Explore "The Red River Half-Breed" by Gustave Aimard on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The band of gold grabbers, whose prisoner Miss Maclan had become, had met the snowstorm supinely. They had, besides, obeyed their prudent leader by remaining buried in its protective mantle until the day was broken. The ravine crest had quickly been banked up, so that shielded them; and the marshland, offering no poor resistance to the tempest, had turned no gusts back. They had suffered the least of any exposed in that time of anguish. The danger over, they set to cleaning the camp with coarse jokes, and thronged to breakfast at a bugle call, after having worked on a cup of coffee alone with the wolfish appetite of sojourners in that high latitude. They were well provisioned, none of the wormy "crackers," rank pork, and burnt horse bean coffee of commerce, but good flour bread, deer and bear meat, and honest salt pork. Captain Kidd would have lost half the troop in this onerous wintry expedition with an inferior table.
For the leaders a marquee had been erected, raised of the canvas that sheltered them nightly, in which a folding table stood on picket pins for legs, so that the guests could squat around. Well loaded with hearty fare and various liquors, it was the article of furniture most prominent.