try to reduce the cost of living.

No; I really go out of my way to ignore the left-overs, and not once on
this trip had I so much as mentioned dish-towels or anything unpleasant.
I had seen my digestion slowly going with a course of delicious but
indigestible saddle-bags, which were all we had for bread.

But--I was failing. Bill unpacked and cooked and packed up again and
rode on the chuck-wagon. But there was something wrong. Perhaps it was
the fall out of the wagon. Perhaps we were too hungry. We were that, I
know. Perhaps he looked ahead through the vista of days and saw that
formidable equipment of fishing-tackle, and mentally he was counting the
fish to clean and cook and clean and cook and clean and--

The center of a camping-trip is the cook. If, in the spring, men's
hearts turn to love, in the woods they turn to food. And cooking is a
temperamental art. No unhappy cook can make a souffle. Not, of course,
that we had souffle.

A camp cook should be of a calm and placid disposition. He has the
hardest job that I know of. He cooks with inadequate equipment on a
tiny stove in the open, where the air blows smoke into his face and
cinders into his food. He must cook either on his knees or bending over
to within a foot or so of the ground. And he must cook moving, as it
were. Worse than that, he must cook not only for the party but for a
hungry crowd of guides and packers that sits around in a circle and
watches him, and urges him, and gets under his feet, and, if he is
unpleasant, takes his food fairly out of the frying-pan under his eyes
if he is not on guard. He is the first up in the morning and the last in
bed. He has to dry his dishes on anything that comes handy, and then
pack all of his grub on an unreliable horse and start off for the next
eating-ground.

So, knowing all this, and also that we were about a thousand miles from
the nearest employment-office and several days' hard riding from a
settlement, we went to Bill with tribute. We praised his specialties. We
gave him a college lad, turned guide for the summer, to assist him. We
gathered up our own dishes. We inquired for his bruise. But gloom
hung over him like a cloud.

[Illustration: COPYRIGHT BY FRED H. KISER, PORTLAND, OREGON
_A mountain lake in Glacier National Park_]

And he _could_ cook. Well--

We had made a forced trip that day, and the last five miles were
agonizing. In vain we sat sideways on our horses, threw a leg over the
pomme