y bacon and fringy flapjacks
and, in general, to furnish "the grease of life," as he called it, to
the outfit. And while he was doing it his fellows conducted the beef,
on ten thousand legs, from the South to the North. They took them
North so that they would put on fat under the stimulus of a Northern
winter.

In those days he engineered the peculiar cookstove which we have
already noticed. It was a big, square, sheet-iron stove with an iron
axle and wheels like those of a sulky plow. This piece of machinery
was hooked on behind the chuckwagon, which it followed from clime to
clime. Jonas, being a live man and a "hustler," seldom waited for the
outfit to reach the camping-place and come to a halt before starting to
get a meal. As he explained, he had to get about a two-mile start on
their appetites, with pancakes; and so, while the stove was yet far off
from its destination, he would fire up and get things going. Then he
would trot along behind and cook. While "she" (the stove) lurched into
buffalo wallows and rode the swells and unrolled the smoke other stack
far out across the billowy prairie, Jonas would hurry along behind and
keep house. Entirely occupied with his kitchen duties he would move
busily here and there or remain steadily behind or beside the stove
while it pursued its onward way, and with the bucket of batter in his
hand and the griddle smoking and sizzling, he would seldom miss a flap.
From the standpoint of a weary cowboy it was a beautiful sight. It is,
indeed, a pleasant thing, when you are tired and hungry, to see your
supper thus coming along as conqueror over space and time.

No one but a man like Jonas, who had the combined talents of a sea-cook
and a cowboy, could have managed it. To make coffee under such
circumstances took considerable ability, of course. And even the
flapjacks, which stayed on the stove better, might seem difficult.
Jonas, however, was a man of quick hand and eye; things seldom got the
drop on him, and he handled the pancakes with a revolver wrist. As the
foreman said, he was "a first-class culinary engineer." In doing this,
his longtime experience on bucking bronchos stood him in good stead;
then, too, his practice was confined almost entirely to pancakes and
coffee, for they were but few and simple dishes that he knew by heart.
But even with this special expertness it took a quick man and a
philosopher, especially when the stove cut a caper and the footing w