“I suppose it is, after you been doin’ it a few thousand times; easy as fryin’ flapjacks.”
“How long have you been cooking with steam kettles?” asked Johnny.
“Only five or six years. But I’ve been cookin’ all my life. I was cook for a surveying outfit when the Union Pacific was built. Boy! Those were the days of real sport. Used to run out of fuel and everything.”
A humorous twinkle lurked about the man’s eyes, as he lighted his pipe and sat down on an upturned bucket.
“I mind one time,” he mused, “when we was plumb out of wood, and nothin’ but grass; prairie all ’round us. Just enough fire to make coffee; not enough to fry flapjacks, and the nearest supply station thirty miles away.”
“What did you do?” asked Johnny.
“Well, sir,” the cook removed his pipe and spat on the ground, “I said, ‘Boys, there’ll be flapjacks for breakfast just the same.’ I mixed ’em up as usual in a big tin bucket. I gave the bucket to one of the boys, and a hunk of bacon rind to another, and told ’em all to follow me. I struck a match and set the prairie grass on fire; then I held my fryin’ pan over it until it was hot. I baked the first flapjack and tossed it out of the pan over my shoulder. Some fellow caught and ate it. I did another and another the same way, and kept that up until every fellow in the bunch was satisfied.”
Johnny smiled. The cook smiled, spat on the ground, then concluded his story. “When we got through breakfast we were ten miles from camp. Prairie fire travels. So did we.”
Johnny laughed; then he thought and laughed again. After a time he rose and went on his way.
“That’s another fellow,” he told himself, “that I’d never suspect of being a crook, but what’s that about people who ‘smile and smile and are a villain still’? A fellow has to watch out.”