that he had never heard of corns in the woods before sourdough was invented. He insinuated that everything from ingrown nails and bunions to toothache and falling hair was due to the loggers’ sourdough meals. Ere long old Sam was met with silence and bitter looks when he visited the bunkhouses to show a new use of sourdough. And the loggers’ appetites fell away; one month after the accident to Jonah Wiles’ pants, Johnny Inkslinger joyfully reported to Paul Bunyan that the consumption of flour and soda had been cut in half. The great logger frowned; he had already learned much about the need his men had for good food rightly cooked, though it was no necessity for him.
“But I can’t consider this business, now,” he said ruefully. “We’ve got to get this country logged off before the water drops in Redbottom Lake. When the spring drive is finished we’ll settle the feeding problem once and for all time.”
Saying this, he thrust a bundle of sharpened axes and two score new crosscut saws into his pocket, and, followed by his timekeeper, he strode for the woods to lay out the work for the next day. Jonah Wiles was then in the kitchen with Sourdough Sam. Paul Bunyan and his timekeeper always walked softly, but the wind from their swinging feet rattled the doors and windows of the cookhouse.
“There they go,” muttered Jonah Wiles. “Now listen, Sam. They’ll be in the woods for an hour anyway. Now’s yer chance to get in good with everybody again. I want yeh to keep yer high place, ol’ feller. I’ve always loved yeh like a brother, an’ yer trouble with the boys is grievin’ me to a shadder.”
“I shore appreciate your sympathy when all is givin’ me the cold shoulder,” said the cook disconsolately. “But ’tain’t no use. Nobody seems willin’ to give sourdough a real chance. Folks could use it fer ever’thing if they wanted to, an’ now these fool loggers even hate to eat it.”
Jonah Wiles replied with his usual shrewd arguments. Every evening when he thought he had made all the mischievous suggestions to the loggers that it was wise to utter, he would come to the kitchen and, pretending great sympathy and friendliness, he would urge Sourdough Sam into enterprises that could only end disastrously. He was now urging old Sam to dump sourdough into the timekeeper’s ink barrels during his absence with Paul Bunyan. The cook had long been sure that small quantities of sourdough would treble the ink supply. But, disheartened and discouraged, he had not ventured to broach the idea to Johnny Inkslinger.
“Make it a surprise party,” suggested Jonah Wiles. “Get busy, Sam. It’s yer chance to win a real name for yerself.”
At last Sourdough Sam yielded to his tempter.
The flunkies had left the kitchen long before. The stoves and cook tables were dark shapes in the twilight shadows. Only the white sourdough tanks stood out in the gloom. Jonah Wiles lifted the top from one of them, and a hissing roar rose from its depths, where the fermented dough worked and bubbled like quicklime. Jonah Wiles beckoned to Sourdough Sam. The cook’s eyes shone; he breathed heavily.