“Simple as anything,” said Winona, “once you know how.”
And they scattered to find wood. The sticks lay about in plenty—later they were hard to find without going into the woods which encircled the camping-place—and Mrs. Bryan showed them how to commence a fire by laying small pieces of brushwood criss-cross at the bottom, and piling on heavier wood till all was aflame. Presently they had a solid, roaring fire. They sat back and let it burn down to coals. By then they had the flour-barrel opened, the bacon sliced, and the water ready to put on the cocoa. Winona made biscuits, it seemed to her, in mountains, while Elizabeth got out the butter and knives and forks, and set the table.
“You can’t cut out biscuits enough for twenty people with a cutter, child!” advised Mrs. Bryan.
“Just take the butcher-knife, and cut the whole mass of dough into squares, after you’ve laid it on the floured floors of the oven!”
But the bacon had to be sliced, and this took longer; and Adelaide’s job, looking after the cocoa, proved nerve-racking, because cocoa will burn at the slightest chance. But everything came right, and by the time the other girls were astir their breakfast was awaiting them, piping hot; crispy bacon, hot biscuits and butter, with jam they had made themselves, and cocoa.
“Jam’s an extra,” Mrs. Bryan warned them. “It happened to be left over from the sales, so I brought it. You’ll have to go to work and make some more out of berries you pick.”
After breakfast, Marie, the keeper of the Blue Birds’ Nest, said that she was going to put two Blue Birds to work at each of the camp shifts, and leave the odd one to be Mrs. Bryan’s personal Bird and attendant. Mrs. Bryan was to choose her attendant, who was to run her errands for her and help her generally. But she refused to do it.
“I like them all so much,” she said, “that I can’t pick out a special one.”
So they counted out for the honor, and the choice for the first week fell on little Lucy Hillis. The others, as far as it could be done, worked with their own sisters.
After breakfast, while the dish-washing brigade wrestled with the cups, plates and spoons that twenty people leave behind them, the cooks held a council. They decided that it would be easier if two girls got each meal in turn: Winona and Adelaide the dinner, Elizabeth and Lilian the supper, and so on. The camp police divided off the same way, and so, eventually, did the dish-washers. Helen, who had the Camp funds in her charge, talked with the girls who were going to market that day. There was twenty-five dollars for three weeks of camp, she explained, and she thought that the safest way would be to allow so much a day, which gave them about a dollar twenty a day to spend. They thought so, too, and presently Nataly and Helen went off in search of the farmhouse which had promised to keep them supplied with perishable provisions.