room. Until the bell rang, that was sacred from the boss himself.

Therefore he descended from the porch, one step at a time, and climbed
around to the kitchen. Here he found preparations for dinner well under
way.

"'Llo, Bobby," greeted the cook, a tall white-moustached lean man with
bushy eyebrows. The cookees grinned, and one of them offered him a cooky
as big as a pie-plate. Bobby accepted the offering, and seated himself
on a cracker box.

Food was being prepared in quantities to stagger the imagination of one
used only to private kitchens. Prunes stewed away in galvanized iron
buckets; meat boiled in wash-boilers; coffee was made in fifty-pound
lard tins; pies were baking in ranks of ten; mashed potatoes were
handled by the shovelful; a barrel of flour was used every two and a
half days in this camp of hungry hard-working men. It took a good man to
plan and organize; and a good man Corrigan was. His meals were never
late, never scant, and never wasteful. He had the record for all the
camps on the river of thirty-five cents a day per man--and the men
satisfied. Consequently, in his own domain he was autocrat. The dining
room was sacred, the kitchen was sacred, meal hours were sacred. Each
man was fed at half-past five, at twelve, and at six. No man could get a
bite even of dry bread between those hours, save occasionally a teamster
in the line of duty. Bobby himself had once seen Corrigan chase a
would-be forager out at the point of a carving knife. As for Bobby, he
was an exception, and a favourite.

The place was enthralling, with its two stoves, each as big as the
dining room table at home, its shelves and barrels of supplies, its rows
of pies and loaves of bread, and all the crackle and bustle and aroma of
its preparations. Time passed on wings. At length Corrigan glanced up at
the square wooden clock and uttered some command to his two
subordinates. The latter immediately began to dish into large
receptacles of tin the hot food from the stove--boiled meat, mashed
potatoes, pork and beans, boiled corn. These they placed at regular
intervals down the long tables of the dining room. Bobby descended from
his cracker box to watch them. Between the groups of hot dishes they
distributed many plates of pie, of bread and of cake. Finally the
two-gallon pots of tea and coffee, one for each end of each table, were
brought in. The window coverings were drawn back. Corrigan appeared for
final inspection.

"Want to r