covered up the mosses creep in and then after they’ve decayed enough you get a little soil and a bird drops a seed and up comes a tree. Then there’s roots and berries in their season, and, O lots of things a fellow can keep a-going on. As for water, a woodsman will find it almost anywhere and if he can’t he’ll use the Indian cucumber. I was lost a week upon the Musquacook once without any provisions, but I wagged along and didn’t lose any flesh to speak of. On the last day, I remember, I knocked over a booby—”
“Can’t ye find something besides partridge to gossip about?” groaned Abner. “I vum! to hear ye makes my mouth water so I fergit I’m thirsty. If I was back at the settlement I’d order a hundred dollars’ wurth of ham’n eggs.”
“I’d have a reg’lar hotel dinner,” enthusiastically declared Bub. “I’d start in with soup and fish and then have roast beef, rare, with green corn on the cob and all the fixings, same’s I had in Portland once, and at the end I’d call for pie and—”
“Quit it, ye young torment! Quit it, or I’ll lambast ye; I may be shot by Big Nick, but I vum! I won’t submit to being tortured by any younker.”
