strong and comely of body,
and resolute of mind. What was more, he had, though he scarcely
realized it, after all, only left behind in England a cramped life
embittered by a steady shrinkage in the rent roll and as steady an
increase in taxation and expenses. His present life was clean, and
governed by a code of crude and austere simplicity. His mother's
spirit was in him, and, being what he was, there were things he could
not do. He did not attempt to reason about them. The knowledge was
borne in upon him instinctively.

He rose, by and by, and, for he was hungry, limped on to the
sleeping-shanty of the construction gang. It was built of logs and
roofed with rough cedar shingles hand-split on the spot. The sun beat
hot upon them, and they diffused a faint aromatic fragrance,
refreshing as the scent of vinegar, into the long, unfloored room,
which certainly needed something of the kind. It reeked with stale
tobacco-smoke, the smell of cookery, and the odors of frowsy clothes.
A row of bunks, filled with spruce twigs and old brown blankets, ran
down one side of it, a very rude table down the other, and a double
row of men with bronzed faces, in dusty garments, sat about the
latter, eating voraciously. Fifteen minutes was, at the outside, the
longest time they ever wasted on a meal.

That evening, however, they were singularly short of temper, for
Cassidy had driven them mercilessly all day, and, though not usually
fastidious, the supper was not to their liking. The hash was burnt;
the venison, for one of them had shot a deer, had been hung too long;
while the dessert, a great pie of desiccated fruits, had been baked to
a flinty hardness. That was the last straw; for in the Mountain
Province the lumber and railroad gangs as a rule work hard and live
well; and when the cans of green tea had been emptied the growls
culminated in a call for the cook.

He came forward and stood before them, a little, shaky, gray-haired
wreck of a man, with the signs of indulgence plain upon him. Whisky is
scarce in that country, but it is obtainable, and Grenfell generally
procured a good deal of it. The man was evidently in a state of
apprehension, and he shrank back a little when a big, grim-faced
chopper ladled out a great plateful of the burnt stew from a vessel on
the stove.

"Now," he said, "you've been spoiling supper too often lately, and I
guess we've got to teach you plain, cookery. Sit right down and get
that hash inside you