For the rest, he took what he could find cold on the table.
On an inverted cracker box the cook sat reading an old copy of the Police Gazette.

Various fifty-pound lard tins were bubbling and steaming on the range.

The cookee divided his time between them and the task of sticking on the log walls pleasing patterns made of illustrations from cheap papers and the gaudy labels of canned goods.

Dyer sat down, feeling, for the first time, a little guilty.

This was not because of a sense of a dereliction in duty, but because he feared the strong man's contempt for inefficiency.
"I sort of pounded my ear a little long this morning," he remarked with an unwonted air of bonhomie.
The cook creased his paper with one hand and went on reading; the little action indicating at the same time that he had heard, but intended to vouchsafe no attention.