CHAPTER VI.THE DOCTOR.
After the young people had departed on the morning of that eventful day, Miss Helen Campbell settled herself in a hammock on the upper porch with a novel and two new magazines. She loved the “children,” as she called them, and the sound of their voices and laughter was as music to her ears, but occasionally she enjoyed a peaceful morning to herself without any chatter to disturb her quietude.
Who would have imagined as she sat there idly swinging in the hammock, that the dainty little lady was all the way to sixty years old? Her eyes were as blandly blue and clear as a child’s; her complexion had never lost its peach blossom glow, and the fine network of wrinkles around her eyesand at the corners of her mouth was only faintly visible.
“But I’m getting old,” she thought. “Those long trips have rejuvenated my spirits but my body is tired. I haven’t the physique for adventuring any longer. I don’t think I could stand a shock of any kind, great or small.”
Her thoughts broke off at this point and she idly touched the railing of the porch with one of her little feet and set the hammock to a gentle motion like a rocking cradle.
“No, I shall not put myself in the way of shocks. I am glad we are not touring this summer; just taking life peacefully——”
Again her thoughts broke off. Her eyes wandered across the wide vista of valley flanked by a range of mountains. The landscape was flecked by great shadows cast by lazily moving ribbons of cloud. The foliage of the trees and the undergrowth on the opposite mountains were like rugs of velvet. One might imagine a gigantic figurestretched out on the soft green patches of forest. There were no harsh outlines to the mountains. Their rugged edges were veiled and softened by the shadows of the passing clouds. Miss Campbell closed her eyes.
“Life is very pleasant,” she thought, “even at sixty.”
After a long dreamy period as untroubled as a summer sea, some instinct compelled her to open her eyes, and she found herself looking straight into the eyes of Mrs. Lupo who was standing at the foot of the hammock. Mrs. Lupo held her hands behind her back. Miss Campbell noticed at once that the woman’s expression had changed. She had lost that look of a shy gentle animal. Her eyes had narrowed into little slits and her upper lip was drawn back showing an even row of glistening teeth. Without taking her eyes off Mrs. Lupo’s, Miss Campbell sat up very straight and stiff.
“Well, what do you want?” she demanded, always holding the woman’s gaze with hers.
Mrs. Lupo moved a step nearer, still with her hands behind her back.
“Stand where you are,” ordered Miss Campbell, fired with superhuman courage and never once shifting her gaze. “Stand where you are,” she repeated. There was not a tremor in her voice. “Now, give me what you are hiding behind you.”
For at least a moment the two women stood looking at each other. If Miss Campbell had flinched, there is no telling what the half-savage creature, insane with rage, might have done.
And even now, with a swift movement, Mrs. Lupo brandished a long carving knife in Miss Campbell’s face.
“Drop that instantly,” thundered Miss Campbell in a voice that did not seem to be her own.
But the force of her splendid will and courage struck home. The carving knife slipped from Mrs. Lupo’s hand and stood upright between them in the board floor of the porch.
“Get down on your knees,” ordered Miss Campbell, and all this time she had never taken her eyes off Mrs. Lupo’s.
The knife was still swaying on the point of its blade, as the woman sank to the floor in a quivering, sobbing heap.
“What do you mean by coming to me like this?” demanded Miss Campbell.
“Your daughter, she try cut my throat this morning with same. I take revenge,” answered Mrs. Lupo between her sobs.
“Nonsense! Absurd!”
“She have dislike me from first,” went on Mrs. Lupo, who seemed to eliminate all articles from her conversation. “She joke at me. She buy berries of girl I hate.”
Miss Campbell leaned against the rail and watched the woman crouched at her feet like a whipped dog. Only an instant did she allow the thought to come to her that she was alone in camp with a half-crazed savage.
“She is a very weak, pitiable object,” she said to herself. “I must manage her and I shall. I am not afraid.”
Suddenly she leaned over and put her hand very softly on the woman’s shoulder.
“I am so sorry for you,” she said. “Won’t you let me help you? I think you are much too fine and capable to fly into rages like this. What is the reason of it?”
“Not know,” answered Mrs. Lupo. “When they come, I see red. I wish to break up—kill.”
“Do you love your husband?”
“Yes,” answered the other with so much eloquence of expression that Miss Campbell knew she spoke the truth.
“And he loves you?”
“He loves me, but not so much. He leaves me for long time,—alone.”
“Has he ever seen you in a rage?”
“Yes,” answered Mrs. Lupo in a low voice, her head sinking on her breast.
“Of course, then, that is why he leaves you. Men like gentleness in a woman. A violent-tempered wife never keeps her husband’s love. If you were gentle and quiet, your husband would take you with him to the village. But you are jealous and uncontrolled. You make a spectacle of yourself and of him. You look very ugly as you looked a while ago, like an angry animal instead of a handsome young woman. Try being gentle and always looking pretty and see how it works.”
Mrs. Lupo looked up. Miss Campbell had captured her interest and she was listening to that sage spinster’s advice with entire attention.
“You think me handsome woman?”
“Very, when you are in a good temper.”
“Suppose I can’t keep back anger?”
“The next time your eyes see red, make a little prayer. It will always be answered.”
“To Christ?” asked Mrs. Lupo, who had been to a mission school as a girl.
“Yes, to Christ, who never spoke a harsh word even when He was struck in the face and spit upon and finally nailed to a cross.”
“What shall I say?” asked the other, as interested as a child.
“When you feel the rage coming on, say over and over: ‘Oh, Christ, take my anger from me and make me gentle and kind.’”
Mrs. Lupo repeated the prayer several times.
“And it will come true?” she asked.
“Always, always. Try it and see.”
At last the half-breed rose to her feet. The knife stood upright between them swaying on its blade.
“You forgive?” she asked.
“I forgive.”
“I will go away. I am afraid yet when the daughter comes. There is still hate here,” she pointed to her temples. “But it will be gone if I stay away. When Lupo goes to village he stays long time. It is better for me not to seehim when he comes back. Until I learn, I will not see him no more. Good-by. I’m thankful to you.”
Mrs. Lupo departed, leaving the knife where it had fallen. It was on the tip of Miss Campbell’s tongue to say:
“You must not leave me alone.” But she checked herself. She doubted if she could exert her will another time like that. Already beads of perspiration stood out on her brows. A feeling of extreme lassitude crept over her and she slipped back into the hammock with a sensation of nausea. Then unconsciousness bound her with invisible cords and the brave little woman fainted dead away.
As Mrs. Lupo turned into the gallery, she glanced back but she only saw the train of Miss Campbell’s white wrapper fluttering from the hammock in the breeze.
There had been several loud raps downstairs, but to Miss Campbell, fighting her way slowlyback to consciousness, it sounded hundreds of miles away, like spirit rapping; or perhaps it was the pounding of her own pulses. A man entered the living room. He was of medium height and spare with a lean brown face, and he was dressed as men usually dress for walking trips, in knickerbockers, heavy shoes laced well up the leg, a gray flannel shirt open at the neck with a brown silk tie. He wore a pith helmet; on his back was strapped a flat knapsack, and he carried a cane and a telescope. As he hurried through the living room, he tossed his helmet into a chair. There was a bald spot on his head fringed with reddish hair turning gray. His features were distinguished and because of a certain dignity with which he carried himself, a certain air of command and confidence, people were apt to wonder who he was.
“It was upstairs, I am certain,” the visitor remarked to himself, glancing into the empty kitchen and then mounting the rustic steps to theupper sleeping porch. With quick, comprehensive eyes he took in the five white cots standing in a row, on the porch the group of wicker chairs, the murderous looking knife, swaying on the tip of its shining blade, and lastly the high-backed canvas sleeping hammock from which trailed the train of a white muslin dress.
“Whew!” he exclaimed, under his breath.
For a moment it looked as if something unspeakably dreadful had happened that beautiful morning, and his fears were not set at rest even when he bounded past the knife and stood leaning over Miss Campbell’s half conscious form.
“Water,” she gasped faintly.
“I wonder if there’s a bathroom,” he thought, running along the porch to the nearest door after the one leading to the passage. “Of course they always have them in these so-called camps,” he added, catching the flash of a porcelain tub beyond. In another moment he had wet Miss Campbell’s lips from a glass of water and wasdabbing her temples with the end of a wet towel. “Better now?” he asked, as she opened her heavenly blue eyes.
She nodded with a faint smile and closed them again.
“Curious how a doctor is always finding work to do even in the wilderness,” he thought, feeling Miss Helen’s pulse. With an exclamation, he hurried back to the bathroom, and among a perfect army of tooth powder and talcum powder boxes,—“enough for half a dozen people,” he thought,—he spied a bottle of aromatic spirits of ammonia. He mixed a dose in the glass with professional dexterity and hurried back.
“Just as well I happened along,” he thought, moistening her lips with the mixture. “That does the trick,” he added, as she presently opened her eyes again and swallowed a little of the ammonia and water.
The white, pinched look left her face, the color crept back to her cheeks, and she gave a sigh ofrelief as she shifted her position in the hammock.
“My pillows?” she asked, feeling for the pillows which he had slipped from under her head to the floor.
“Better lie flat for a while,” he ordered in a tone of authority. “I wonder where her people are?” the doctor added to himself, glancing again at the five cot beds. Then he drew up a chair and watched Miss Helen Campbell as she dropped into a doze.
In a little while she exclaimed in a much stronger tone of voice:
“Please take me out of this wobbly thing; I want to lie on my own bed.” The walking-doctor promptly lifted her in his arms like a little child and deposited her on one of the cots. Her hands were cold, and he covered her with a Roman blanket that lay on the foot of the bed. Then he found two hot water bottles, marched down stairs, heated a kettle of water on the kerosene stove, searched for beef tea in the ice chest andby good luck found half a jar. With the water bottles at her feet and a little beef tea to nourish her, Miss Campbell at last fell into a deep sleep, while the doctor, sitting near at hand, read one of the magazines and, occasionally tip-toeing to her bedside, listened to her breathing and felt her pulse.
Toward late afternoon, he descended into the lower regions of the log house and foraged for food. He found crackers and cheese, a tin of beans and a bottle of ginger ale. Having refreshed himself, he was about to return to his patient when Mr. Lupo staggered into the kitchen with a market basket on his arm.
“Where is my wife?” he asked in a thick voice.
“She is not here and you’d better go, too, quick,” answered the doctor.
Mr. Lupo looked at him with an ugly expression, his eyes narrowing, as his wife’s had done when she had approached Miss Campbell with the carving knife.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I am a doctor.”
“Has anything happened? My wife, she is crazy when she is mad. Is that the reason why she ran away?”
“Does your wife flourish carving knives?”
Mr. Lupo retreated with a terrified expression.
“She has—?” he was too frightened to finish.
“No,” replied the doctor. “The lady was too strong for her here.” He touched his forehead with his finger.
“She was not touched—the lady?”
“No, but she has collapsed from fright,—she is very ill,—I could not answer for her recovery if you gave her another shock.”
Without a word, Mr. Lupo rushed out of doors, jumped into a rickety wagon drawn by an old mountain-climbing horse and in another instant was clattering down the road.
Toward evening Miss Campbell grew stronger. The doctor raised her head and fed her by thespoonful a cup of malted milk, also found in the ice chest.
“Billie?” she said.
“That’s my name,” answered the doctor. “William for long.”
“Nice boy,” she added, patting him on the shoulder, with a very small limp hand. “Have the children got back?”
“They will be here pretty soon, now,” he answered, frowning and glancing at his watch.
“Ben is a safe guide. They are safe with him. Wake me when they arrive,” and turning over on her side, Miss Campbell went back to sleep.
Occasionally the doctor scanned the side of the mountain with his telescope.
“The children are taking a long time,” he said to himself. “They had better look alive, if they want to make it before nightfall.”
But night fell and there was no sign of the wanderers. The doctor lit a cigar and watched the shadows creep up the side of the mountains.He listened to the last twittering of the birds and then a silence, profound and deep, settled on the camp.
Again he descended to the living room of the camp now in darkness. Presently he lighted the green shaded lamp and two lanterns, hanging one at the front of the house and the other at the back. He unpacked the market basket and cooked himself some supper, and finally with a glass of milk and a slice of bread for Miss Campbell when she waked, returned to the upper sleeping porch.
“A telescope is an excellent thing,” he observed, settling himself in a steamer chair, a lamp on the floor beside him with a tin protector to keep draughts from the flame. “I saw the woman plainly enough flourishing the carving knife. It must have been sheer force of will on the part of this little lady that made her drop it.”
And now the darkness had indeed fallen, a black, impenetrable curtain. Only the outline ofthe opposite range could be seen. It seemed to have closed in on the camp, and like a gigantic wall, to shut it off from the outer world. An owl hooted in a tree not far away and from a cleft in the mountains came the weird song of the whippoorwill.
CHAPTER VII.PHOEBE.
Fate had chosen a very simple way of bringing about events of great importance to persons in this history. A doctor off on a walking trip had idly lifted his telescope to scan the village in the valley. As he swept his glass over the country, it had brought near to him glimpses of white farmhouses, men working in the fields and then looming quite close and unexpectedly large to his eye, a woman brandishing a long knife over the head of a person in white.
The doctor lost no time in idle speculation.
“It’s in that camp on the lower ledge,” he said to himself as he dashed down the path, and in some twenty minutes or more entered the living room of Sunrise Camp.
It is not pleasant to think of what might havehappened to Miss Helen Campbell if the doctor’s alert, intelligent eyes had not caught and instantly comprehended the significance of the picture brought to him by the telescope. How long might she have lain there unconscious, or how dealt with the half-intoxicated Lupo if he had mounted the steps in search of his wife? Then, as the hours slipped on and no human soul came near to minister to her and comfort her, and she had finally realized that her young people had never returned, how would she have endured that second shock?
Fate had brought the doctor in the nick of time to perform an inestimable service to the Motor Maids and to all those who knew and loved Miss Helen Campbell.
And through this service to the friends of Miss Campbell, another was to follow,—one filled with danger and interest, which would require all the skill of his profession.
About ten o’clock Miss Campbell awoke, refreshedand rested. She took the milk and bread with an appetite. Then she examined the stranger at her bedside with some curiosity.
“I suppose they sent for you from the village?” she asked.
“I happened to be nearer than that,” he answered.
Memory was returning by slow degrees.
“I had a shock of some sort; or was it a fall? I remember fainting and the next thing I recall was aromatic ammonia and you.” The doctor smiled. “I suppose they are all in bed now. They were too tired to sit up.”
“It was so late, you see,” he said apologetically.
“They needn’t have left me this enormous porch to myself. I know they will hate sleeping down there. Can’t Billie come and speak to me?”
“I am afraid he’s sound asleep by now.”
“He?” ejaculated the patient. “But, of course, how could you be expected to know my young cousin by name. She is the tall girl with the grayeyes. I think she is beautiful. Perhaps you might not—but you would—”
The doctor started. He had heard a stealthy step on the porch below.
“You will not think me impertinent if I ask you not to talk?” he said. “Just a few more hours’ quiet and you’ll be quite fit. I’m going to leave you a moment.”
Miss Campbell gave him a good natured smile. She liked his fine face and his clear brown eyes.
“Very well, doctor,” she said. “I see you know your business. I’ll be obedient.”
Taking the lamp he went downstairs.
It could hardly be the gray-eyed Billie and her friends returning, he argued. They would never come creeping back in that stealthy manner.
“Well, who is it?” he called in a low voice.
Mrs. Lupo came out of the shadows and stood before him.
“Lady going die?” she asked in a terrified whisper.
“Pretty ill, but she’s coming around.”
The woman looked vastly relieved.
“Young lady know?”
“She has never come back.”
Mrs. Lupo raised both hands in a gesture of despair.
“The marsh—I never told—I’m wicked woman!” she exclaimed.
“Good heavens!” said the doctor, “you mean to say you sent them through that bog? It’s full of suck holes. You have done enough wickedness for one day. Where is your husband? Hurry up, quick. Wake up the villagers. Get lanterns. Go find them!”
Mrs. Lupo seized a lantern from the gallery.
“I go myself,” she said, and disappeared. All that night Mrs. Lupo searched Table Top. She knew the trail as intimately as the mountain girl, but at dawn she had found nothing. But as the light spread over the marsh, she saw something lying on the very edge of the most dangerousquicksand in the place. It was Nancy’s hobble skirt.
“Oh, oh!” groaned the poor woman over and over with a kind of savage chant. “Oh, oh! I’m punished now.”
Rolling the skirt into a bundle she turned her face from Sunrise Camp and disappeared in the pine forests.
About an hour after Mrs. Lupo had left the camp, the doctor heard the noise of hurrying footsteps on the gallery at the front and hastening downstairs he found Ben Austen and his guide.
“Miss Campbell—how has she stood it? Is she all right?” demanded Ben breathlessly.
“Not so loud,” answered the doctor. Then he told Ben in a few words what had happened. “She doesn’t even know you have been lost,” he said.
While the two men were talking together in whispers, the girl looked about her with muchcuriosity. Was she in a palace? The high roof, the rugs and chairs were things new to her. And this was called a “camp”! What was the inside of a real house like, she wondered.
“That virago!” she heard Ben say. “No wonder she drives Lupo to drink. This young lady here has saved us all and guided me back through the swamp.” He indicated the barefooted girl. “I suppose we would have been there yet if she hadn’t heard us call.”
“You must sit down,” said the doctor kindly. “I’ll just have a look at my patient and then help this young man get some supper. Your name is—?”
“Phoebe,” she answered, shrinking with shyness.
“Phoebe what?”
“I have no other name.”
Phoebe had been accustomed all her life to the courtesy and gentleness of one man, her father. The few others she had known were rough mountaineers,and here was she, barefooted and ragged, treated like a princess by two men.
While the doctor fried ham and eggs, the staple of every camp, Ben made a pot of tea, and presently drew up a table in front of her and placed on it a tray set as neatly as he knew how. Phoebe watched the proceedings with wide frightened eyes. She tried to hide her bare feet under her ragged dress and to draw down the sleeves over her hands, brown and stained with blackberry juice. Later, when they had made her a bed on one of the divans and left her to sleep until daylight, she was too bewildered to say good-night.
All her life Phoebe had lived in the little mountain cabin. She had never known a mother and she had never had a friend. Her father had taught her many things, however, and one was to read from the books on the shelf. There were several books on astronomy; Pilgrim’s Progress; the Bible; a volume of Shakespeare; a history ofEngland; a translation of the “Iliad”, and some volumes of poetry:—Keats, Tennyson and Browning. Where her father had got these books and the silver and the blue china, she knew no more than he. He had tried and tried to remember, but he had forgotten. He had no identity, no past. His name, his family, everything connected with his early life had gone. His past life had stopped when he had gone for a physician. He had taught his little girl to read, as we have said, and when old enough she had often read aloud in the long winter evenings. He had seemed to listen with absorbed interest, but it is difficult to say how much he grasped of the words he heard, or whether they were mere words to him with no collective significance.
With a certain instinct left to him from that mysterious dead past, he had imparted to his daughter an unmistakable refinement of speech and manner. About some things he was even fastidious,—her way of eating, the appearanceof the table and the silver. He himself was excessively neat and orderly and had periods of great industry, weaving baskets of sweet grass and carving wood, not crudely, but with unusual taste, boxes and chalets, napkin rings and figures of animals. Where he had learned these arts his daughter never knew, but she imagined from an old Indian who had lived in the little cabin in the early days and had died when Phoebe was still quite small. As far as a man may be sane whose memory extends back only some eighteen years and who has only one illusion, Phoebe’s father was sane. The baskets and woodcarving he and his daughter peddled through the country with success, because they were exceedingly well done, and the money earned was sufficient for their small needs.
Too excited from the unusual events of the night to sleep, Phoebe lay on the divan in the living room and reviewed the mysteries that filled her life. She had a strange smattering of knowledgefor a girl of eighteen. It would seem that she had been gifted with a memory for two since her father had none, and whatever she learned from the row of books on the shelves she remembered. That is, whatever interested her.
She knew the constellations and the planets, and on summer nights had located them in the heavens by means of the book chart. She would point them out to her father, who glanced at them vaguely, smiled and went on playing the zither, his consolation in idle moments.
She had read and re-read the history of England so many times that some of the chapters she could repeat word for word. She understood little of the poetry, but the rhythm of the lines sang in her head, and without knowing the meaning she could repeat in a sing-song voice long poems and sonnets. “Pilgrim’s Progress” and the “Iliad” and the New Testament with the Psalms were her solace on the long winter evenings. One after the other she read them with unendingpleasure. She would read slowly so as not to finish too soon, as a child nibbles at her sweet cake to make it last the longer, and having finished one volume she would take up another with all the eagerness of one about to plunge into a new book. Just how much she had gained from the teachings of Christ was hidden deep in her own soul, but we will find later that Phoebe had learned a secret which those who have had the advantage of broad education have often passed by.
When at last the first pipings of the birds came to herald the dawn, she rose and went out to the gallery. The last star was fading into the grayness of the sky and already morning was at hand. In the growing light it might be seen that Phoebe had an unusually beautiful face. Her eyes, of very dark blue, were almost black at times; her reddish brown hair, coiled into a thick knot on her neck, grew low on her forehead. Her features were well molded, her mouth fine andstrong, and a full, rounded chin added sweetness to her expression.
Standing in the very spot where she had first seen Billie and Mary, she turned her face toward the east and watched for the sun.
“I believe my prayers are answered,” she said.
Some twenty minutes later, seated by Ben in the motor car, she guided him along a mountain road, which led at last to a point near her father’s cabin.
CHAPTER VIII.THE GYPSY COOKS.
“Dearest Papa:” (wrote Billie) “Cousin Helen has entirely recovered from her fright,—anger she calls it. She is not afraid of either of the Lupos, although the dent in the plank where the knife was still standing when we finally did get home will always make me feel trembly. Dr. Hume is making us a visit. Cousin Helen will not hear of his leaving us. She says she will certainly have another attack of heart failure if he goes away, but that it’s of a different variety from the last. I think we all have a touch of that kind of heart disease as a matter of fact, boys and girls. He is a wonderful man and has taken us on some beautiful walks over the mountain. Nancy and Percy always stay behind with Cousin Helen, and we are finally beginning tounderstand that it’s as much preference as self-denial. Nancy and I are doing the cooking with some help from Ben and Dr. Hume. It’s great fun. We cook on a camp fire outside and not on that wretched little stove, which is like a bad child and never behaves when it is expected to. Ben and Percy wash the dishes. Thank heavens for that. I could never make a living as a scullery maid. It’s a dog’s life. Elinor and Mary make up our cots and keep things tidy. It is really and truly camping now, and such a relief not to have those Lupos. But there is trouble about the laundry. Nobody in these high places will stoop to wash clothes. If you could send us up a strong, fearless girl, it doesn’t matter how little she knows, it would be fine. We want her strong to scour pans and wash clothes, and fearless enough to be left at the camp alone when we all go off in the ‘Comet’ on a picnic.
“The mountain girl who saved us is named Phoebe. Her father is not insane, but he hasno memory. His accent might be English. At any rate it’s better than ours. Nobody on the mountain knows anything about them. An old Indian brought them to the cabin when Phoebe was a baby and took care of them both for several years. The people call the man ‘Frenchy,’ why I’m sure I can’t imagine, perhaps because he seems foreign. He does really beautiful wood carving and basket weaving and he seemed quite pleased over getting orders from us. We all of us want to do something for Phoebe but she is not the kind you can approach easily. I would not dare even offer her a pair of shoes, and she’s generally barefooted. Cousin Helen thought perhaps she might like to work for us, but I would as soon think of asking our dear cousin herself. I’m the best coffee maker in the compound and I’ve learned by the cookbook how to poach eggs, after breaking six to get the hang of it. Dr. Hume knows a Scotch dish that’s a dream and so easy to make. Nancy and I aregoing to give them a surprise. It’s ‘Mock Duck,’ made of beefsteak stuffed with many things, and then rolled up like a mummy and tied with strings. We shall roast it over hot embers on a spit Ben has rigged up, with a thing he calls a ‘gutter’ to catch the juices. Good-by, dearest Papa. Don’t forget the strong, fearless girl.
Your devoted daughter,Billie.”
In due time a telegram was telephoned from the railroad station to the nearest hotel and from thence to the postoffice in the village at the foot of Sunrise Mountain. Here it was written down on a scrap of paper and in the course of events reached Billie Campbell. It said:
“Meet Alberdina, fearless Swiss-German. 4.30 train Saturday. Father.”
Ben brought the message with the evening mail Friday afternoon while Nancy and Billie, much heated and excited, were in the act of cooking the mock duck.
“What are you roasting? An Indian papoose?” he demanded, after they had laughed over the name of the new, fearless maid.
The spurious fowl made of a large flat piece of meat stuffed out to plump proportions and tied at each end did resemble a fat little Indian baby.
“Don’t worry us,” exclaimed Nancy. “We have enough to bother us now. The potatoes are taking forever to cook and the beans are almost done.”
“The onions are just as bad,” put in Billie.
“Why don’t you put the onions and potatoes in the same pot with the beans? Maybe it will bring them luck,” suggested Ben.
“Do you think it would affect the flavor?” Billie asked eagerly.
But Nancy, of a more adventurous spirit in cooking, recklessly dumped all the vegetables together into one pot and set it on the kerosene stove, which had been carried out by the ever-useful Ben and placed at no great distance from the open fire.
Percy came up just then.
“How are the Gypsy cooks? Is the pot boiling? What’s that thing that looks like a pig in a blanket? Or is this a cannibal feast?”
“Run away, Algernon Percival, and don’t ask so many questions,” replied Billie, stirring the pot.
“I’ve brought the dinner horn along,” said Percy in an insinuating tone of voice.
Even the Gypsy cooks laughed at this. Percy was the last person to rise in the morning. He usually appeared with the coffee and eggs, but the moment he waked up, he seized the trumpet from a nail in the wall at the side of his bed and blew a long triumphant aria with variations. Then from the camp fire at a safe distance from the log hut would come shouts of derision from the others who had been up quite an hour. The table had been carried out under the trees, and here in the early morning they had their breakfast. Here also, they had their supper if it was readybefore dark and there were no lights to attract the myriads of night-flying insects. But it did look this evening as if they would be obliged to transfer all dishes and stools, table and eatables into the house, unless the potatoes and onions could be impressed with the importance of submitting to the inevitable.
Dr. Hume, just in from a long walk, tired and mortally hungry, now made his appearance, and Miss Helen Campbell in dainty white, and without any traces whatever of her recent experience with Mrs. Lupo, came trailing across the clearing. There was an expectant expression on her face, as of one who is thinking with inward pleasure of dinner. Elinor came with a bowl of Michaelmas daisies and Mary brought up the procession, carrying a platter of bread sliced so as not to destroy the shape of the loaf, an accomplishment she was proud of.
Percy, seeing the gathering of the company, promptly lifted the trumpet to his lips and blew ablast so startling and unexpected that Mary gave a nervous shriek and dropped the bread to the ground.
“Oh, you wretch,” she cried, “see what you have done! And what was the use anyway, since dinner isn’t ready and we are all here?”
“Don’t be so hasty in your judgments, Lady Mary,” answered Percy, composedly gathering up the slices of bread. “That was a song of joy because a beautiful damozel approached with bread for the hungry.”
“Hungry?” repeated Miss Campbell, watching, unmoved, the process of shaking the pine needles from the bread. “Starving, rather. If I don’t have my dinner in a minute, I shall be light enough to float away like a thistledown.”
“Who said starving?” cried Dr. Hume, joining the circle. “If there were a stronger word, I’d use it.”
“Famished?” suggested Ben.
“Perishing for want of food,” added Elinor.
Nancy and Billie exchanged glances of dismay and Billie impotently poked the pot of vegetables with a long peeled wand.
“What’s that thing that looks like an emigrant’s roll?” demanded the doctor.
“It won’t explode, I hope,” remarked Miss Campbell, noticing that the roll of meat seemed to be bursting its bonds in the process of roasting.
“Poor thing, it does seem to be suffering,” said Dr. Hume gravely. “There is some enlargement taking place in its internal organs, due to heat expansion, I judge.”
“I guess that animal, whatever it is, feels something like an early Christian martyr,” put in Percy.
“What is the creature?” inquired Miss Campbell, raising her tortoise shell lorgnette in order the better to see the writhing form over the flames.
“It’s a duck,” answered Billie, desperately stirring the kettle of vegetables.
“Duck?” they shouted in a loud chorus.
“There never was a duck on land or sea that looked like that.”
“Where are its legs?”
“Was it a winged duck?”
“Perhaps it’s a species of wingless, legless mountain duck, unknown to low countries?”
“Well, if you must know,” cried Billie, now very hot and red over the fire, and wishing devoutly that that brutally truthful speech about watched pots had never been made, “if you demand the truth, it’s mock duck——”
“It sounds like the name of a Chinese laundry-man,” put in Percy.
“Made by a famous Southern recipe. We didn’t know it would take so long to cook.” She was ashamed to mention the potatoes and onions. “If you are all so famished, you might start on the bread and butter.”
Instantly they gathered around the table and Percy passed around the bread tray. From breadthey turned to the salad of tomatoes and cucumbers. Lettuce did not seem to flourish in that country. They drank the ginger ale and ate all the olives, and still the spurious fowl remained a mockery to cooks. It sent forth rivulets of juices and made a great to do over the fire, like people who are all promises and talk and no action, but it would not get done. Then the doctor slipped away and presently returned with his contribution to the supper. He had made it in the morning and it had been standing in the ice chest all day.
“I thought we might help this so as there would be no delays after we had dispatched that talkative fat person in the blanket,” he said. “I hope you will like it. My mother used to call it ‘piddling.’ It was a wash-day dessert and we always had it Mondays, made from Sunday’s cake.”
Elinor busied herself serving the wash-day dessert into china saucers. It was made of slices of cake soaked in fruit juice and spread with jam.
“When there is cream in the house, it adds of course,” observed the doctor with some pride over his success as a cook.
“The flavor’s delicious,” observed Miss Campbell, testing a small piece daintily on the edge of her spoon.
“It’s bully,” exclaimed Ben.
The doctor was really vain over his efforts.
“And I made it from memory,” he informed them, “without any recipe. I call that pretty good for a first attempt.”
They wondered if he had ever done anything in his profession that gave him as much childish delight as making this simple dessert of his boyhood.
After a brief silence, broken only by the tinkle of spoons against saucers, the campers around the table glanced at each other guiltily. Except for the portions reserved for the two cooks, there was not a crumb of piddling left.
“Better hide the plates and cover the dish,”said the doctor in a conspirator’s whisper. “It’s enough to provoke them into a mutiny. Time enough to break the news after they have eaten their mock turtle.”
“Duck,” choked Percy.
But the Gypsy cooks had noticed nothing. They were too absorbed with straining the beans and the onions now cooked to shreds, from the adamantine potatoes. The cooked vegetables they arranged in the bottom of a large meat platter as a becoming bed for the mock duck which Billie, with mingled feelings of fear and triumph, now prepared to loose from his fastenings with a long fork and the historic carving knife. But Mock Duck to the end was a rogue and a trickster. The poor little cook had just loosened him from the spit and was holding him precariously on the prong of a fork, when he gave a malicious leap into the air and plunged into the very centre of the hot embers. Instantly a circle of flames rose high about him and the air was charged with the fumes of burning flesh.
“Oh, oh!” shrieked Billie. “Help! Help!”
They did what they could to save the remnants of Mock Duck. Ben singed his eyebrows in an effort to spear him on a fork and raise him from his fiery bed. They were all very quick but the flames were quicker, and when at last Mock Duck was lifted from the embers his form was no longer recognizable and the surface of his outer covering was burned to a cinder.
The two little Gypsy cooks wept with disappointment. They had worked so hard and were so hot and tired and hungry.
Their friends were consumed with pity.
“There, there,” cried Dr. Hume, too tender hearted to look upon tears without being moved. “Don’t cry, little cooks. Look at all this nice gravy and these delicious vegetables.”
“Why, my dearest children, you mustn’t mind,” exclaimed Miss Campbell. “See what a beautiful mixture we can have. Pour the gravy right into the platter with the beans and onions. We’ll eat it on bread.”
How callous do the most fastidious become after a few weeks in camp!
“Come, come, there’s no time to be lost,” exclaimed the starving Percy.
But the two disappointed cooks had nothing to say. They choked back their tears and fell to with an appetite on beans and onions ingloriously mixed with bread and gravy. And as a final delicacy, the campers, who had commenced with dessert and salad, finished off with two very delicious mealy potatoes apiece.
“If we stayed in this wilderness long, we’d revert to savages,” Miss Campbell remarked, stirring a large cup of black coffee. “But on the whole, I think I am enjoying the reversion and my appetite is getting better every day.”
“If I were starving in the wilderness and somebody offered me Mock Duck, I’d refuse it,” ejaculated Billie irrelevantly, for nobody had mentioned mock duck for a long time.