Page:Hugh Pendexter--The young timber-cruisers.djvu/45

 and he slackened his steps. “Enough? Of course we have enough. Eat all you can hold, but we fellers git so all fired hungry we usually sprint for the dining room. Hear ’em outside! You’d think there was only a slice of bread and we’d got to fight for it. Follow me.”

For the first time in his life Stanley beheld more than a hundred men eating in their shirt-sleeves, and eating as if life depended upon their finishing quickly. Only they didn’t finish but helped themselves again and again. Mountains of baked beans, hills of doughnuts, seas of strong coffee, plateaus of gingerbread, foothills of fried potato vanished and were replaced, only to vanish again. And no one spoke, except to grunt a request for some particular dish. The rattle of the knives and forks, the clatter of the dishes, was a reprodution in miniature of the confusion in the mill.

“Pitch in,” encouraged Bub, manfully wresting the doughnuts from the expectant hand of a Prince Edwards Islander.

“I’m through,” whispered Stanley, suddenly finding his appetite had ﬂed.

“Jumping cats!” exclaimed Bub, pausing in amazement. “Off your feed as bad as that? I thought you was hungry.”

“I was, but the noise, the sight of so much