CHAPTER XVIII.—CASE MAKES A HIT WITH DOUGH.
“The river is running like a mill-race,” Case declared, at noon, as he looked over the surging mass to the east of the spot where the Rambler lay, “and the rain is stopping, so I don’t think it will get any higher. Shall we set the motors going and try to run down? I’m getting weary of staying here.”
“You may wish yourself back a good many times before we pass the rapids,” Alex said. “If you think it’s any fun to breast a strong current, just jump in there and try it. Then you’ll see!”
“I’m not curious about high currents,” grinned Case, taking a glass and looking down the river. The Rambler lay above the fringe of stunted bushes which had hidden the pool on their approach, and so the boy could look a long way down the stream.
“I can’t see a single rock sticking up,” he said, presently. “The current sets toward the other shore, and looks safe, but it is making an awful noise! It must be ten feet above yesterday’s mark. Let us get ready.”
“I’m for getting dinner first,” Alex interrupted “I don’t want to fill up on river water! We can fry some of the bear meat, and get up quite a meal in a short time. I like bear better in a stew, but we’ll have to be content with fried meat this time.”
“Both the bears we have met were in a stew!” joked Case.
“And they had us in the stew with them, too,” Alex replied.
So the boys cooked bear meat, made biscuits out of flour and baking powder, and ate dinner. Then they washed and put away the dishes and got ready for the exciting run ahead of them.
“We don’t know what is below the rapids,” Clay suggested, as the boat under full power, shot out of the pool and took the center of the stream, “but we’re likely to find out right soon. Keep by the motors. Case, to see that nothing goes wrong with them, and you, Alex stand by the prow with your pole, and we’ll break the speed record for motor boats of our class. It doesn’t make any difference how fast we go here if we don’t strike obstructions. We’ll be through all the quicker.”
The boys were agreeably surprised at the ease with which the journey through the rapids was made. The Rambler rocked frightfully, at times, but the high speed at which she was going kept her in fairly good water, under the influence of the helm.
In a very few minutes she lay in a basin below the cataract. The water ran swiftly in the basin, of course, for the great mass above was forcing it on, but there were no obstructions and no dangerous eddies.
The whole valley to left and right appeared to be under water clear up to the foot of the hills. The boat was kept under motion until the light began to die out, and then tied up to a tree in a dell which had been dry only the day before.
“Now,” Case said, switching on the lights in the cabin, “I’m going to celebrate the escape of Hairbrained Alex by making a batch of bread. Real bread, I mean, of hops and white flour. If I eat any more pancakes I’ll be as flat, mentally, as they are physically.”
“I don’t believe even the bear or the dog will eat bread you make,” said Alex, “but you might make some. We may be able to use it for an anchor. Go ahead, Case, and I’ll catch a fish for supper.”
“Where’s your oven?” asked Clay. “We can bake biscuit under a pan on top of the coal stove, but there are no pans on board the right size to fit over a couple of loaves of bread. They are too large or too small. We neglected to buy an oven.”
“There’s a granite iron pail here,” Case laughed, “that will fit down tight over the bread on top of the heater. I’ll mix up the dough, and we’ll have it all ready to bake before we go to bed. I’ve seen bread made lots of times, so I guess I can do the trick.”
He took four packages of compressed yeast and put them in a cup to dissolve, first heating the water to blood temperature. Alex watched him with a grin on his face.
“Why don’t you put in some yeast?” he finally asked.
“That’s just what I’m doing,” Case replied, “and I’ll get along just as well if you go and get that fish. We’ll want him for supper.”
Alex snorted and went away, pulling the bear cub along with him. Captain Joe still stood watching the making of the bread.
When the yeast was dissolved, Case emptied a large quantity of flour into a great dishpan and stirred the yeasty water into it Clay, who entered the cabin at that stage of the proceedings, hastened to ask:
“How much bread are you thinking of making, little cook?”
“Never you mind me!” retorted Case. “I’m making this bread. You don’t have to eat any of it. Go on, now, and leave me alone. Ships’ cooks are never questioned by the officers or the passengers.”
Clay went out to help Alex catch his fish, and Case mixed the dough up lightly, making almost a panful. This done, he switched on the electric stove, placed a square pan, inverted, over the cherry-red coils, laid a board over that, and set the pan of dough on to “rise.”
“That ought to be up so we can bake it to-night,” he thought. “I’d have made bread before if I had known how easy it was.”
“What do you do next?” asked Clay, standing in the door of the cabin.
“After it rises,” Case answered, not a little proudly, “you mix it up good and hard and put it to bake. We ought to have bread enough out of that batch to last us a week. I can bake only two loaves at a time under the pail, but time doesn’t count for anything with us, and the dough will keep.”
The rain had stopped, and the boy went out on deck to see how Alex was succeeding in his quest for a fish supper. Conditions seemed to be wrong, for the boy had not had a single bite.
After a time the lads decided to open beans and make a supper of them, with pieces of fried meat which had been left from dinner. Case brought the beans and meat out on deck, under the prow light, and they soon satisfied their hunger.
The boys sat out on deck for a long time, and then Case went in and switched off the electric stove. Teddy sat there watching the dough lifting in the pan, and the boy left him there, thinking that he would soon crawl into one of the bunks and go to sleep. Then Case went out where the other boys sat looking over the rushing water.
“That dough is coming along fine,” he exclaimed, proud of his achievement, “and will be ready to mix with more flour before long. I don’t see why women make such a fuss over baking. It is just as easy as mixing pancakes. We’ll have plenty of bread now. I’ll make it often.”
The clouds slipped away and the stars looked down. The strong electric light on the prow showed wreckage of all kinds drifting past There were trunks and limbs of trees, some green, as if the water had undermined the roots of live cedars.
While they sat there, laying plans for the future, something which looked like a battered rowboat came sailing down. It surely was a rowboat, they discovered, as it came nearer, and Clay took up the glass and waited for it to come into the circle of light.
“Boys!” he cried, as the wreck flashed into view and then disappeared down the river, “I believe that was what is left of our boat. It looked like it, anyway! Now, how could that come here?”
“Caught in the flood,” Alex said, grimly. “I don’t wonder that it is a wreck in that case. I’m a good deal of a wreck myself to-night.”
“The last time we saw the boat,” Case remembered, “it passed us, and Gran was riding in it, and a long-armed man was rowing like mad. It ought to be below us. I wonder if they were tipped into the river when the boat was crushed.”
“Sure it was our boat?” he asked. “It doesn’t seem possible.”
“It was the wreck of our boat,” Clay insisted. “Well, it is only one more mystery for us to forget. I wish Gran was here to-night.”
“So do I,” cried Case. “He’d be tickled half to death to get some of my bread!”
“I hope the poor boy isn’t lying at the bottom of the river, somewhere, or drifting in this yellow flood,” Clay said. “I would give a great deal to know why he left us.”
“He tried to tell us something in that paper,” Alex cut in. “I wish he had had more time to write. I guess that long-armed chap just grabbed him and started away. We’ll catch up with him yet, if he isn’t dead.”
The boys talked for a long time, Captain Joe snoring at their feet and Teddy somewhere in the cabin. They would have been on their way that night, only they were entirely ignorant of the character of the river below them. There might be more dangerous rapids close at hand.
“Case,” Clay said, at length, “why don’t you go in and look at your bread? You turned off the heat, and it will be getting cold. Then we won’t have any bread—which would be a shame.”
“I clear forgot about it,” Case answered. “HI go right in and look after it. It won’t get cold, for the pan under it and the board and the stove are warm, or were when I switched off the electricity. Guess I’ll mix it now. It must be about time. Who’ll stay up and help me bake it?”
“I will!” answered Alex. “I’m just hungry for bread.”
Case went into the cabin and turned on the lights. The first thing he saw was a great heap of what seemed to be snow banked high against the table where the electric stove stood. But it was not banked up so securely that it was not pushing out over the floor.
Then he saw that the pan of dough had “risen,” and that it was dripping down over the stove, over the table, and over the floor. It seemed to the amazed and disgusted boy that there was a barrel of it on the table and another barrel on the floor. It looked as if a spring of dough had bubbled up out of the pan and started to make a dough pond of the cabin.
Clay and Alex heard him trying to gather the dough off the table, and stepped into the cabin. They took one look and fell down on the floor, screaming with laughter. Case turned angrily away.
“You seem to think it funny!” he said.
“Funniest thing I ever saw!” roared Alex. “What are you going to do with all that stuff? You’ve got enough there to feed a bread line. Oh, my! Oh, my!” and he rocked back and forth and shouted.
“I’m going to get this pile on the floor out into the river,” Case answered, beginning to see the humor of the situation. “That in the pan is clean and all right, and will make splendid bread.”
He took a broom and began pushing the mess on the floor toward the door, but it was too sticky. After the second muscular exertion in that direction he stopped and leaned heavily on the broom.
The white heap was lifting straight up in the air.
“Glory be!” shouted Alex. “If it isn’t rising yet. Lookout, or it will push the roof off the cabin! Look at it! Look at it rise!”
The dough continued to move. It shunted this way and that, then actually sprang toward the boy, who leaped back in amazement.
“It is chasing him!” chuckled Alex. “The white ghost of the bread that never was is chasing Case! Oh, hold me, some one! He’d have made bread before if he had known how easy it was! Oh! Oh! Oh!”
The next moment it was chasing Case! Teddy, struggling under the sticky stuff, got to his feet and moved toward the door, trailing dough after himself in great stringy masses.
Case sat down on the edge of the table and roared. Clay hastened outside to have his laugh out, and Alex just rolled on the floor, connecting with the dough in more places than one and looking, when he arose, like a baker who had slept in his mixing trough.
“I told you to put a little yeast in!” cried Alex. “I guess you did it, all right. Now, you’ll have a time giving Teddy a bath I Why not put him in the oven and bake him? We’ll have lots of bread now! Wow! Wow!”
Case chased Alex out of the cabin and set to work cleaning the bear. It was a thankless task, for Teddy resented his efforts, and seemed to be complaining that a cub couldn’t even go to sleep under the electric stove without having his fine bearskin coat all mussed up!
After the boy had done his best Alex turned in and assisted in the further work of preparing what dough was left for the oven. He chuckled to himself all the evening, and talked knowingly to Teddy when that abused little bear came to him for sympathy.
“When you see a printer making bread,” he instructed the bear, as he washed flour and yeast out of his eyes, “you want to climb a tree. Case means well, but he knows about as much of the manufacture of bread as you do of the Federal constitution! Next time you see him melting up yeast, you take to the woods. It will be safer there!”
But, in spite of this sarcasm, Case stuck to his job until the bread was baking under the granite iron pail on the heater. As luck would have it, his efforts proved successful, and the lads had hot bread and butter before they went to bed.
There was little need, they thought, of keeping watch that night, for the Rambler was tied up quite a distance from the river, in four feet of water, which was flowing over a piece of ground which had been dry not long before. They were out of sight from the center of the stream, and no one would be likely to wade or swim through the inundated country to get to them.
In the morning when they awoke the sun was shining above the valley of the Columbia and it was late. They paid little attention to the hour, however, for they were in no hurry now, and, besides, there was something more important for them to consider.
This was how to get the Rambler back into the river! During the night the water had run out and left them stranded!
“Tell you what we’ll do,” suggested Alex. “We’ll have Case make some more dough, and that will raise the boat up so we can slide her in!”
“All right,” Case declared, “have all the fun you can, but you won’t get any more of that bread. Teddy and Joe ate it up after we went to sleep.”