He gave a toss and a flip, and the hot cake sailed into the air. In vain he sought to catch it, and in vain Piper dodged.
The flapjack hit Sleuth fairly in the left eye, and he fell over upon his back with a howl of dismay.
Naturally, this incident was productive of considerable merriment, in which, however, the victim failed to join.
“Enjoy yourselves!” rasped Sleuth, gazing ruefully at the lost flapjack as it lay on the ground. “Laugh, while I perish of hunger, you heartless brutes! Say, Ben, don’t try to flip the next one; turn it with a knife or something. And please hurry up, or in the throes of famine I’ll eat that half-cooked thing that soaked me in the blinker.”
Stone, however, persisted in the attempt to flip the flapjacks, and, having learned something through his first failure, succeeded quite well with the next cake, although Piper took care to keep well out of range. Having caught the knack, the cook furnished flapjacks as fast as the fire would brown them, and, urged by him, the boys began devouring them almost as rapidly as they came to the table. Adrip with molasses, they were not so bad, either.
“In the dictionary,” replied Phil, lifting a dripping piece to his mouth.
“Come on, Stoney,” urged Crane. “Don’t yeou dast to try ’em? Ain’t yeou goin’ to eat any?”
“When the rest of you begin to falter,” said Ben, as he watched another one browning, “I’ll take a venture. If they prove fatal we’ll all perish together.”
Far from proving fatal, however, they fully satisfied the hunger of those vigorous boys, whose healthy digestions gave them not a single pang. The last morsel was cleaned up, and Stone was universally acclaimed as a wonderful cook.
“I reckon that settles it,” said Grant, when he had finished. “You’ve got your job cut out for you during this outing, Ben, and I shall vote that you be given full charge of the commissary department.”
An hour or more after dinner, as the boys were lounging about, a canoe containing a single occupant was seen approaching the point. The person who wielded the paddle headed for the sandy beach of the little cove, upon which lay the canoe of the campers, and, as he drew near, he was seen to be a youngish man dressed in khaki. A bamboo fishing rod projected upward over one of the thwarts of the stranger’s canoe.