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 in