Young Owen Dugdale's heart thrilled within him.
In all his life he could not exactly remember a single time when he had been thus warmly welcomed to any camp. Why, it was almost worth shooting the rapids and meeting with disaster to hear such words, and feel that every one was meant.
Who were these lads, and why were they here in this faraway land?
His astonished eyes fell upon the craft that had evidently carried them up the river from some hamlet, scores, perhaps hundreds, of miles away.
Such a dandy canoe Owen Dugdale had never dreamed existed in the whole wide world, for it was of varnished cedar, and with its nickeled trimmings, glistened there under the hemlocks in the flash of the lightning, and the glow of the protected campfire.
He seemed to feel somehow that this apparent calamity upon the river had been the "open sesame" for him to enter upon a new and perhaps delightful experience; rather a rough introduction perhaps, but then he knew only such in the range of his past.
And the delicious odor of that supper was enough to arouse the dormant appetite of one who had foresworn all cookery, one of these modern cranks determined to exist upon nuts and fruit, which our young friend of the bullboat certainly was not.
Both lads bustled about trying to make him comfortable near the cheery blaze, and then filling a pannikin with the canoeist's stew of corn beef, succotash and left-over potatoes, they invited him to set-to, nor wait for them a second.
Owen could not have restrained himself, once his nostrils became saturated with those delicious odors, and he started to eat like a starving chap; as indeed, he came very near being, seeing that he had not partaken of a mouthful of food for almost twenty-four hours, and then but scantily.
Then came a cup of such coffee as he had never before tasted, with condensed milk to mellow the same, and close at his hand was placed a package of crackers into which he was expected to dip as the humor seized him.