“Hold on a moment!” exclaimed Paul Bunyan in bewilderment. “Please tell me first: what are hot cakes, pies, cookies, cakes, puddings, ham, bacon, eggs, potatoes, baking powder, sauerkraut, frankfurters and the rest of it? Can we get them from somewhere, or must I invent them?”
Hot Biscuit Slim patiently explained them to the great logger.
“Holy mackinaw!” said Paul Bunyan, greatly relieved, “I never imagined such things could be. I’m delighted that they’ve already been invented.”
Hot Biscuit Slim told him that they could all be grown or manufactured on the great farm. Then he went on to recommend that the flunkies be equipped with roller skates, thus tripling their efficiency. He made many other suggestions, and Paul Bunyan agreed to all of them.
“Now to work,” said Hot Biscuit Slim. “I’ll have a new sourdough dish for the loggers’ supper. Sourdough is a contraption that’s seen it’s day, but I’ll make the best of it while I got to use it. Send me your blacksmith.”
A unique smell met the loggers when they crowded eagerly into the cookhouse at suppertime, a delightful odor that overpowered the weakest among them. And when the flunkies trotted out, carrying huge platters heaped high with brown, globular mysteries, each one having a curious hole in the center, the famished loggers all bounced about on their benches in uncontrollable excitement, and well they might! For they were being served with the first doughnuts! Doughnut connoisseurs of to-day would have regarded them as crude; they were made from sourdough, they were hard as hickory and unsweetened. But Paul Bunyan’s loggers shouted over them; they discovered to their great leader the exuberance and expansion of feeling, the exaltation of spirit, the strengthening of moral qualities, which may develop from grand feeding. As he listened to the extraordinary uproar in the cookhouse and considered it he formed one of his great reflections: Meals make the man.
Jonah Wiles was the one dismal figure among the feasters. The doughnuts were bitter in his mouth because they were so pleasing to him. He devoured half a dozen of them and then forced himself to stop, for he was beginning to feel good-humored. His gaze turned shiftily towards the kitchen, where Hot Biscuit Slim was frying doughnuts with astonishing rapidity. The assistant cooks were rolling out the dough; Big Ole, the blacksmith, bare-armed and streaming with sweat, tossed the doughnuts on his anvil and punched the holes in them with swift strokes. Jonah Wiles glowered malignantly on the scene. With one meal the son of his enemy had brought happiness to the camp and achieved glory.
“He’ll learn Jonah Wiles has a few tricks yet,” the worst bunkhouse crank muttered savagely.
After supper he waited for a lull in the bunkhouse merriment. When it came he emitted a terrific groan.
“I’m afeard them new biscuits with the holes in ’em ain’t goin’ to set well on the stummick. I’m afeard——”