“We are going home,” interrupted Amanda; “it’s horrid here, and everybody will be afraid we are drowned.”
A little smile crept over Amos’s freckled face. “’twill indeed be a tale to tell Jimmie Starkweather,” he said, looking admiringly at the brush-covered shelter, and then at the brisk fire. “’Tis a shipwreck such as no boy in the settlement has had.”
Amos asked no more questions, but sent the girls after more dry brush, while he dug another hole in the sand. Then with a long stick he pushed the hot wood and coals from the first hole into the second, and carefully laid the big plaice fish on the hot sand, pushed a thick covering of hot sand over it, and started a new fire on top of it.
“’twill be baked to a turn,” he said to his sister and Anne; “’Tis the way the Indians cook fish and mussels and clams. I have seen them.”
“We’ll go home as soon as we can eat it,” said Amanda; “’twill be low tide by that time, and if you have no better plan for us, Amos, Anne and I will wade to Long Point.”
“Wade!” repeated Amos scornfully; “you’d be drowned.”
“Then tell us your plan,” urged Amanda, while Anne looked at him pleadingly. She had thought much about her father as she lay awake under the roof of pine boughs, and wondered if some word from him might not have reached the settlement. She thought, too, about the scarlet stockings, and wished herself back in the little brown house on the hill. So she said, “We must go home, Amos.”
“I wish you girls had stayed home,” muttered Amos; “if some of the boys had come we’d have had a good time here; but girls always want to go home. Well, I’ll get you to Long Point without swimming,” and again Amos smiled, for he had a secret of his own that he knew would greatly surprise Amanda and Anne.
It was not long before he began scraping the hot embers from the sand under which the fish was cooking. Then he poked the hot sand away, and there lay the plaice, steaming and smoking, and sending out an appetizing odor.
“There!” said Amos proudly, as he managed to cut off a piece with his jack-knife for each of the girls, “that’s as good fish as you ever tasted.”