"We'll just hunt around and chop down a steak," suggested Mrs. Vernon. "Who wants to go with me to find the wooden animal that grows a steak ready-made?"
Of course, they all went, except Julie and Joan who remained to build a fire and start the bacon sizzling in the tiny pan. A scout-twist of flour and water was kneaded by Joan and put to bake near the fire, and then the girls sat and waited for the others to return.
The Captain blazed a way slowly into the forest wilderness, peering under bushes and wherever a tree had been cut down—on its stump of a trunk she always looked eagerly. After about ten minutes' search she saw what she wanted.
"Ah! Here it is—a porterhouse, this time."
The new members saw a great chestnut stump, its jagged spears of wood protesting against its untimely end. But all over the trunk grew fungi—some larger, some smaller, and all of the same flat horizontal shape, like a huge palm-leaf. These were carefully removed and handed to the girls to carry.
"What are they for?" asked Judith, looking at the red juice that ran over her fingers when she took the fungus.
"That's your steak—think it is too big for one?"
"The what?" exclaimed the other new members, skeptically.
"Beefsteak mushroom—finest steaks ever tasted," came reassuringly from the Captain. "The ones growing on a chestnut stump are always the sweetest, but the chestnut trees are disappearing so fast that soon we will have no such mushrooms from them."
When they had gathered enough steaks for that meal, they returned to the clearing where Julie and Joan awaited them. On the way back, Mrs. Vernon showed the scouts the earmarks of the beefsteak mushroom.