Woods, too, felt his peril, and intrepid soul though he was, seemed to contract, withdraw like a turtle into his flannel collar, as though already he felt the sizzling grease on his unprotected pate.
Conversation was at a standstill in the atmosphere charged with Bertha's disapproval. Only Porcupine Jim, quite unconscious, unabashed, heaped his plate and ate with all the loud abandon of a Berkshire Red. Emboldened by the pangs of hunger a long way from satisfied, John Johnson tried to "palm" a fourth biscuit while surreptitiously reaching for a third. Unfortunately John was not sufficiently practised in the art of legerdemain and the biscuit slipped from his fingers. It fell off the table and rolled like a cartwheel to Bertha's feet.
"Shan't I bring you in the shovel, Mr. Johnson?" she inquired in a tone of deadly politeness as she polished the biscuit on her lip and returned it to the plate.
John's ears flamed, also his neck and face. The honest Swede looked like a sheep-killing dog caught in the act. He dared not answer, and she added: "There's three apiece."
"Mrs. Jennings, I haven't put the camp on half-rations yet." Bruce was mutinous at last.
The bride drew herself up and reared back from the waist-line until she looked all of seven feet tall. The row of short locks that hung down like a row of fish-hooks beneath a knob of black hair seemed to stand out straight and the window rattled in its casing as she swarmed down on Bruce.
"Look a here, young feller, I don't need no boss to tell me how much to cook!"
Jennings protested mildly: "Now don't you go and git upset, Babe."
"Babe" turned upon him savagely: "And don't you go to takin' sides! I'm used to livin' good an' when I think what I give up to come down here to this hole--"
"I know 'taint what you're used to," Jennings agreed in a conciliatory tone.
Smaltz took this occasion to ostentatiously inspect a confection the upper and lower crusts of which stuck together like two pieces of adhesive plaster.
"Looks like somebudy's been high-gradin' this here pie."
The criticism might have touched even a mild-tempered cook; it made a demon of Bertha. She started around the table with the obvious intention of doing Smaltz bodily harm, but at the moment, Porcupine Jim, whose roving eye had been searching the table for more food, lighted upon one of the special dishes set before Jennings' plate.
It looked like rice pudding with raisins in it! If there was one delicacy which appealed to James's palate more than another it was rice pudding with raisins in it. He arose from the bench in all the pristine splendor of the orange-colored cotton undershirt in which he worked and dined, and reached for the pudding. It was a considerable distance and he was unable to reach it by merely stretching himself over the table, so James, unhampered by the rules of etiquette prescribed by a finical Society, put his knee on the table and buried his thumb in the pudding as he dragged it toward him by the rim.