ored. Among the glowing fires moved the black bulk of the Kid,
turning the hunks of venison. And then the universe and I, curiously
mixed, swooned into nothing at all, and I was blinking at a golden glow,
and from the river came a shouting.

It was broad day. We leaped up, and rubbing the sleep from our eyes, saw
a light skiff drifting toward us. It contained two men--Frank and
Charley. We had met them at Benton, and during an acquaintance of three
weeks we had learned of their remarkable ability as cooks. Frank was a
little Canadian Frenchman, and Charley was English. Both, in the
parlance of the road, were "floaters"; that is to say, no locality ever
knew them long; the earth was their floor, the sky their ceiling--and
their god was Whim. Naturally our trip had appealed to them, and one
month in Benton had aggravated that hopelessly incurable
disease--_Wanderlust_.

So we had agreed that somewhere down river we would camp for a week and
wait for them. They would do the cooking, and we would take them in tow.
Two days after we dropped out of Benton, they had abruptly "jumped" an
unfinished job and put off after us in a skiff, rowing all day and most
of the night in order to overtake us.

Certainly they had arrived at the moment most psychologically favorable
for the beginning of an odd sort of tyranny that followed. Cooking is a
weird mystery to me. As for Bill and the Kid, courtesy forbids detailed
comment. The Kid had been uniformly successful in disguising the most
familiar articles of diet; and Bill was perhaps least unsuccessful in
the making of flapjacks. According to his naive statement, he had
discovered the trick of mixing the batter while manufacturing
photographer's mounting paste. His statement was never questioned. My
only criticism on his flapjacks was simply that he left too much to the
imagination. For these and kindred reasons, we gladly hailed the
newcomers.

Ten minutes after the skiff touched shore, the camp consisted of two
cooks and three scullions. The Kid was a hewer and packer of wood, I was
a peeler and slicer of things, and Bill, sweetly oblivious of his
bewhiskered dignity, danced about in the humblest of moods, handing this
and that to the grub-lords.

"You outfitted like greenhorns!" announced the usurpers. "What you want
is raw material. Run down to the boat, please, and bring me this! Oh,
yes, and bring me that! And you'll find the other in the bottom of the
skiff's forward locker!