Читать книгу The Adventures of Peterkin - Gilbert W. Gabriel - Страница 8

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HIS arms full of leaves and flowers, Peterkin hurried back to the little black cave, where his stove was in hiding.

“This cave shall be my kitchen,” he told himself. “Under its shadow I shall cook my meals and brew my broths, and boil and broil and bake.... Only, I quite forgot, I have nothing to cook. Nothing but flowers and leaves.”

He thought for a long while, and finally he decided that, instead of having just a cold and fragrant salad, he should heat them all up into a smoking stew. He should have a meal to warm the cockles of his heart.

But, when he had gathered the stalks of withered palm leaves and had crammed them into the cindery throat of his stove, he had to wait another little while before he could figure out just how to make a flame. At length he remembered having read the way to strike a spark with two pieces of sharp rock. So he snatched up a pair of stones and smashed them and crashed them against each other until the fiery sparks were darting down into the mouth of the stove—into the midst of the fuel. There was a sudden bursting into red flame, and the fire was started!

Then Peterkin—clever cook that he was—laid his purple flowers and his orange vines prettily within the cup of a sea-shell, and sprinkled them over with salt water of the surf. Then he laid shell and all upon the stove and waited for results.

Nor had he to wait so long. For, all in a twinkle, there was a monstrous pouf! Great billows of smoke, brown and lavender, gushed up from the heart of the sea-shell and spread themselves across the sky. There came a resounding crackle of flames ... the whole shell, trailing its glowing mists behind it, rose up, up, above the tree-tops, into the clouds, and out of sight! It was gone, forever and aye.

For a long while poor Peterkin could scarcely realize all that had happened so much of a sudden. He stood staring up at the dwindling speck of the sea-shell and wondering ... where could his meal have disappeared? And what must he do now for another?

“And I am so hungry, too,” he sighed. “Not a bite to eat since I and my Pumperkin left the patch. Well, there’s nothing for it but that I begin to search through the whole forest of green palms. Perhaps I shall find a scarlet cockatoo, or a yellow-tailed dove, to carry back with me for dinner.”

But, indeed, he felt so weak from want of food that he could scarcely stand. He lay down on the sunny stretch of the sands and half closed his eyes. He could see, in a blur, that the low line where the sea and the sky met, far away, was smothered in black clouds—and that little streaks of angry red seemed to be flashing in the black. He asked himself, drowsily, was this a storm approaching? Was it a hurricane, or what.... And then, before he had time to answer himself, he fell asleep.