While they waited for the coffee and bacon, some of them fell to digging in the shell-heap. They found only a few charred bones, that looked like bird-bones, and some bits of broken pottery. But even these gave them a thrill. The Indians had been there! What had they been doing? They could imagine all sorts of things.
They could hardly bear to stop digging even when the lunch call sounded. But how good the coffee smelled and how delicious the bacon tasted, as they sat around the bonfire which had died down to glowing coals, and munched the luncheon that was an after-thought of Tante’s.
“I say!” cried Dick suddenly, with his mouth full of bacon, “I wonder if we look like the bands of Fijis who used to camp here?’
“Fijis, you cowboy!” interrupted Hugh. “They were proper Penobscots who owned this part of the world.”
“How I’d like to see them sitting around here, chucking their clam-shells one by one onto that heap——”
“Unless they were waiting for the tide to go out, so they could get the clams,” tittered Nancy. Dick shied a pebble at her and went on with his word-picture.
“—Sitting around in a circle, gossiping about that gay little massacre they had just pulled off on the island over there. Wow!” Dick gave a western war-whoop that made the girls jump, and Norma covered her ears with horror. Three crows arose protesting frantically from some nook beyond the bank, and flapped away inland, cawing bad luck to these invaders.
“Yes. I feel like an Indian myself!” volunteered Beverly unexpectedly. “I had an ancestor who was an Indian, you know. Pocahontas was her name.”
“Pocahontas!” several voices echoed the familiar name in wonder.
“I know about her!” chimed the Twins. “She ran out and saved Captain Smith”—“from having his head cut off”—“no, from being roasted alive!”