"They're lovely. But I wouldn't fry one for ten million dollars! Keep them for breakfast, Uncle Joe,—Sarah will know how to do them beautifully."
With an understanding chuckle, Uncle Joe went off to cache his string of beauties in a cool place along the creek; and Blue Bonnet and Amanda continued their quest for ferns.
As they were returning, crowned with success, they met the Señora just back from a stroll with Mrs. Judson. The three other girls were already sitting suggestively about the board.
"There," said Blue Bonnet triumphantly, as she deposited the fruit-jar in the centre of the table with its graceful ferns and honeysuckle trailing over the oil-cloth, "feast on that!"
"I call that a pretty slim dinner," said Kitty.
Blue Bonnet, disdaining the insinuation, departed rather hastily to the kitchen, drawn thither by a strong odor and a still stronger suspicion of disaster. The sheet-iron stove was red-hot. Catching up a cloth she flung open the oven door, and then backed abruptly away from the cloud of acrid yellow smoke that rolled thickly into her face.
"Oh, Blue Bonnet!" wailed Amanda. "Everything's burned to a cinder! We shouldn't have gone off."
Blue Bonnet's only reply was a violent fit of coughing. The smoke continued to pour in dense billows from the oven. "Grab the pans, quick!" she managed to choke out.
Amanda made a valiant dive through the smoke, and had just time to seize the pans from the top and bottom of the oven, when she, too, was overcome, and in the paroxysm of coughing that followed threatened to burst a blood-vessel. Finally with crimson faces and streaming eyes, both cooks gazed ruefully down on the black marbles that had been potatoes, and the charred drum-stick that had once been a leg of spring lamb.
"Keep back—no trespassing!" called Blue Bonnet as the other girls, scenting fun as well as the odor of burning things, came running from the dining-room. "This is our funeral and we don't want any mourners!" She waved them back peremptorily, at the same time screening the ruins with her apron.