Mary needed nothing, except to have the kettle lifted to its place upon the fire. Frank was all this time warming his hands and feet, as if he was desperately cold. In reading the Scriptures, and repeating the Lord's Prayer, his voice could scarcely be heard; he knew that he had done wrong, and was beginning to repent. At breakfast, Mary asked him in a kind, forgiving tone, if he would not have some coffee; but true to his resolution he declined.
The first business of the day was to take care of their venison. Yet what should they do with it? They had no cool place in which to keep it fresh, nor salting tub nor barrel in which to corn or pickle what they could not consume in its green state. Harold's proposal was that they should cut the hams into thin slices, and jerk them in the smoke, as he had seen Torgah do; or else to dry them in the sun, which in the middle of the day was quite hot. Robert said he had heard or read of meat being saved fresh for several days by burying it under cool running water, and offered to try it at their spring. Mary said she liked both plans, but having had such good experience of Harold's baked turkey, she hoped he would now give them a specimen of baked venison.
It was finally resolved to give each plan a fair trial. One ham should be sliced and jerked; another should be baked for the next day's dinner, as the turkey had been; one shoulder should be cooked for that day's consumption, and the other put under the drip of the spring to prove whether it would keep until Monday.
"There is one advantage at least that we shall gain from these experiments," said Harold; "a knowledge how to economize our meat."
For a minute or two Mary had been evidently pondering upon some difficult problem; and Robert, observing her abstraction, asked in a jesting tone if she was studying anatomy.
"Not exactly," she replied; "I was thinking of two things; how to cook this shoulder, when we have nothing in which to bake or roast it--"
"O, as for that," Harold interjected, "I will provide you in ten minutes' time with a roaster wide enough for an ox, or small enough for a sparrow. Do you just hang it by a string from the pole I will set for you above the fire; it will roast fast enough, only you will lose all your gravy."
"The gipsies' roasting-pole!" said she; "I wonder I did not think of it. The other thing is, that after you have sliced the steak-pieces from the bone, the remainder would make an excellent soup, if we had any vegetables to put with it."
"And what do you want?" Robert inquired.
"In beef soup," she replied, "cooks usually put in turnips, onions, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, and the like."