“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 to understand 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 has no 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 are going 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 ready before 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 a blast 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 bread they 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.