"Eighteen! Apply to me if you 're in trouble at one-thirty to-night." He looked at his watch.
"You scored seventeen fully ten minutes ago, mon vieux," said Mr. Ewart laughing.
"Slander, Marcia! Don't believe it. Three of mine would make only one of yours, Gordon Ewart;—I 've camped enough with you to know your 'capacity', as the freight cars have it. Marcia Farrell, your last 'batch' has been 'petering out', as we say at home. You dropped only one small spoonful for each of the last twenty cakes; the ones you made for Ewart had a complement of two big spoonfuls—they were corkers, no mistake. Hold up your head, Boy!" he admonished the collapsed object on the sofa. "Never say die—here are just four more for us four, amen."
A dismal groan was his only answer. Mr. Ewart, taking turner and bowl from me, declared a truce. The Doctor set the plates on the table. When all was clear about the hearth, on which Cale laid a pine log for a treat, Mr. Ewart announced that he had a surprise in his pocket.
"Jamie, your birthday falls on the twelfth of August, does n't it?"
"Yes; how did you remember that, Gordon?"
"You had a birthday when I was in Crieff with you seventeen years ago—and we celebrated. Have you forgotten?"
"Forgotten!" Jamie came bolt upright, the cakes were as naught, the remembrance of them faded. "Do you think I could ever forget that? You took, or rather trotted me for a long walk over the moors—oh, the pink and the purple heather of them, the black blackness of their bogs, the green greenery of their bracken higher than my head!—to the 'Keltie'; and you held me over the pool to see the whirl and dash of the plunging torrent. I remember the spray made me catch my breath. Then you took me down to the bank of the 'burnie', and found a place to camp—my first camp with you—under a big elm; and there you discovered a flat stone, and two crooked branches for crotches. You took from your mysterious game-basket a gypsy kettle and, filling it at the 'burnie' with the water that tastes like no other in the world, you hung it from the crotch over the flat stone that was our hearth. You made heaven on that spot for a seven-year-old boy, because you let him touch off the fagots. You boiled the water, made tea—such tea!—and brought out of that same basket bannocks and fresh gooseberry jam— Oh, don't, don't mention that birthday! You make me homesick for it; even Marcia's griddlecakes can't help me!"
"We 'll celebrate again this year in the wilds of the Upper Saguenay." Mr. Ewart took from his pocket a paper and, unfolding it, read the terms of a lease of a fish and game preserve in the northern wilderness.
"And the Andrés, father and son, shall be our guides, our cooks, our factotums. The son is half Montagnais; his mother was of that tribe."