As we stood looking into the crowded booth, where the men sat elbow to elbow, and all the knife blades were plying to and from all the plates and mouths, Dunn explained that his men were well fed. "The time has gone by," said he, "when you could keep an outfit on salt pork and bacon. It's as far gone as them days when they say the Hudson Bay Company fed its laborers on rabbit tracks and a stick. Did ye never hear of that? Why, sure, man, 'twas only fifty years ago that when meal hours came the bosses of the big trading company would give a workman a stick, and point out some rabbit tracks, and tell him he'd have an hour to catch his fill. But in railroading nowadays we give them the best that's going, and all they want of it--beef, ham, bacon, potatoes, mush, beans, oatmeal, the choicest fish, and game right out of the woods, and every sort of vegetable (canned, of course). Oh, they must be fed well, or they wouldn't stay." He said that the supplies of food are calculated on the basis of three-and-a-half pounds of provisions to a man--all the varieties of food being proportioned so that the total weight will be three-and-a-half pounds a day. The orders are given frequently and for small amounts, so as to economize in the number of horses required on the pack-trail. The amount to be consumed by the horses is, of course, included in the loads. The cost of "packing" food over long distances is more considerable than would be supposed. It was estimated that at Dunn's camp the freighting cost forty dollars a ton, but I heard of places farther in the mountains where the cost was double that. Indeed, a discussion of the subject brought to light the fact that in remote mining camps the cost of "packing" brought lager-beer in bottles up to the price of champagne. At one camp on the Kootenay bacon was selling at the time I was in the valley at thirty cents a pound, and dried peaches fetched forty cents under competition. As we looked on, the men were eating fresh beef and vegetables, with tea and coffee and pie. The head cook was a man trained in a lumber camp, and therefore ranked high in the scale of his profession. Every sort of cook drifts into camps like these, and that camp considers itself the most fortunate which happens to eat under the ministrations of a man who has cooked on a steamboat; but a cook from a lumber camp is rated almost as proudly. [Illustration: "THEY GAINED ERECTNESS BY SLOW JOLTS"]