The boys were all hungry, and there was nothing appetizing in looking forward to a breakfast of meat and fish. Joe Wayring and his friends did not mind it, for they had eaten many such meals during their vacation wanderings in the woods; but Tom Bigden was not much accustomed to roughing it, and he condemned the squatter almost as bitterly for walking off with the hard-boiled eggs, sardines, canned fruit and bottle of cold coffee, which he had provided as his share of the common dinner, as he did for stealing his fishing-rod.
“When Matt opens my bundle and finds all that buttered tissue paper in it I guess he’ll wonder,” said Joe, as he stepped into Roy’s canoe and picked up one of the joints of the double paddle. “He won’t know what I intended to do with it; do you, Bigden?”
After a little reflection Tom concluded that he couldn’t tell what use the buttered tissue paper could be put to, unless Joe intended to start a fire with it, and the latter went on to explain.
“We always take a supply with us as a substitute for a frying-pan,” said he. “After cleaning the fish in good shape, we wrap him up in this tissue paper, and then add three or four thicknesses of wet brown paper. In the meantime, the fellow whose business it is to see to the fire has taken care to have a nice bed of coals ready. We rake these coals apart, put in the fish, and cover him up so quickly that the paper around him has no time to get afire, and there he stays until he is done. Then we poke him out, and when the paper is taken off the skin and scales come with it; and if you relish a well-cooked fish, there he is.”
“But how do you know when the fish is done?” asked Ralph.
“A potato is as good a clock as you want to go by,” answered Joe.
“A potato?” repeated Ralph.
“Yes. I brought several with me, intending to put them on the table after they had done duty as clocks, but they have gone off with the sugar, lemons and other good things I had in my bundle. As soon as your fish is covered up in the coals,” continued Joe, “put your potatoes in alongside of him and cover them up also. You can test them with a sharp stick at any time, and when they are done, which will be at the end of half an hour, if your fire is just right, poke them out, break them open and place them on a flat stone which you have previously washed, to cool. Then poke out your fish, take off the wrappings and fall to work. But we shall have to use boards this trip—there are plenty of them lying around loose on the point, unless Matt Coyle has carried them off to patch up his shanty—and make our noses do duty as clocks.”
Tom did not understand this, either; but believing that he had made a sufficient airing of his ignorance of woodcraft for one day, at least, he asked no more questions.
Half an hour’s steady paddling brought the boys to the point, on which they landed to prepare their meager breakfast. That it was a favorite resort for parties like their own was evident. Beds of ashes surrounding the mossy bowlder from beneath which the spring bubbled up, marked the places where roaring camp-fires had once been built, and the empty fruit and meat cans that had been tossed into the bushes told what good dinners had been eaten there.