The B. M. Bower Megapack

by B. M. Bower

  Later, they hitched the four horses to the mess-wagon, learned that the new cook, though he deeply regretted his inefficiency, did not drive anything. “The small burro,” he explained, “I ride him, yes, and also the automobile drive I when the way is smooth. But the horses I make not acquainted with him. I could ride upon the elevated seat, yes, but to drive the quartet I would not presume.”

  “Happy, you’ll have to drive,” said Weary, his tone a command.

  “Aw, gwan!” Happy Jack objected, “He rode out here all right last night—unless somebody took him up in front on the saddle, which I hain’t heard about nobody doing. A cook’s supposed to do his own driving. I betche—”

  Weary went close and pointed a finger impressively. “Happy, you drive,” he said, and Happy Jack turned without a word and climbed glumly up to the seat of the mess-wagon.

  “Well, are yuh coming or ain’t yuh?” he inquired of the cook in a tone surcharged with disgust.

  “If you will so kindly permit, it give me great pleasure to ride with you and to make better friendship. It now occurs to me that I have not yet introduce. Gentlemen, Jacques I have the honor to be name. I am delighted to meet you and I hope for pleasant association.” The bow he gave the group was of the old school.

  Big Medicine grinned suddenly and came forward. “Honest to grandma, I’m happy to know yuh!” he bellowed, and caught the cook’s hand in a grip that sent him squirming upon his toes. “These here are my friends: Happy Jack up there on the wagon, and Slim and Weary and Pink and Cal and Jack Bates and Andy Green—and there’s more scattered around here, that don’t reely count except when it comes to eating. We like you, by cripes, and we like your cookin’ fine! Now, you amble along to town and load up with the best there is—huh?” It occurred to him that his final remarks might be construed as giving orders, and he glanced at Weary and winked to show that he meant nothing serious. “So long, Jakie,”he added over his shoulder and went to where his horse waited.

  Jacques—ever afterward he was known as “Jakie” to the Flying U—clambered up the front wheel and perched ingratiatingly beside Happy Jack, and they started off behind the riders for the short mile to Dry Lake. Immediately he proceeded to win Happy from his glum aloofness.

  “I would say, Mr. Happy, that I should like exceeding well to be friends together,” he began purringly. “So superior a gentleman must win the admiration of the onlooker and so I could presume to question for advisement. I am experience much dexterity for cooking, yes, but I am yet so ignorant concerning the duties pertaining to camp. If the driving of these several horses transpire to pertain, I will so gladly receive the necessary instruction and endeavor to fulfil the accomplishment. Yes?”

  Happy Jack, more in stupefaction at the cook’s vocabulary than anything else, turned his head and took a good look at him. And the trustful smile of Jakie went straight to the big, soft heart of him and won him completely. “Aw, gwan,” he adjured gruffly to hide his surrender. “I don’t mind driving for yuh. It ain’t that I was kicking about.”

  “I thank you for the so gracious assurement. If I transgress not too greatly, I should like for inquire what is the chuck for which I am told to fill the wagon. I do not,” he added humbly, “understand yet all the language of your so glorious country, for fich I have so diligently study the books. Words I have not yet assimilated completely, and the word chuck have yet escape my knowledge.”

  “Chuck,” grinned Happy Jack, “is grub.”

  “Chuck, it is grub,” repeated Jakie thoughtfully. “And grub, that is—Yes?”

  Happy Jack struggled mentally with the problem. “Well, grub is grub; all the stuff yuh eat is grub. Meat and flour and coffee and—”

  “Ah, the light it dawns!” exclaimed Jakie joyously. “Grub it is the supply of provision fich I must obtain for camping, yes? I thank you so graciously for the information; because,” he added a bit wistfully, “that little word chuck she annoy me exceeding and make me for not sleep that I must grasp the meaning fich elude. I am now happy that I do not make the extensive blunder for one small word fich I apprehend must be a food fich I must buy and perhaps not to understand the preparation of it. Yes? It is the excellent jest at the expense of me.”

  “There ain’t much chuck in camp,” Happy observed helpfully, “so yuh might as well start in and get anything yuh want to cook. The outfit is good about one thing They don’t never kick on the stuff yuh eat. The cook always loads up to suit himself, and nobody don’t ask questions or make a holler—so long as there’s plenty and it’s good.”

  Jakie listened attentively, twisting his mustache ends absently. “It is simply that I purchase the supplies fich I shall choose for my judgment,” he observed, to make quite sure that he understood. “I am to have carte blanche, yes?”

  “Sure, if yuh want it,” said Happy Jack. “Only they might not keep it here. Yuh can’t get everything in a little place like this.” It is only fair to Happy Jack to state that he would have understood the term if he had seen it in print. It was the pronunciation which made the words strange to him.

  Jakie looked puzzled, but being the soul of politeness he made no comment—perhaps because Happy Jack was at that moment bringing his four horses to a reluctant stand at the wide side-door of the store.

  “The horses, they are of the vivacious temperament, yes?” Jakie had scrambled from the seat to within the door and was standing there smiling appreciatively at the team.

  “Aw, they’re all right. You go on in—I guess Weary’s there. If he ain’t, you go ahead and get what yuh want. I’ll be back after awhile.” Thirst was calling Happy Jack; he heeded the summons and disappeared, leaving the new cook to his own devices.

  So, it would seem, did every other member of the Flying U. Weary had been told that Miss Satterly was in town, and he forgot all about Jakie in his haste to find her. No one else seemed to feel any responsibility in the matter, and the store clerks did not care what the Flying U outfit had to eat. For that reason the chuck-wagon contained in an hour many articles which were strange to it, and lacked a few things which might justly be called necessities.

  “Say, you fellows are sure going to live swell,” one of the clerks remarked, when Happy Jack finally returned. “Where did yuh pick his nibs? Ain’t he a little bit new and shiny?”

  “Aw, he’s all right,” Happy Jack defended jealously. “He’s a real chaff, and he can build the swellest meals yuh ever eat. Patsy can’t cook within a mile uh him. And clean—I betche he don’t keep his bread-dough setting around on the ground for folks to tromp on.” Which proves how completely Jakie had subjugated Happy Jack.

  That night—nobody but the horse-wrangler and Happy Jack had shown up at dinner-time—the boys of the Flying U dined luxuriously at their new-made camp upon the creek-bank at the home ranch, and ate things which they could not name but which pleased wonderfully their palates. There was a salad to tempt an epicure, and there was a pudding the like of which they had never tasted. It had a French name which left them no wiser than before asking for it, and it looked, as Pink remarked, like a snowbank with the sun shining on it, and it tasted like going to heaven.

  “It makes me plumb sore when I think of all the years I’ve stood for Patsy’s slops,” sighed Cal Emmett, rolling over upon his back because he was too full for any other position—putting it plainly.

  “By golly, I never knowed there was such cookin’ in the world,” echoed Slim. “Why, even Mis’ Bixby can’t cook that good.”

  “The Countess had ought to come down and take a few lessons,” declared Jack Bates emphatically. “I’m going to take up some uh that pudding and ask her what she thinks of it.”

  “Yuh can’t,” mourned Happy Jack. “There ain’t any left—and I never got more’n a taste. Next time, I’m going to tell Jakie to make it in a wash tub, and make it full; with some uh you gobblers in camp—”

  He looked up and discovered the Little Doctor approaching with Chip. She was smiling a friendly welcom
e, and she was curious about the new cook. By the time she had greeted them all and had asked all the questions she could think of and had gone over to meet Jakie and to taste, at the urgent behest of the Happy Family, a tiny morsel of salad which had been overlooked, it would seem that the triumph of the new cook was complete and that no one could possibly give a thought to old Patsy.

  The Little Doctor, however, seemed to regret his loss—and that in the face of the delectable salad and the smile of Jakie. “I do think it’s a shame that Patsy left the way he did,” she remarked to the Happy Family in general, being especially careful not to look toward Big Medicine. “The poor old fellow walked every step of the way to the ranch, and Claude”—that was Chip’s real name—“says it was twenty-five or six miles. He was so lame and he looked so old and so—well, friendless, that I could have cried when he came limping up to the house! He had walked all night, and he got here just at breakfast time and was too tired to eat.

  “I dosed him and doctored his poor feet and made him go to bed, and he slept all that day. He wanted to start that night for Dry Lake, but of course we wouldn’t let him do that. He was wild to leave, however, so J.G. had to drive him in the next day. He went off without a word to any of us, and he looked so utterly dejected and so—so old. Claude says he acted perfectly awful in camp, but I’m sure he was sorry for it afterwards. J.G. hasn’t got over it yet; I believe he has taken it to heart as much as Patsy seemed to do. He’s had Patsy with him for so long, you see—he was like one of the family.” She stopped and regarded the Happy Family a bit anxiously. “This new cook is a very nice little man,” she added after a minute, “but after all, he isn’t Patsy.”

  The Happy Family did not answer, and they refrained from looking at one another or at the Little Doctor.

  At last Big Medicine brought his big voice into the awkward silence. “Honest to grandma, Mrs. Chip,” he said earnestly, “I’d give a lot right now to have old Patsy back—er—just to have around, if it made him feel bad to leave. I reckon maybe that was my fault: I hadn’t oughta pitched quite so hard, and I had oughta looked where I was throwin’ m’ rider. I reelize that no cook likes to have a fellow standin’ on his head in a big pan uh bread-sponge, on general principles if not on account uh the bread. Uh course, we’ve all knowed old Patsy to take just about as great liberties himself with his sponge—but we’ve got to recollect that it was his dough, by cripes, and that pipe ashes ain’t the same as a fellow takin’ a shampoo in the pan. No, I reelize that I done wrong, and I’m willin’ to apologize for it right here and now. At the same time,” he ended dryly, “I will own that I’m dead stuck on little Jakie, and I’d ruther ride for the Flying U and eat Jakie’s grub than any other fate I can think of right now. Whilst I’m sorry for what I done, yuh couldn’t pry me loose from Jakie with a stick uh dynamite—and that’s a fact, Mrs. Chip.”

  The Little Doctor laughed, pushed back her hair in the way she had, glanced again at the unresponsive faces of the original members of the Happy Family and gave up as gracefully as possible.

  “Oh, of course Patsy’s an old crank, and Jakie’s a waxed angel,” she surrendered with a little grimace. “You think so now, but that’s because you are being led astray by your appetites, like all men. You just wait: You’ll be homesick for a sight of that fat, bald-headed, cranky old Patsy bouncing along on the mess-wagon and swearing in Dutch at his horses, before you’re through. If you’re not so completely gone over to Jakie that you will eat nothing but what he has cooked, come on up to the house. The Countess is making a twogallon freezer of ice-cream for you, and she has a big pan of angel cake to go with it! You don’t deserve it—but come along anyway.” Which was another endearing way of the Little Doctor’s—the way of sweetening all her lectures with something very nice at the end.

  The Happy Family felt very much ashamed and very sorry that they could not feel kindly toward Patsy, even to please the Little Doctor. They sincerely wanted to please her and to have her unqualified approval; but wanting Patsy back, or feeling even the slightest regret that he was gone, seemed to them a great deal too much to ask of them. Since this is a story of cooks and of eating, one may with propriety add, however, that the invitation to ice cream and angel cake, coming though it did immediately after that wonderful supper of Jakie’s, was accepted with alacrity and their usual thoroughness of accomplishment; not for the world would they have offended the Little Doctor by declining so gracious an invitation—the graciousness being manifested in her smile and her voice rather than in the words she spoke—leaving out the enchantment which hovers over the very name of angel cake and ice cream. The Happy Family went to bed that night as complacently uncomfortable as children after a Christmas dinner.

  Not often does it fall to the lot of a cowboy to have served to him stuffed olives and lobster salad with mayonnaise dressing, French fried potatoes and cream puffs from the mess-tent of a roundup outfit. During the next week it fell to the lot of the Happy Family, however. When the salads and the cream puffs disappeared suddenly and the smile of Jakie became pensive and contrite, the Happy Family, acting individually but unanimously, made inquiries.

  “It is that I no more possess the fresh vegetables, nor the eggs, gentlemen,” purred Jakie. “Many things of a deliciousness must I now abstain because of the absence of two, three small eggs! But see, one brief arrival in the small town would quickly remedy, yes? It is that we return with haste that I may buy more of the several articles for fich I require?” He spread his small hands appealingly.

  “By golly, Patsy never had no eggs—” began Slim traitorously.

  “Aw, gwan! Patsy never fed yuh like Jakie does, neither!” Happy Jack was heart and soul the slave of the chef. “If Chip don’t care, I’ll ride over to Nelson’s and git some eggs. Jakie said he’d make some more uh that pudding if he had some. It ain’t but six or seven miles.”

  “Should you but obtain the juvenile hen, yes, I should be delighted to serve the chicken salad for luncheon. It is the great misfortune that the fresh vegetable are not obtain, but I will do the best and substitute with a cleverness fich will conceal the defect—yes?” Jakie’s caps and aprons had lost their first immaculate freshness, but his manner was as royally perfect as ever and his smile as wistfully friendly.

  “Well, I’ll ask Chip about it,” Happy Jack yielded.

  Eggs and young chickens were of a truth strange to a roundup in full blast, but so was a chef like Jakie, and so were the salads, stuffed olives and cream puffs; and the white caps and the waxed mustache and the beautiful flow of words and the smile. The Happy Family was in no condition, mentally or digestively, to judge impartially. A month ago they would have whooped derision at the suggestion of riding anywhere after fresh eggs and “juvenile hens,” but now it seemed to them very natural and very necessary. So much for the demoralization of expert cookery and white caps and a smile.

  Chip also seemed to have fallen under the spell. It may have been that the heavenly peace which wrapped the Flying U was, in his mind, too precious to be lightly disturbed. At any rate he told Happy Jack briefly to “Go ahead, if you want to,” and so left unobstructed the path to the chicken salad and cream puffs. Happy Jack wiped his hands upon an empty flour sack, rolled down his shirtsleeves and hurried off to saddle a horse.

  Happy Jack did not realize that he was doing two thirds of the work about the cook-tent, but that was a fact. Because Jakie could not drive the mess-wagon team, Happy Jack had been appointed his assistant. As assistant he drove the wagon from one camping place to another, “rustled” the wood, peeled the potatoes, tended fires and washed dishes, and did the thousand things which do not require expert hands, and which, in time of stress, usually falls to the horse-wrangler. Jakie was ever smiling and always promising, in his purring voice, to cook something new and delicious, and left with the leisure which Happy’s industry gave him, he usually kept his promise.

  “Now, Mr. Happy,” he would smile, “I am agreeable to place the confidence in
your so gracious person that you prepare the potatoes, yes? And that you attend to the boiling of meat and the unpacking and arrangement of those necessary furnishings for fich you possess the great understanding. And I shall prepare the so delicious dessert of the floating island, what you call in America. Yes? Our friends will have the so delightful astonishment when they arrive. They shall exclaim and partake joyously, is it not? And for your reward, Mr. Happy, I shall be so pleased to set aside a very extensive portion of the delicious floating island, so that you can eat no more except you endanger your handsome person from the bursting. Yes?” And oh, the smile of him!

  A man of sterner stuff than Happy Jack would have fallen before such guile and would have labored willingly—nay, gladly in the service of so delightful a diplomat as Jakie. Except for that willing service, Jakie would have been quite overwhelmed by the many and peculiar duties of a roundup cook. He would have been perfectly helpess before the morning and noon packing of dishes and food, and the skilful haste necessary to unpack and prepare a meal for fifteen ravenous appetites within the time limit would have been utterly impossible. Jakie was a chef, trained to his profession in well-appointed kitchens and with assistance always at hand; which is a trade apart from cooking for a roundup crew.

  Happy Jack, in the fulness of time, returned with the eggs. That is, he returned with six eggs and a quart or two of a yellowish mixture thickly powdered with shell. He took the pail to Jakie and he saw the seraphic smile fade from his face and an unpleasant glitter creep into his eyes.

  “It is the omelet fich you furnish, yes? The six eggs, they will not make the pudding. The omelet—I do not perceive yet the desirableness of the omelet. And the juvenile hen—yes?”

  “Aw, they wouldn’t sell no chickens.” Happy Jack’s face had gone long and scarlet before the patent displeasure of the other. “And my horse was scared uh the bucket and pitched with me.”