You gentlemen would be surprised to know what he had in the larder there, ready against just such an emergency as this—of course it wouldn't have been safe to have left all that chow there in an uninhabited cottage if he hadn't had a caretaker, 'way off there in those trackless and uninhabited northern wilds, where any bum might come in and help himself, but luckily there was a Norsky farmer living not over a hundred feet away, just across the road, his name was Oscar Swanson, great big squarehead farmer he was, had a son that worked on the section gang out of Lucknow, and his daughter had gone to business college in Winniwaka and was working for a firm of insurance agents in Winniwaka, mighty bright successful young lady, and Oscar kind of kept an eye on Joe's place, and so he had—
Say, it would 've knocked you for a loop to go into that pantry! Every luxury and necessity of the table, you might say—all canned, of course, but my God! No Roman feast that you read about—or rather, probably, that you see in the movies—
