“Sure ting,” cried Benoit, the jolly French-Canadian cook. “Good for my healt. He's tak off my front porsch here.” And the cook patted affectionately the little round paunch that marred the symmetry of his figure.
“You ought to get Cameron to swap jobs with you, Benny,” said one of the axemen. “You would be a dandy in about another month.”
Benoit let his eye run critically over the line of his person.
“Bon! Dat's true, for sure. In tree, four mont I mak de beeg spark on de girl, me.”
“You bet, Benny!” cried the axeman. “You'll break 'em all up.”
“Sure ting!” cried Benny, catching up a coal for his pipe. “By by, Cameron. Au revoir. I go for tak some more slice from my porsch.”
“Good-bye, Benny,” cried Cameron. “It is your last chance, for to-morrow I give you back your job. I don't want any 'front porsch' on me.”
“Ho! ho!” laughed Benny scornfully, as he turned to hurry after his chief. “Dat's not moch front porsch on you. Dat's one rail fence—clabbord.”
And indeed Benoit was right, for there was no “porsch” or sign of one on Cameron's lean and muscular frame. The daily battle with winter's fierce frosts and blizzards, the strenuous toil, the hard food had done their work on him. Strong, firm-knit, clean and sound, hard and fit, he had come through his first Canadian winter. No man in the camp, not even the chief himself, could “bush” him in a day's work. He had gained enormously in strength lately, and though the lines of his frame still ran to angles, he had gained in weight as well. Never in the days of his finest training was he as fit to get the best out of himself as now. An injured foot had held him in camp for a week, but the injury was now almost completely repaired and the week's change of work only served to replenish his store of snap and vim.
An hour or two sufficed to put the camp in the perfect order that he knew Benoit would consider ideal and to get all in readiness for the evening meal when the gang should return. He had the day before him and what a day it was! Cameron lay upon a buffalo skin in front of the cook-tent, content with all the world and for the moment with himself. Six months ago he had engaged as an axeman in the surveyors' gang at $30 per month and “found,” being regarded more in the light of a supernumerary and more or less of a burden than anything else. Now he was drawing double the wage as rodman, and, of all the gang, stood second to none in McIvor's regard. In this new venture he had come nearer to making good than ever before in his life. So in full content with himself he allowed his eyes to roam over the brown grassy plain that sloped to the Bow in front, and over the Bow to the successive lines of hills, rounded except where the black rocks broke jagged through the turf, and upward over the rounded hills to the grey sides of the mighty masses of the mountains, and still upward to where the white peaks lost themselves in the shining blue of the sky. Behind him a coulee ran back between hills to a line of timber, and beyond the timber more hills and more valleys, and ever growing higher and deeper till they ran into the bases of the great Rockies.