Chapter XXII: At Home

Tom and Brent had a late supper in the cabin that night. After the adventures of the day the little primitive abode, nestling in the surrounding wildness, seemed like heaven indeed. The supper, consisting of baked beans and bacon and fried potatoes and crumbling but flavory rusks, was prepared by Tom’s own skilful hand.

Brent peeled the potatoes for frying, and he looked funny enough sitting facing the little stove with his long legs held up by another old rickety chair, his feet so close to the increasing blaze that one might have supposed they were going to have fried leather for supper. “I like the odor of burning shoes,” he said; “it’s the very sole of camping.”

“Peel them closer,” said Tom; “you’re throwing away half the potato with the peel. And cut out the eyes, too; like this. Here, I’ll show you.”

A rusty old pan was on Brent’s lap, and as he worked on soberly, his spectacles halfway down his nose, he gave the impression that peeling potatoes was a very sober and intellectual task.

“You’d better get water,” said Brent, “I’ll be ready to dump these in in about a couple of minutes.”

Tom brought water from the neighboring spring and put it on the little round stove to boil, pausing to warm his hands over the red-hot lid. “Do you know it’s blowing up mighty chilly outside for this time of year?” he said.

“A very funny thing has occurred,” said Brent pausing soberly.

“Did you hear a sound too? Sounded to me like someone running; I was over by the spring.”

“Probably the man coming to read the gas meter,” said Brent; “or else the wind. You hear all kinds of things up here.”

“You sure do,” said Tom.

“But what I was going to say,” said Brent, “is that I think this flourishing metropolis is haunted or bewitched or something. I just cut the peel off a potato only to find that there was no potato inside it. That’s a very funny thing when you come to think of it. Where’s the potato? It was inside when I started to----”

“You peeled it all away,” said Tom disgustedly.

“Do you believe I could have done that?”

“That’s what I was telling you,” said Tom, “about peeling close. _You_ don’t _peel_, you _slice_.”

“Them’s harsh words, Tom.”

“Well,” Tom laughed.

“You can’t imagine my _amazement_,” said Brent, “when I looked in my hands and found there was _no potato there_. Do you know, Tommy, I’m beginning to think I never really saw any rattlesnake at all, that it was just----”

“Shh, listen!” said Tom.

“’Tis nothing but the wind,” said Brent; “the i is pronounced as in high. Do you want me to slice some bacon now? I learned how to do that over the radio; also how to make salads. Station E-A-T-S.”

It was cosy eating supper in the cabin. Tried and true camper though he was, Tom had never been in such a place before. The little abode seemed to harmonize with that wild, remote gulch and to have become an inseparable part of it. There were two bunks in the drawing room (as Brent called it) one above the other, like berths on a ship. They were not furniture but a part of the place. In the little enclosed shed, which was the only other room, was an old-fashioned bed, of faded yellow wood with flowers painted on it.

All the coverings had been taken from the cabin (our adventurers had their own), but on this old single bed in the lean-to was a bearskin robe, memento of the old hunting days. It carried Tom’s thoughts back through the years (how many?) to the time when Mink and Buck trod those silent depths, and when the roar of beasts was borne upon just such winds as that which was now springing up.

Odds and ends of paraphernalia in this primitive lean-to, pathetic little trinkets, showed it to have been the room which little June Sanderson had occupied. Tom wondered where this child of the forest was now, and if she was happy in the big, glaring, noisy world. And if she ever wished for her warm bearskin comforter.

In the larger apartment (though it was small enough) were rusty old traps hanging against the logs, a couple of vicious-looking knives stuck in a crevice (Tom thought these had been used for skinning animals), and several dilapidated pairs of snowshoes.

One thing affected Tom strangely: this was a bleached skull of some small animal, on which stood, in its own grease, a half-burned candle. The other half of that candle had lighted the last minutes, perhaps, that old Buck Sanderson had spent in his lonely cabin. And the skull. How old was it? And when did the shot ring out in those solemn depths of wilderness which had laid that creature low? For how many years had it been a candlestick?

He pictured a candle burning there upon that ghastly little pedestal while Mink and Buck skinned a bear, or perhaps divided their gains acquired from Pollock, the questionable Pollock, who took care of furs so long ago. There were rows of chalk marks on a log, too; the primitive bookkeeping of old days.

“Come on, let’s eat,” said Tom.