Mr. Pennington—Harmsworth-Pennington was his veritable name, as she learned later—took the hint and swept her immediately off to the lean-to. The tout-ensemble was not terrifying. It consisted of a kerosene stove of two burners, another one near it for emergencies, a wooden cupboard full of heavy white dishes, and a lower part to it where the stores were.
"The hardest thing for you will be getting up early," he said sympathetically. "The men have to have breakfast and be out of here by seven o'clock. And they take dinner-pails with them. Then there's nothing to get till the evening meal."
"Of course there'd be tidying to do," suggested Marjorie avidly, for she hated disorder, and saw a good deal about her.
"If you had the strength for it," said Pennington doubtfully.
"Francis thinks I have," she answered with a touch of wickedness.
Francis, behind her, continued to say nothing at all.
She spent five minutes more in the lean-to with the opportune Pennington, and gathered from him, finally, that next morning there would have to be a big pot of oatmeal cooked, and bacon enough fried for five hungry men. Griddle cakes, flapjacks, or breadstuff of some kind had to be produced also; coffee in a pot that looked big enough for a hotel, with condensed milk, and a meal apiece for their dinner-hour.
"I just give 'em anything cold that's left over," said Pennington unsympathetically. "There has to be lots of it, that's all."
Marjorie cried out in horror.
"Oh, they mustn't have those cold! But—do they have to have all that every morning?"