At this camp too, the regular details were permanently and formally arranged. The Scribbler having confirmed the Commodore's judgment, and evinced a decided genius for cookery, consented to serve permanently as _chef_, the rest taking turns on successive days as foragers, woodcutters, and dish-washers.
[Footnote 2: In order to protect themselves against prosecution for libel the authors would state that the coffee-pot in question is an admirable one under proper conditions. Such conditions, however, are not afforded by an open fire of driftwood.]
As the squadron turned out and took its matutinal swim, soon after sunrise, the lake was dimpled by a favorable breeze, and after breakfast orders were issued to make sail.
"I've got to make a spar first, Commodore," exclaimed the Cook, "my main boom is gone, or hasn't come, I don't know which."
"Find another at once," said the commanding officer, and the Cook seized the hatchet, and started into the timber, returning presently with an elm pole weighing twenty pounds, nearly half the weight of his boat, his original boom having been a piece of bamboo weighing a scant half-pound. By dint of hard work with hatchet and knife, he worked this log into a makeshift for a boom.
"I wonder," remarked the Cook, as he dropped his knife for a moment, and caressed the blistered palms of his hands, "why all you fellows insist on having decks. I don't wonder that you two Chrysalids," referring to the Vice and the Purser, whose boats were of that famous model, "I don't wonder that you two Chrysalids do it, for the builder of your boats stupidly decked them before you bought them, but the Commodore, who, like me, was sensible enough to buy a Red Lake boat, wasn't satisfied to leave it free and open as he found it, but has gone and stretched rubber-cloth over it fore and aft. It's as bad as sailing in a coffin, to sail in any of them."
[Illustration: The Cook selects a Boom. (Below is the one that was lost.)]
"I'd as lieve sail in a coffin as in a bath-tub," replied the Vice, who, having commanded a blockade-runner during the late unpleasantness, had a natural fondness for tight decks and plenty of them.
"A well-covered bath-tub," remarked the Commodore, "is fully as seaworthy as a mahogany-topped coffin, and far less suggestive of canoeing on the Styx. But for a cover of some sort, I confess an affection. It keeps things dry; if a man capsizes--"