It required nearly all the afternoon for Tom and Cal to bring the deer to camp and dress it. In the meantime Larry, Dick and Dunbar—who insisted upon helping and did his part very cleverly—worked upon the shelter and the bunks inside. As a result the hut was ready for use that night, though not quite finished in certain details.
By Larry’s orders no further work was to be done after supper, but supper was to be late, as there was the turkey to be roasted, and he wanted to roast it right. While he was preparing the bird for the fire, Dick was rigging up a vine contrivance to serve in lieu of a spit, and Tom and Cal employed the time in bringing a bushel or two of Tom’s wild sweet potatoes to camp.
The turkey was suspended by a long vine from the limb of a tree, so hung as to bring the fowl immediately in front of a fire built at that point especially for this roasting. Dick had bethought him to go to the dory and bring away a square of sheet copper, carried for boat-repairing purposes. This he scoured to brightness with sand, after which he fashioned it into a rude dripping pan, and placed it under the turkey to catch the juices for basting purposes. There was nothing remotely resembling a spoon in the camp or the boat, but Dick was handy with his jackknife, and it did not take him long to whittle out a long-handled wooden ladle with which to do the basting.
By another device of his the roasting fowl was kept turning as fast or as slowly as might seem desirable. This device consisted of two very slender vines attached to the supporting vine at a point several feet above the fire. One of the “twirlers,” as Dick called the slender vines, was wrapped several times around the supporting vine in one direction and the other in the opposite way.
Sitting on opposite sides of the fire, and each grasping a “twirler,” Dick and Larry kept the turkey turning first one way and then the other.
While they were engaged in this, an abundant supply of Tom’s sweet potatoes were roasting in the ashes.
“Now we are at Quasi,” said Cal, just before the turkey was declared “done to a turn”—“at Quasi, the object of all our hopes, the goal of our endeavors, and the guiding star of all our aspirations during a period of buffetings, trials and sore afflictions. We are securely at Quasi, and our residence—which prosaic people might call a hut, hovel or shanty, but which is to us a mansion—is practically finished. It is only meet and fit, and in accordance with Homeric custom, that we should celebrate the occasion and the toilsome achievements that have made it possible, by all possible lavishness of feasting. All of which means that I am going to make a pot of robust and red-hot coffee to drink with the turkey and ‘taters.’”
It was a hungry company that sat down on the ground to eat that supper, and if there was anything lacking in the bill of fare, such appetites as theirs did not permit the boys to find out the fact.
“It is an inflexible rule of good housewives,” drawled Cal, when the dinner was done, “that the ‘things’ as they call the dishes, pots, pans, and the like, shall be cleared away and cleansed. So here goes,” gathering up the palmete leaves that had served for plates and tossing them, together with the bones and fragments of the feast, upon the fire, where they quickly crackled into nothingness. “There aren’t any cooking utensils, and as for these exquisitely shaped agate iron cups, it is the function of each fellow to rinse the coffee out of his own. Oh, yes, there’s the coffee pot I forgot it, and by way of impressing the enormity of my fault upon a dull intelligence I’ll clean that myself. A hurried scouring with some sand and water, followed by a thorough rinsing, ought to do the business finely.”
“I say, Cal,” said Dick, “I wish you would remember that this is your off night.”