Peanut took his piece over to the three men. “I’ll swap this excellent and nourishing morsel for a ham sandwich,” he said.
The men laughed. “You will not!” one of them answered, hastily stuffing the last of his sandwich into his mouth. “I’ve tried that before, myself. If you’ve got a little water to soften it up in, and a bit of bread to put it on, it’s not so bad, at that.”
One of the other men passed over a sandwich--but not to Peanut. He gave it to Rob. “Divide the bread,” he said. “It’ll make your rations go better.”
Each boy, then, got a third of a slice of bread, and a tiny morsel of ham. On this they put their chunk of emergency rations, softened with the last of the water from the canteens, and began to eat. Nobody seemed to be enjoying the food very much, but their expressions grew less pained the longer they chewed.
“Beats all how long you can chew this before it disappears,” said Lou. “Gets sweeter, too.”
“Maybe that’s the bread. Bread almost turns to sugar if you chew and chew it without swallowing,” said Rob. “But this pemmican stuff certainly is filling.”
Mr. Rogers laughed. “Not exactly--put on your shirt, Peanut,” he said. “Pemmican was originally made of dried venison, pounded up with fat and berries. Now it’s made of dried beef pounded up with dried fruits and fats, and packed into a jelly cake to harden. That’s about what this is, I fancy. It’s very nourishing.”
“All right, but where’s the sweet chocolate?” Peanut demanded.
Rob passed out the chocolate for dessert, and after it was eaten, everybody began to complain of being thirsty. The canteens were empty.
“There’s a spring just below the summit,” said one of the three strangers.
“You mean there _was_,” laughed a second. “You drank it all dry on the way up.”
“Let’s get there on the way down before he does,” cried Peanut.
“No fear,” the first speaker laughed, “we are going down over the ridge, the way you just came up. We’re doing Moosilauke to-morrow.”
“By the Beaver Brook Trail?” the boys asked.
“It ain’t,” said Peanut. “It was, but it ain’t.”
“He means it’s eroded into pretty steep drops in places,” Rob put in. “We thought when we came down that it would be an awful pull up.”
“There’s a good logging road across the brook, though,” one of the men said. “If you’d taken that instead of the trail you’d have had no trouble. I was over it last year.”