'You're right, old chap,' said Dick; 'but just for a minute it seemed so jolly queer to knock over a spiny little brute like that, and then talk of eating it.'
'Gipsies eat 'em reg'lar,' replied Chippy, 'an' I know 'ow they handle 'em. They're good—I tell ye that.'
Carrying the hedgehog by a withe cut from a willow, the scouts went on to the ground below the hanger, and pronounced the spot first-rate for a camp. There was a sandy patch at the foot of the bank, and here they resolved to build their fire and sleep.
CHAPTER XXX
THE FIRST CAMP
The fire was taken in hand first thing, for Chippy would need a great pile of red-hot embers for his cookery. The hanger was littered with dry sticks, so that there was no lack of material, and soon they had a rousing fire crackling on the sandy soil.
At the foot of the hanger they met with a stroke of luck. They found a young beech-tree which had been blown down in some winter storm. It was now as dry as a bone and easy cutting, and Dick went to work with the little axe, and soon cut and split a heap of logs some eight or ten inches long and three or four inches through—first-rate stuff, for no tree in the wood burns more sweetly than beech. While the fire was under way, and while Dick hacked at the beech, Chippy had gone in search of clay. He was gone soms time, for he did not hit on a clayey spot at once. But he worked along the bank of the stream where the wash of the water had laid bare the nature of the soil until he struck upon a seam of red clay, and dug out a mass with his knife and the point of his staff.
He brought the clay to the fire, and next fetched a billy of water from the river, and worked the clay into a mass which would spread like stiff butter. Now he took the hedgehog, opened it, and removed its inside. Then he began to wrap it in a thick covering of the clay.
'Aren't you going to skin it?' cried Dick, who had been watching his brother scout's doings with deep interest.