Lucetta went over to the canoe, chipped a bit of the daubing from one of the seams, and tasted it appraisingly.
"It tastes like spruce-gum," she offered; "do you suppose it can be?"
Prime ate a little in his turn and confirmed the guess. "That is about what it is," he decided. "The next thing is to find out how they contrive to get enough of it. I wonder if they tap the trees as we do sugar-maples?"
"If we could find a tree that has been broken," Lucetta suggested. And then: "How have we managed to live so long without learning some of these perfectly simple things, Cousin Donald?"
"Too much education and too little instinct," he scoffed. "To-morrow morning I'll climb trees and become a gum-gatherer. It seems inexpressibly humbling to think that a small hole in a piece of birch bark is all that prevents us from going on our way rejoicing. Never mind, there is another day coming, and if there isn't, success or failure won't make any considerable difference to either of us."
Bright and early the next morning they tried the spruce-gum experiment. Prime found that he could have plenty of it for the gathering, and when they had a sufficient quantity they melted it in one of the empty vegetable tins and used it as a glue with which to make the patch adhere. The result was not entirely satisfactory. The melted gum hardened quickly, but it became so brittle that a touch would loosen it.
"This is where we set up a laboratory for original research," Lucetta said, laughing. "I wonder if some more cooking would do it any good."
"'The ruling passion strong in death,'" Prime quoted with good-natured sarcasm. "You are a born cook. Let's try it."
They tried it and merely succeeded in making the product still more brittle. They then tried adding a little grease from the fat pork to make it more flexible, and that ruined it completely.
"Two civilized brains, college-trained to a piano-polish finish, and not a single workable idea between them," Prime derided. "It's humiliating—disgusting!"