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"Strikes me as queer, it does, that some of you fellows who know so much kin do so little. Knowledge ain't worth a cent unless you've got the rustle. Now there's the boss. You talk the same talk, an' he can't well know more than you seem to do, but look where he is, while you stop right down at the bottom running a cook-shanty. Guess you were born tired, English Jim."

He sat upon an overturned bucket discoursing whimsically, while Mattawa Tom, who acted as Thurston's foreman, peeled potatoes for him. The cook-shanty was warm and snug, and Gillow made those to whom he granted the right of entry work for the privilege. "Strikes me as queer," said the big axeman, with a grin, when the cook halted to refill his pipe.

A visitor at one of Paul's camps was astonished to see a crew of men unloading four-horse logging sleds at the cook-shanty. They appeared to be rolling logs into a trap door from which poured clouds of steam. "That's a heck of a place to land logs," he remarked. "Them ain't logs," grinned a bull-cook, "them's sausages for the teamsters' breakfast."

It was said of one of these that he had to wear calked shoes to keep from sliding out of the cook-shanty and rub sand on his hands when he picked anything up. There are two kinds of camp cooks, the Baking Powder Bums and the Sourdough Stiffs. Sourdough Sam belonged to the latter school. He made everything but coffee out of Sourdough.