Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 155, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 June 1920 — THEIR LUCKY DAY [ARTICLE]

THEIR LUCKY DAY

How Members es Campho Party Found a Cook. Finding gs Manna In the Wllderneaa •r Getting Water From Rock Would Not Hava Boon Wonderful After That Experience. It might seem reasonable to believe that In the wilderness the troubles and trials caused by cooks or the want of cooks could be comfortably left behind, but according to Mrs. Mary Roberts Rinehart such Is not the case. So essential a place in the routine of a large camping party does a cook occupy that trouble with that Important personage la a dire calamity. In "Tenting Tonight” Mrs. Rinehart gives her yiewsonthesubjectaud describes the nerve-racking experience of trying to keep hold of an unstable cook. By the end of the second day, she says, we were well away from even that remote part of civilization from which we had started, and a terrible fact was dawning on us. The cook did not like us! Now, the center of a camping trip is the cook. 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 the smoke Into his face and cinders Into his food. Worse than that, be must cook not only for the party, but for a hungry crowd of guides and packers that sits in a circle and watches him, and urges him, and gets under his feet 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 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. But gloom hung over him like a cloud. A few days later the climax came. One afternoon we found a ranger’s cabin and rode into its inclosure for luncheon. Breakfast had been early, and we were very hungry. We had gone long miles through the thick and silent forest, and now we Wanted food. We sat in a circle on the ground and talked about food. At last the chuck wagon drove in. We stood up and gave a hungry cheer, and then —Bill was gonel Some miles back he had halted the wagon, got out, taken his bed on his back, and started toward civilization on foot We blankly at the teamster. “Well,” we said, "what did he say?” “All he said to me was 'So long!’” said the teamster. And that was all there was to it There we were in the wilderness, far, far from a cook. In savage silence we lunched out of tins. When we spoke it was to impose horrible punishments on the defaultUm cook. In silence we finished our limcheon; in silence, mounted our horses. In black and hopeless silence we rode on north, moving every moment farther and farther from cooks and hotels and tables d’hote. At last In a clearing we saw a man sitting quite idly beside the trail. We rode up to him and said: “Do you know of any place where we can find a cook?" And this man, who had dropped from heaven replied: “I am a cook.” So we put him on our extra saddle horse and - took him with us. He cooked for us with might and main, dawn and night, until the trip was over.