It was a good while before she came back, and the boys, tired of waiting, had forked out the bacon, and were eating their meal, which was what the poets call "frugal," but immensely relished all the same.
Suddenly Katy and the culprit stalked out of the ring of shadows that encircled the fire, bearing huge bundles of yellow rushes.
"That ain't fair!" cried Tug. "You ought to have let me gone, Katy."
"Oh, I didn't mind, and I wanted Jim to hurry back."
"I didn't want her to carry none," said Jim, more eager about self-defense than grammar. "If I give up, I want to give up all over, and not half-way."
"Good for you, Youngster," Aleck shouted, leaping up. "Give us your hand!"
Thus peace was restored, and the boy sat down happily to his well-earned supper, while the older ones spread the crisp reed-straw. Finding there wasn't quite enough, they went off to the marshes and brought two more armfuls, which made a warm and springy couch for the whole party.
These "rushes" were not rushes, properly speaking, but the wild rice which grows so abundantly on the borders of the great lakes, and throughout the little ponds and shallow sheets of water that are dotted so thickly over Wisconsin and southern Minnesota. It is like a small bamboo jungle, for the close-crowding stiff reeds often stand ten feet or more above the water. They bear upon the upper part of their stalks a few ribbon-like leaves, and each reed carries a plume which in autumn contains the seeds, or the "rice."
The botanical name of the plant is Zizania aquatica; and among it flourish not only the common white and yellow water-lilies, but that splendid one, the Nelumbium luteum, which Western people call the lotus.
This rice formed an important part of the food of the Indians who lived where it grew. In and out of the marshes run narrow canals, kept open by the currents, and through these the Indian women would paddle their canoes, seeking the ripe heads, which they would cut off and take ashore to be threshed out in the wigwam, or else they would shake and rub out the rice into a basket as they went along. At home the rice would be crushed into a coarse flour in their stone mortars, then made into cakes baked on the surface of smooth stones heated in the coals.