“You peeled it all away,” said Tom disgustedly.
“Do you believe I could have done that?”
“That’s what I was telling you,” said Tom, “about peeling close. You don’t peel, you slice.”
“Them’s harsh words, Tom.”
“Well,” Tom laughed.
“You can’t imagine my amazement,” said Brent, “when I looked in my hands and found there was no potato there. Do you know, Tommy, I’m beginning to think I never really saw any rattlesnake at all, that it was just⸺”
“Shh, listen!” said Tom.
“’Tis nothing but the wind,” said Brent; “the i is pronounced as in high. Do you want me to slice some bacon now? I learned how to do that over the radio; also how to make salads. Station E-A-T-S.”
It was cosy eating supper in the cabin. Tried and true camper though he was, Tom had never been in such a place before. The little abode seemed to harmonize with that wild, remote gulch and to have become an inseparable part of it. There were two bunks in the drawing room (as Brent called it) one above the other, like berths on a ship. They were not furniture but a part of the place. In the little enclosed shed, which was the only other room, was an old-fashioned bed, of faded yellow wood with flowers painted on it.
All the coverings had been taken from the cabin (our adventurers had their own), but on this old single bed in the lean-to was a bearskin robe, memento of the old hunting days. It carried Tom’s thoughts back through the years (how many?) to the time when Mink and Buck trod those silent depths, and when the roar of beasts was borne upon just such winds as that which was now springing up.