There is one thing dearer to a boy than catching fish. That is cooking and eating them.
Hunger began at last to gnaw at Steven's vitals and to make itself imperatively felt. He looked up at the sun as if to tell the time by its location, though in reality he regulated his movements by that infallible horologue ticking beneath his jacket.
"It must be after twelve," he said, although it was not yet eleven.
"Where are we going to have our dinner?" Pepeeta asked.
"Come, and I will show thee," he replied, flinging down his pole and gathering his fish together.
Pepeeta followed him as he led the way up from the river's side to a ledge of rocks that frowned above it.
Rounding a cliff, they came suddenly upon the mouth of a cave where Steven threw down the fish, assumed an air of secrecy, took Pepeeta by the hand and led her toward it, whispering:
"And is it within its dark recesses that we are to eat our dinner?" Pepeeta asked, imitating his melodramatic manner.
"Yes! No one in the world knows of it, but Uncle Dave and me. We always used to cook our dinner here, and play we were robbers."
Pepeeta saw the ashes of fires which had been built at the entrance, an old iron kettle hanging on a projecting root, a coffee pot standing on a ledge of a rock, and fragments of broken dishes scattered about, and entered with all her heart into an adventure so suddenly recalling the vanished scenes of her gypsy childhood. The eyes of the boy glistened with delight as he perceived the unmistakable evidences of her enjoyment.
"And so this is your secret!" she exclaimed.
"Not by a good deal!" he answered, "Thee is not to know the real secret until we have had our dinner. I will build the fire and clean the fish, and if thee knows how, thee can cook them."
"Oh, you need not think I don't know anything--just because I cannot skip stones and bait hooks," Pepeeta said gaily, and with that they both bustled about and before long the smoke was curling up into the still air, and the fragrant odor of coffee was perfuming the wilderness.
While they were waiting for the fish to fry, Pepeeta regaled her enchanted listener with such fragments of the story of her gypsy life as she could piece together out of the wrecks of that time. He was overpowered with astonishment, and the idea that he was sitting opposite to a real gypsy, at the mouth of a cave, filled up the measure of his romantic fancy and perfected his happiness. He hung upon her words and kept her talking until the last crust had been devoured and she had repeated again and again the most trivial remembrances of those far off days.