“Ten thousand dollars’ worth a day?” Sandy said with a straight face. “That sounds about right for you, chow hound.”
Jerry clipped the tall, slender boy on the arm with his knuckles. “Calories, you dope! Don’t get smart.”
“I’ll bet neither one of you knows what a calorie is?” Quiz said dryly.
Sandy’s forehead puckered up thoughtfully. “I think I do. It’s a unit of energy, isn’t it?”
“That’s close,” Quiz admitted. “It’s the amount of heat—heat is energy—required to raise the temperature of one gram of water one degree Centigrade.”
Jerry nudged Russ Steele. “Bet you didn’t know that, General Steele?”
Russ smiled good-naturedly. “I had a vague idea it was something like that. Let’s find the office. I used to know the foreman of this camp.”
The boys eyed the lumberjacks admiringly as they walked by the mess hall. Most of them were stripped to the waist, their muscles bunching and rippling in their sun-bronzed arms and torsos as they moved about. The cuffs of their sweat-blackened levis were tucked into the tops of hobnailed boots.
“Let’s recruit a couple of these bruisers for the Valley View football team. Our line would be a stone wall for sure,” Jerry whispered to Sandy.
Russ took them around the end of the mess hall to a small frame shack in the middle of the camp. A big collie was sitting in the open doorway. Instinctively, Sandy reached down and got a hold on Prince’s collar.