This whole performance was repeated many times, and although it was not always successful, two or three of the fish managing to get away, when Injun turned the bow of the canoe back toward the cabin, they had enough lake-trout to satisfy the most voracious appetite. Injun stowed away the canoe in its hiding-place, and both the boys threw off their clothes and plunged into the water to wash.
Injun cleaned the fish, and rolling them in some corn-meal that Bill Jordan had placed in the kit for just this purpose, they were soon frying over the fire.
"Delmonico's chef has nothing on you, Injun," said Whitey, as well as he could with his mouth full of trout; "you can't get fish like this in any hotel that I ever was in! It was worth coming sixty miles to get them!"
Injun didn't know who or what "Delmonico's chef" was, but he knew that Whitey intended to be complimentary, and grinning, let it go at that.
For a long time, after supper, the two boys sat before the fire in the cabin, listening to the night sounds and planning what they would do on the morrow. But, at last, Whitey began to yawn—nobody thinks of keeping late hours when camping in the mountains—and after the door had been barred, the boys tumbled into their beds of pine boughs and were asleep in less time than it takes to tell it, lulled by the occasional hoot of an owl or the far-away voice of a lonesome coyote.
Injun was awakened in the night by a sniffing at the door, and he heard a slight commotion among the horses. He reached for his Winchester and softly opened the door to reconnoiter. But whatever the animal was, he had made off; probably not liking the human scent; and though the red boy kept vigil for a time, nothing occurred to disturb the quiet again, and he went back to his bed of pine boughs. Whitey slept through it all; so soundly, in fact, that a regiment of soldiers might have marched across the floor and he would not have wakened.
[CHAPTER XXV]
THE ISLAND IN MOOSE LAKE
The fact that their evening meal had consisted largely of trout did not deter the boys from having the same kind of a breakfast, especially as the "breakfast" was even then swimming in the lake and just asking to be caught and eaten.