Winnie, who liked cake herself, and thought she had seen some, went back to the heap of provisions and began to dig at it like a small dog at a mole-hill.
“Marie!” she called triumphantly in a minute, “There is cake! And a lot of bananas!”
“That’s good,” Marie serenely remarked. “Bring them along.”
Winnie reappeared in a minute, very flushed and triumphant, with a hand of bananas under her arm, and a huge chocolate cake, with almost undamaged icing, poised carefully before her.
“Oh, I remember!” said absent-minded Dorothy, “I brought that cake. It was in the satchel with the knives and forks.”
“You certainly saved all our lives,” said Louise feelingly, and went on whittling toasting-sticks for the bacon. “Here, Winnie, take a stick and start in to be useful.”
“How do you do it?” Winnie wondered—“cook bacon, I mean? I never did it this way before.”
“Just string it on the stick any way at all,” Marie advised, and speared a slice scientifically as she spoke.
“Easy when you know how!” laughed Winnie, sharpening her own stick a little more and threading some bacon on it.
In a few minutes everybody had slices of bacon frizzling gayly, and getting more or less charred. When they were done enough they were popped between the opened rolls, and—eaten, cinders and all. The water, though it was boiled in something else than its own proper kettle—something remarkably like a dish-pan cunningly slung over the fire by a wonderful system of forked sticks—came to a boil without accident, and was poured on the cocoa. Each girl had brought her own drinking-cup, so there was no difficulty about crockery. It seemed to Winnie, balanced on one elbow on her rug, that nothing had ever tasted so good as the bacon sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, washed down by all the hot cocoa you could drink.