Chet stirred up the fire, and mixed some prepared pancake flour, and put on the coffee pot. Some of the Indians joined Digby in catching fish. They had much more primitive tackle than the white boy; but the catfish bit so hungrily that it scarcely mattered whether the bait was let down to them on “store tackle” or on a thorn from a whitethorn bush. “Say!” exclaimed Dig, “somebody besides us was hungry for breakfast. These cats are ravenous. Whew! look at that one!” CHAPTER XIV—THE WARNING As fast as the catfish were caught they were skinned and dressed. Chet had sliced all the bacon they had brought with them; he told Dig that the way they were feasting now pointed to a fast for the rest of their trip to Grub Stake. “Don’t worry,” advised his chum. “Let’s give these Indians a good meal for once. They’re good fellows.” Chet, as chief cook, was hampered by the size of his skillet; Poke had kicked a hole in the largest one the day before. But John Peep cooked the fish for the most part, while Chet fried flapjacks. And no old cook with a trail outfit could toss a flapjack better than Chet Havens. One of the Indian lads brought clean pieces of bark—one for each person—and Chet slid the cakes on to these make-shift dishes. The fish were handed about on the same platters. There was plenty of seasoning besides the general good appetite. “Don’t talk!” grumbled Dig. “By this time I don’t know whether I had any breakfast early or not. Don’t be stingy with the cakes, Chet.” But his chum got tired of tossing flapjacks after a while; to tell the truth, his arm got lame. Then John Peep tried it. The chums discovered that these Indian lads did not call each other by the outlandish names that white people had bestowed upon them. They all spoke of John Peep as “Amoshee,” and Chet quickly began to address him by his Indian name, too. There was a lot of fun at that breakfast. Indian boys are not like whites in all things, it is true; but they are not lacking in a sense of humour, and as these sat about the campfire in the glade, jokes and quips passed to and fro as they might have at a gathering of white boys. Chet “counted noses” and said to Amoshee: “Say, they froze you out of our ball club, but why don’t you have one of your own? Here’s enough of you boys to make up a good nine.” The Indian lad’s eyes brightened, and he looked proudly around the circle of faces. Their racial features were pronounced; there wasn’t a redskin boy there that could not trace his line back to some big chief of the olden time when the Indian was master of these plains and hills. “Heap good boys,” Amoshee grunted, but smiled, too, for he only used English in that barbarous way in fun, or when he was excited. Out in the open like this, having thrown off all the shackles of civilisation, his natural thoughts and instincts rose to the surface. “Heap good boys,” he said again, and with pride.