“Of course you don’t know—you don’t know nothin’ about these things. You ain’t read nothin’ about ’em, but I ’ave; I’ve read stacks of books about pirates. The ole man ’e uster make me read out of ’em, too, at nights.”
“I say!” exclaimed Dave, “we better get our swags up and bring the boat round.”
“Yes, we better,” agreed Tom, “we got to hook round an’ pirate some tucker, too, as soon as it grows dark.”
They went back to the landing-place and brought the boat up the creek.
Then Tom said they’d have to bake a damper with some of the flour he had borrowed from the old man.
So he stripped a short sheet of bark off a tree with his tomahawk, measured out about a pound of flour, wetted it, and began to roll the damper. The paste was too thin first, and seemed to be trying to get away from him. Dave received orders to stand by and pour on more flour gently. And Dave let the bag slip and lost half the flour in the grass, and Tom said, wrathfully, that he was the biggest fool of a pirate on the river, and it seemed that he was never going to get any sense either.
At length the pirate captain evolved a sticky, stringy sheet of paste, which looked more like variegated marble than anything else, and he raked out the ashes and dropped it in and covered it over.
For about an hour the pirates kept raking the ashes off and covering the damper up again, and then Tom pronounced the dish cooked. It was afternoon, and they proceeded to have some four o’clock damper and tea.
“It’s all right damper,” said the chief architect; “only a bit burned on the bottom. If you scrape the charcoal off the bottom, though, it’ll be good.”
Dave absent-mindedly chipped the chunks of charcoal and cinders off the lower side, and then he cut into the daily loaf and it cut queer. There were streaks of dry flour, and streaks of wet dough, and what wasn’t powder or paste was old Silurian rock.