“What!” ejaculated the Boy, aghast; then quickly, to keep a good face:  “You take my life when you do take the beans, whereby I live.”

When the Colonel had disposed of his strawberries, “Lord!” he sighed, trying to rub the stiffness out of his hands over the smoke, “the appetite a fella can raise up here is something terrible.  You eat and eat, and it doesn’t seem to make any impression.  You’re just as hungry as ever.”

"And the stuff a fella can eat!"

The Colonel recalled that speech of the Boy’s the very next night, when, after “a hell of a time” getting the fire alight, he was bending forward in that attitude most trying to maintain, holding the frying-pan at long range over the feebly-smoking sticks.  He had to cook, to live on snow-shoes nowadays, for the heavy Colonel had illustrated oftener than the Boy, that going without meant breaking in, floundering, and, finally, having to call for your pardner to haul you out.  This was one of the many uses of a pardner on the trail.  The last time the Colonel had trusted to the treacherous crust he had gone in head foremost, and the Boy, happening to look round, saw only two snow-shoes, bottom side up, moving spasmodically on the surface of the drift.  The Colonel was nearly suffocated by the time he was pulled out, and after that object-lesson he stuck to snow-shoes every hour of the twenty-four, except those spent in the sleeping-bag.

But few things on earth are more exasperating than trying to work mounted on clumsy, long web-feet that keep jarring against, yet holding you off from, the tree you are felling, or the fire you are cooking over.  You are constrained to stand wholly out of natural relation to the thing you are trying to do—­the thing you’ve got to do, if you mean to come out alive.

The Colonel had been through all this time and time again.  But as he squatted on his heels to-night, cursing the foot and a half of snow-shoe that held him away from the sullen fire, straining every muscle to keep the outstretched frying-pan over the best of the blaze, he said to himself that what had got him on the raw was that speech of the Boy’s yesterday about the stuff he had to eat.  If the Boy objected to having his rice parboiled in smoked water he was damned unreasonable, that was all.

The culprit reappeared at the edge of the darkening wood.  He came up eagerly, and flung down an armful of fuel for the morning, hoping to find supper ready.  Since it wasn’t, he knew that he mustn’t stand about and watch the preparations.  By this time he had learned a good deal of the trail-man’s unwritten law.  On no account must you hint that the cook is incompetent, or even slow, any more than he may find fault with your moment for calling halt, or with your choice of timber.  So the woodman turned wearily away from the sole spot of brightness in the waste, and went back up the hill in the dark and the cold, to busy himself about his own work, even to spin it out, if necessary, till he should hear the gruff “Grub’s ready!” And when that dinner-gong sounds, don’t you dally!  Don’t you wait a second.  You may feel uncomfortable if you find yourself twenty minutes late for a dinner in London or New York, but to be five minutes late for dinner on the Winter Trail is to lay up lasting trouble.