"It isn't much of a baking tin," she commented, eyeing it critically,
"but it'll do."
Under her direction Bennington impaled the two slices of ham on long
green switches, and stuck these upright in the ground in such a
position that the warmth from the flames could just reach them.
"They'll never cook there," he objected.
"Didn't expect they would," she retorted briefly. Then relenting,
"They finish better if they're warmed through first," she explained.
By this time the potatoes were bubbling energetically and the coffee
was sending out a fragrant steam. Mary stabbed experimentally at the
vegetables with a sharpened sliver. Apparently satisfied, she drew back
with a happy sigh. She shook her hair from her eyes and smiled across
at Bennington.
"Ready! Go!" cried she.
The frying pan was covered with a tin plate on which were heaped live
coals. More coals were poked from between the logs on to a flat place,
were spread out thin, and were crowned by the frying pan and its
glowing freight. Bennington held over the fire a switch of ham in each
hand, taking care, according to directions, not to approach the actual
blaze. Mary borrowed his hunting knife and disappeared into the
thicket. In a moment she returned with a kettle-lifter, improvised very
simply from a forked branch of a sapling. One of the forks was left
long for the hand, the other was cut short. The result was like an
Esquimaux fishhook. She then relieved Bennington of his task, while
that young man lifted the kettle from the fire and carefully drained
away the water.
"Dinner!" she called gaily.
Bennington looked up surprised. He had been so absorbed in the spells
wrought by this dainty woods fairy that he had forgotten the flight of
time. It was enough for him to watch the turn of her wrist, the swift
certainty of her movements, to catch the glow lit in her face by the
fire over which she bent. Then he suddenly remembered that her
movements had all along tended toward dinner, and were not got up
simply and merely that he might discover new charms in the small
housekeeper.
He found himself seated on a rock with a tin plate in his lap, a tin
cup at his side, and an eager little lady in front of him, anxious that
he should taste all her dishes and deliver an opinion forthwith.
The coffee he pronounced nectar; the ham and mealy potatoes, delicious;
the "johnny-cake" of a yellow golden crispness which the originator of
johnny-cake might envy; and the bread and cake and butter and sugar
only the less meritorious that they had not been prepared by her own
hands and on the spot.
"And see!" she cried, clapping her hands, "the sun is still directly
over us. It is not night yet, silly boy!"