At any rate, I never could make up my mind to wash a dish until I required it for my next and immediate meal.
We dined ravenously, and throughout the proceeding, Mike sat in the doorway, keeping close watch that I did not interfere with the sacred person of his lord and master, Jake Meaghan.
Rested and reinvigorated, we set-to with box-openers, hammers and chisels, unpacking and unpacking until the thing became a boring monotony.
Canned milk, canned beef, canned beans, canned salmon, canned crabs, canned well-nigh-everything; bottled fruits, bottled pickles, bottled jams and jellies, everything bottled that was not canned; bags of sugar, flour, meal, potatoes, oats and chicken feed; hardware galore, axes, hammers, wedges, peevies, cant hoops, picks, shovels, nails, paints, brooms, brushes and a thousand other commodities and contrivances the like of which I never saw before and hope never to see again.
Never, in all my humble existence, did I feel so clerky as I did then.
I checked the beastly stuff off as well as I could, taking the Vancouver wholesalers' word for the names of half the things, for I was quite sure they knew better than I did about them.
With the assistance of Jake, as "hander-up," I set the goods in a semblance of order on the shelves and about the store.
We worked and slaved as if it were the last day and our eternal happiness depended on our finishing the job before the last trump sounded its blast of dissolution.
By the last stroke of twelve, midnight, we had the front veranda swept clean of straw, paper and excelsior, and all empty boxes cleared away; just in time to welcome the advent of my first Sabbath day in the Canadian West.
Throughout our arduous afternoon and evening, what a surprise old Jake was to me! Well I knew that he was hard and tough from years of strenuous battling with the northern elements; but that he, at his age and with his record for hard drinking, should be able to keep up the sustained effort against a young man in his prime and that he should do so cheerfully and without a word of complaint,—save an occasional grunt when the steel bands around some of the boxes proved recalcitrant, and an explosive, picturesque oath when the end of a large case dropped over on his toes,—was, to me, little short of marvellous.