While Dick superintended the cooking of the stew, Phil and Garry replenished the wood supply. The stew put on the fire, Dick searched until he found a piece of sapling about an inch and a half in diameter. This is peeled off the bark and so made a rolling pin. A glass jam jar was then emptied of its contents and laid to one side.
"Ah, I perceive that we are going to have hot biscuits for supper tonight," remarked Phil, smacking his lips.
"Regular little Sherlock, aren't you?" said Garry with a laugh. "When you see a chap make a rolling pin and a biscuit cutter, you immediately reach the conclusion that he's going to make biscuits."
That was what Dick was intending to do. With a hot stew, there is nothing more palatable than a stack of piping hot biscuits cooked in a spider over a bed of red embers. They require but little work, only one thing being necessary, and that is to rub the shortening through into the flour. Many amateur campers wonder why the biscuits are flat or doughy. It is because they either do not know that the shortening should be ground in, or else, which is too often true, are too lazy to do the work.
For the benefit of some of our readers who may want to go camping over a summer week-end, the proper making of a pan of biscuits will be described. To make a dozen biscuits, or enough for three hungry boys, take a pint and a half of flour, a teaspoon and a half of baking powder, half a heaping teaspoonful of salt, the equivalent of a heaping tablespoonful of shortening, which may be bought by the can, (lard or drippings will do equally as well) and about half a pint of cold water. Stir the baking powder into the flour, then the salt. Then rub the shortening thoroughly into the flour, till not a bit of it remains in lumps or on the bottom of the mixing pan. Then stir in the water until you have a thick dough. In the meantime have a hot bed of coals, then dust a little flour on the bottom of one of your frying pans.
Finally roll out your dough with the home-made sapling rolling pin, and use an old glass jar or a small round tin to cut your biscuits out with. Knead over the bits that are left from cutting the biscuits out until all the dough has been used. Put them in the frying pan, and if you have no cover, use a second inverted pan for one.
Put this on the hot coals about twenty minutes before your supper is to be ready, and a few moments later put on the coffee pot.
The result will be a supper that cannot be found in the finest of hotels, especially if your appetite is sauced by a good hike and the fragrant balsamy air of the great forest.
Squatting about the glowing coals of the campfire, which cast a red reflection on the tall, sombre pines in back of them, they voted Dick a capital cook, and the supper one of the best they had eaten since they left the station where they had done fire patrol duty.
The meal over and the dishes washed, they discussed the advisability of establishing a guard as they had done when danger threatened them in past times.