rred that "Doc" Tanner who fasted forty
days didn't have anything on him.

Nobody but Jennings shared Bertha's hallucination that she could cook,
and he was the recipient of special dishes, such delicacies as
cup-custard, and toast. This in no wise added to Jennings's popularity
with the crew and when Bruce suggested as much to the unblushing bride
she told him, with arms akimbo and her heels well planted some three
feet apart, that if they "didn't like it let 'em come and tell her so."

Bertha was looking like a gargoyle when the men filed in for supper the
night before the stringing of the wires was to begin. The fact that men
antagonistic to her husband dared walk in before her eyes and eat,
seemed like bravado, a challenge, and filled her with such black
resentment that Bruce trembled for the carpenter when she hovered over
him like a Fury, with a platter of bacon.

Woods, too, felt his peril, and intrepid soul though he was, seemed to
contract, withdraw like a turtle into his flannel collar, as though
already he felt the sizzling grease on his unprotected pate.

Conversation was at a standstill in the atmosphere charged with Bertha's
disapproval. Only Porcupine Jim, quite unconscious, unabashed, heaped
his plate and ate with all the loud abandon of a Berkshire Red.
Emboldened by the pangs of hunger a long way from satisfied, John
Johnson tried to "palm" a fourth biscuit while surreptitiously reaching
for a third. Unfortunately John was not sufficiently practised in the
art of legerdemain and the biscuit slipped from his fingers. It fell off
the table and rolled like a cartwheel to Bertha's feet.

"Shan't I bring you in the shovel, Mr. Johnson?" she inquired in a tone
of deadly politeness as she polished the biscuit on her lip and returned
it to the plate.

John's ears flamed, also his neck and face. The honest Swede looked like
a sheep-killing dog caught in the act. He dared not answer, and she
added:

"There's three apiece."

"Mrs. Jennings, I haven't put the camp on half-rations yet." Bruce was
mutinous at last.

The bride drew herself up and reared back from the waist-line until she
looked all of seven feet tall. The row of short locks that hung down
like a row of fish-hooks beneath a knob of black hair seemed to stand
out straight and the window rattled in its casing as she swarmed down on
Bruce.

"Look a here, young feller, I don't need no boss to tell me how much to
cook!"

Jennings protested m