DISAPPOINTMENT
Joe had already made many inquiries among the turpentine negroes about
Old Dick’s bees, but had not obtained any definite information.
Everybody had heard the story; Dick’s bees had become legendary in
that district, but nobody seemed to have any idea where they had been
situated. They were certainly somewhere down the river, and, most
agreed, on the other side, but estimates of the distance ranged from
five to fifty miles. One man declared Old Dick had dwelt in the River
Island, a tangled and almost unknown swamp thirty miles down the
stream; but this was highly improbable. He hoped that his cousins had
been able to learn something more accurate; but in reality he had very
little idea that they would ever be able to find the old negro’s
apiary, or that they could do anything with it if they did.
Joe’s arrival was unexpected, but he got a great welcome. The Harmans
had been active during his absence. They had walked and driven about
the country with characteristic energy, and had discovered about
thirty “gums” of bees which the owners were willing to sell at prices
of seventy-five cents or a dollar apiece. It was not many, but these
bees would be better than nothing. They had also made assiduous
inquiries about Old Dick, but had been little more successful than
Joe.
“They all say he lived quite close to the river,” said Alice. “He used
to send away his wax and honey on the steamboat. And it seems he lived
near a big bayou opening off the river. Some say it was ten miles
down, and some say twenty.”
“There must be only a limited number of big bayous between ten and
twenty miles from here,” said Bob. “Seems to me we might look into
them all, if necessary.”
Joe laughed. He knew the wild and impenetrable nature of that bayou
country, which his cousins had little idea of. He was ready for the
trip all the same. The Harmans had already made a rough scheme for it,
and their plans took shape as they talked.
Of course they would have to go by water, and fortunately Uncle Louis
owned a good boat at the landing, which he put at their service. He
also had a small shelter-tent, and he told them to help themselves to
all the grub and cooking-utensils they could find about the place.
“But supposing we do find the bees, Uncle Louis,” Alice asked, “who do
they belong to? Would we be allowed to have them?”
“Who’s to stop you?” returned the planter. “The law is that bees
become wild animals when nobody’s keeping them. Anybody can take them,
same’s a bee-tree. Besides, I know all the land-owners from here to
Mobile, and I could fix it. No, you-all find your bees, and raft ’em
off, and you can have ’em all right. You’ll sure deserve them.”
“There might be a hundred gums there,” said Alice optimistically. “We
could extract the honey and melt up the wax, and drive all the bees
into wire-cloth cages, and express them home. Just think what a crop
they’d make for us on the Ontario clover!”
“And think of all the wax we’d get from the old gums!” said Carl, with
equal enthusiasm. “Two or three pounds to the gum and it’s worth fifty
cents now.”
“But of course you’re not thinking of going on this hunt with us,
Allie,” said Bob. “You couldn’t go. It would be much too rough a trip
for you, through the swamps. Wouldn’t it, Joe?”
“Too rough!” cried his sister indignantly. “I guess it won’t be any
rougher than our first season in the north woods, with bears and
thieves and forest fires. As if I couldn’t go anywhere you could! What
do you think I came South for? I should rather think I am going!”
“Surely she can go,” Joe put in. “There won’t be any danger.”
Bob only laughed. He knew well that Alice could not be kept out of any
such adventure, and in fact she was as capable of traveling through
the wilderness as either of her brothers. Probably he would have
objected strongly to leaving her behind, indeed, for she was a great
expert in camp cookery.
As they expected to be out only three or four days they did not need a
heavy outfit. Joe had brought his rifle, his cousins their own
fire-arms, including Alice’s pistol, which she wore strapped around
her waist in a belt of cartridges. They had fishing-tackle, and they
carried several loaves of fresh-baked “light-bread,” with pork,
corn-meal, and a large number of hard-boiled eggs. One of the
plantation mule wagons carried them and their equipment down to
Magnolia Landing early the next morning, and they embarked aboard the
boat and started down the big river.
For two hours they went on, rowing and floating with the current,
round bend after bend of the twisting stream, banked on each side with
the incessant swamps and forests. Occasionally there was a bottom-land
patch of corn; occasionally a glimpse of low pasture where scrawny and
half-wild cattle were grazing.
“What a different country from Canada!” Alice remarked.
All the Harmans had been secretly impressed with the desolation of the
scene, the pitiful farming, the dwarfed cattle, so different from the
great Holsteins and Herefords of the Ontario clover-pastures; but they
had been too polite to voice their impressions to Joe.
“Yes, this is no country for farming,” Joe admitted. “Land too poor, I
reckon. It’s a turpentine and timber country. What they’ll do when the
pine is all cut off I can’t imagine. But this sand strip along the
river is the very worst bit of the State. North and east of here
you’ll see as fine plantations as anywhere in the world.”
“But this is a great country for cheap bees,” said Bob, “and that’s
the main thing just now. When do you suppose we’re coming to that big
bayou?”
Joe thought they must have come six or eight miles, and within another
mile a wide opening did appear on the other shore of the river. They
pushed the boat into it with great hopes. On either side it was
tangled with dense cypress and sycamore and cotton wood, heavy-laden
with gray Spanish moss, but within fifty yards it shoaled off into a
morass of liquid mud.
“This certainly isn’t it,” said Carl, contemplating the depressing
spectacle.
“No, Old Dick never lived here,” Joe admitted. “Well, there are plenty
more bayous to look at.”
As they returned to the river the steamboat passed, coming up from
Mobile, and blew a deafening blast from her whistle as they waved at
her from the rowboat. It was the first human life they had seen since
leaving the landing.
As Joe had said, there were plenty more bayous and creeks. For a while
it seemed that there was a fresh one every hundred yards. Some of them
proved choked and impassable with fallen timber; some were too shallow
to navigate far; once they got far in and became involved in a maze of
backwater channels, shut in by thickets of titi and bay-trees, tangled
with rattan and bamboo-vine. Moccasin snakes popped into the sluggish
waters; birds strange to the Canadians shrieked discordantly overhead;
lizards darted up and down the tree-trunks; but there was no spot
where a cabin had ever stood, nor anything resembling a beeyard.
Growing very tired of being cramped in the boat, they went ashore
after another quarter of a mile down-stream, where the land seemed
unusually high and dry. It was “hammock land,” only occasionally
overflowed by high water, wooded with black-gum and bay-trees, and the
moist earth bore dense clumps of palmetto. Through this they walked
inland till they came to still higher pine woods, then circled around
to the left till they came back to the river again, without having
seen anything encouraging.
“I suppose we might as well have dinner,” Joe suggested. “This
treasure-hunting is hungry work.”
They lunched plentifully, though simply, on bread and butter and cold
boiled eggs, without lighting a fire. There was plenty of drinking
water in the river; it looked muddy indeed, but Joe assured them that
it was perfectly wholesome. There was not much inducement to linger
after they had finished eating. The air of the hammock woods was damp
and chilly, deeply shaded from the sun, and they got into the boat and
floated down the river again.
All that afternoon they spent in the same fruitless exploration of
swamp and creek-mouth and bayou. Wherever the shores looked reasonably
dry they landed and searched up and down and half a mile inland, but
found nothing that even suggested a deserted cabin. They found the
plain tracks of a drove of wild turkeys in the damp soil; they could
have shot plenty of quail, but these birds were out of season, and
they had provisions enough not to be in need of game. Carl took to
fishing from the boat, and landed three or four “yellow cats,”
differing greatly from the Northern catfish, which they reserved for
supper. Persevering in his angling, Carl presently hooked something
that took out all his line, something living that nevertheless hung
like a dead weight of hundreds of pounds on the hook. Carl had the end
of the line injudiciously tied around his wrist; the skin under the
loop turned purple, and he was nearly pulled overboard with the
strain.
Joe snatched out his knife and cut the line. Carl sunk back, not yet
over his surprise.
“What on earth was it?” he gasped. “An alligator?”
“Likely a big catfish,” said Joe laughing. “They get mighty big in the
Alabama—sometimes over a hundred pounds. You can’t land one of those
fellows on a line, but it isn’t often they take a bait. He’d have
pulled you over if you’d held on.”
Recovering from his shock, Carl presently resumed fishing, but he
hooked no more dangerous monsters. The smaller catfish, of a pound or
two, were plentiful enough, but Alice looked upon them with some
aversion.
“I can cook trout better than anybody in the world,” she declared
modestly. “But I don’t know whether I can do anything with these
creatures.”
They turned out excellent that night, however, fried with slices of
bacon, and Alice also produced a pan of fresh hoe-cake—an
accomplishment which she had acquired during her stay at the
plantation. They had coffee, too, and more eggs, and a jar of
fig-preserves which Aunt Kate had slipped among the more substantial
provisions.
A damp fog had fallen on the river and the swamps, and felt intensely
cold. They were on a strip of high land a hundred yards back from the
water, but the air seemed impregnated with vapor. They built up the
fire to a great blaze with dry pine and cypress, like a Canadian camp,
Bob said, and they sat beside it until Alice, declaring that she was
tired, went to her tent in the background.
The three boys piled fresh wood on the fire and rolled up in their
blankets in the warmth. They were all rather depressed and disinclined
to talk much. The exploring trip was turning out disappointingly. Joe
had a sense of guilt. It was he who had first suggested finding the
lost beeyard, and his cousins were neither finding any bees nor having
any sport. He was losing what faith he had ever had in Old Dick, and
he made up his mind that if they had no success on the morrow they had
better go home. He would help them to find gums among the farmers.
Meanwhile he would organize some amusements—a grand ’possum and coon
hunt. In the midst of these schemes he fell asleep.
But in the morning they all felt more cheerful, after plenty of fried
ham, hot coffee, and cornbread. It was clear and sunny; a mocking-bird
sang gloriously from a bay-tree overhead, and it had turned warmer.
The cold wave seemed to be broken.
“The gum’ll be running again in a day or two if it turns warm, and
they’ll be wanting me back at the camp,” Joe remarked.
“Perhaps we’d better go back to-morrow,” said Alice. “But I have a
feeling that something is going to happen to-day.”
Something did happen, which came within a hair’s-breadth of turning
into a tragedy. They floated down the river after breakfast, explored
one creek-mouth after another, landed several times, always with the
same discouraging failure to find any deserted cabin. About noon they
rowed into a broad, shallow bayou and landed to explore in different
directions, Joe following the bayou upwards, Bob up the river shore,
and Carl in a midway direction. Alice elected to stay with the boat.
She did not care to walk, and she had a belief that if she sat quietly
by the bayou she might see an alligator, for which purpose she
borrowed Joe’s rifle.
Joe wandered up the swampy shore of the bayou for nearly a mile, when
it dwindled away into a small creek. He diverged into a tract of
hammock land, circled through this for some time, crossed the head of
the bayou, and came down on the other side.
Approaching the river eventually, he saw the boat drawn up on the
shore opposite him, but Alice was nowhere in sight. He shouted several
times; he wanted to be ferried across; but there was no answer. He
became slightly uneasy, though he could not think of any real danger.
Probably, he thought, she was ambushed by the river out of hearing, on
the watch for an alligator; but when he could get no response to his
shouting he determined to wade the bayou.
He did not think there was more than two or three feet of water in it,
and he splashed in without hesitation. The bottom was soft sand and
mud, and he had to step quickly to keep from sinking in it. It gave
him a slight sense of uneasiness, but in his anxiety to get across he
waded ahead till he was near the center of the bayou.
Then one foot suddenly went down in the mud far over the ankle. He
stumbled and tried to pull it out, and the other foot went even
deeper. Instantly realizing his danger, he threw himself forward in
the water and tried to swim, but he failed to pull himself free; he
went under, gasping; he endeavored to get back to his balance, and
found that his legs were down almost to the knees in the loose,
apparently bottomless sandy mud.
Joe knew the peril of these treacherous sloughs, where hogs and cattle
are frequently engulfed, and, rarely, a human being. He struggled to
free himself; he tried to trample his way up. But the stuff was thick
enough to hold him, not thick enough to afford any purchase, and his
efforts seemed only to sink him deeper.
He stood still and shouted again at the top of his voice. He could
hear the echo far over the swamp, but there was no answer. The surface
of the water was rising well over his waist; it was creeping up with
frightful speed.
The boat lay there, not a hundred feet away. He could see the tin
bucket in it, and the rolled-up tent and blankets. It seemed
incredible that he could not reach it. He tried again to wallow
forward.
His efforts carried him down. Throwing his weight well on one foot
sank it deeper. He was down almost hip-deep in the mud; the water was
rising over his chest.
Afraid now to stir, he stood still and shouted again and again. A
deadly chill seemed to be creeping up from his legs. His feet felt
numb and paralyzed. He felt the slow, terrible sinking, as if some
malignant force had him by the feet.
From somewhere very far away he thought he heard one of the boys
answer his yell—or was it only the echo? The water was muddy all
around him, torn up by his struggles. The turbid ripples lapped his
throat, rising to his chin. In wild terror, he realized that drowning
now was only a matter of moments, and at that instant Alice ran out of
the woods, still carrying his rifle.
He saw her laugh at her first glimpse of his head and waving arms
above the surface, then the laugh suddenly froze on her face. She
dropped the gun, leaped into the boat, and sent it shooting toward
him.
The side rasped his shoulder, and he clutched it, as she gripped his
arm and tried to raise him, supposing he was merely out of his depth
and unable to swim. He threw his head back, just able to clear his
mouth.
“Mud! Quicksand!” he ejaculated.
He caught a mouthful of water and seemed to go suddenly down half a
foot at once. Alice’s pull was unable to lift him. The muddy water
went over his mouth, over his nose. It closed over his nose. It closed
over his eyes, and he held his breath, still clutching uselessly on
the boat above him.
He held that breath till his lungs felt about to burst. Alice let go
her grip on his shoulder. He could feel the water going over his head,
roaring and dashing, he thought. Then something struck his head. The
water seemed strangely to disappear from his face. Involuntarily he
let go the air in his lungs; he drew another breath with a gasp, and
opened his eyes.
A tin surface was around his face, enclosing air and not water. He
vaguely recognized the big bucket they had carried in the canoe. It
had been pushed down over his head, the contained air driving the
water down before it.
The fresh air cleared his head as he caught another gasp. It seemed a
miracle to him, incomprehensible, but he realized that he was safe—at
any rate for some minutes. He could feel himself still sinking; it
could be for only some minutes that he was respited.
He tried to pull himself up by the boat, but it only tilted and gave,
without producing any effect. Alice seemed to be holding the bucket
over his head with one hand, while she was patting his arm
encouragingly with the other.
She tapped on the tin as if for warning, and he felt it slowly
withdrawn. He held his breath, and in a moment it was replaced, with
changed air. It was time; he was choking again, for there were not
many lungfuls of air in that bucket.
Through the water he thought he heard a sound of voices. Alice took
both his hands and put them on the bucket. He would have to hold it
himself. He grasped it, and felt the swirl of the water as the boat
started away.
He felt deserted. An endless time seemed to pass. The air in the
bucket was growing foul and suffocating again, when the water heaved
and the boat’s keel scraped over his shoulder. His arms were gripped;
there was a tug and strain that seemed likely to tear him in two; and
then he came up, trailing behind the boat. Alice and Carl had him by
the arms, while Bob was putting all his strength into the oars.
Without stopping to take him into the boat, they towed him straight
across the bayou and pulled him out on the bank. The woods-rider
crumbled down in a collapsed heap. He rubbed the water out of his eyes
and looked at his rescuers.
“Alice,” he said rather thickly, “you surely saved my life. I—I’ll
never forget this.”
“Oh, Joe!” said Alice, and burst into weeping.
“Hold on, Allie! It’s all right now!” exclaimed Bob.
“That bucket trick was the cleverest thing I ever saw,” said Carl.
“How did you come to think of it?” asked Joe.
“I d-don’t know,” Alice quavered, wiping her eyes. “It came to me like
a flash. I’d read of it somewhere—that you could shove a bucket down
over the head of a drowning man, and it would hold the air—like a
diving-bell, you know.”
“You thought of it just in time,” said Joe. “I’d taken my last breath,
I thought. I ought to have had more sense than to wade into that
place, but I never thought of any sort of quicksand. You didn’t see
any alligators, did you, Alice?” he added hastily, as the girl showed
some symptoms of renewed tears.
“N-no,” said Alice. “I thought I saw one, and I watched it a l-long
time, but it was only a l-log. I was away up the river; that’s why I
didn’t hear you sooner. I ran as soon as I heard you. The boys were
just coming back, too. This is an awful place. Let’s go away from it.”
The muddy bayou did look sinister and depressing to all of them since
it had shown itself to be a death-trap, and they got aboard the boat
and drifted down-stream again. Joe felt in no condition for exploring;
he felt weak and used up, chilled to the bone and shivering, though
the bayou water had not been cold. Within a quarter of a mile they
landed on a high bit of shore, and Joe stretched himself in the full
sunshine, now scorching hot, to dry his clothes and warm the chill out
of his body.
Bob and Carl took their guns and went exploring after eating dinner,
but Joe stayed where he was, soaking in the sun, and Alice stayed to
keep him company. As the hot sun baked him through he felt better, and
the horror of his recent adventure began to wear off. It had left him
with a tremendous admiration for Alice’s pluck and ingenuity, however.
This was the first occasion when he had been alone with her for any
length of time; and he tried to amuse her with stories of the river
country, of the great swamps, bears and alligators, outlaw negroes and
half-wild houseboat-men who dwelt on the river. Adventures were no
novelty to Alice, however, and she replied with tales of the great
north woods, and their narrow escapes in establishing an apiary in the
wild raspberry country. When she talked of the bees she always became
enthusiastic, and she explained something to Joe of modern apiary
methods, of which he was profoundly ignorant.
“Do you know, Alice?” he said with sudden candor, “I don’t believe
we’re ever going to locate Old Dick’s place.”
She laughed.
“I’ve been thinking the same myself,” she admitted. “I’m sorry, too.
However, I guess we can gather up some hives—gums, I mean—around the
country, and if there aren’t enough to ship now, we can do better next
spring.”
“Then you’ll come back next spring!” Joe exclaimed. “Good! I’ll look
after your bees for you through the winter, and next spring I may be
able to locate a lot more. And perhaps I can put some money into the
thing myself, if Burnam’s camp doesn’t go bust. And if it does I’m
going to get my money out of him anyway, if I have to seize the still.
That is, if you-all would like me for a partner,” he added,
doubtfully.
“Of course, we’d like to have you, Joe,” returned Alice frankly. “Why,
the four of us could handle—oh, so many bees! Maybe a thousand
colonies. I know two men who run six hundred between them. There are
places up North where they pay profits of ten or fifteen dollars a
colony. Think of the money we’d make! But it would cost a lot to get a
thousand hives of bees, unless we could get them cheaply here in the
South and ship them.”
They talked the matter over for a long time. The two boys came back,
rested, and went off again in a different direction. They had no luck.
The sun grew low. This was not a suitable spot for camping, as there
seemed to be no dry wood within reach, and they took to the boat,
landing again at a more promising spot a mile lower. Here they
unpacked the provisions, greatly reduced now, and set up the tent.
“Our last camp. To-morrow we’ll be out of grub and have to go home,”
Bob remarked. “I don’t care much. No offense to you, Joe, but I don’t
think your country is as good as the North for a camping trip.”
“This isn’t a camping trip; this is a bee-hunt,” Joe defended. “This
isn’t the time of the year for camping, of course. The swamps are wet,
and there’s nothing to shoot, and the snakes are out. You ought to
come in January; then you could have the trip of your life, and all
the shooting you wanted.”
“But the worst failure is the bees,” said Carl, poking the fire with a
cypress pole. “I don’t believe there ever was any Old Dick. It’s all a
myth.”
“Well, don’t poke so much,” said Alice, who was manipulating the
frying-pan. “If there aren’t Old Dick’s bees, there are others. Joe is
going to hunt up gums for us.”
“I sure will,” said Joe. “But there was an Old Dick once, all right.
His bees may have melted away, though. Maybe he never had so many as
folks said. Lots of things might have happened to them. Bears may have
eaten ’em up—they may have got burned, or stolen. Or they just
naturally died. Bees do die sometimes, don’t they?”
“I expect some niggers stole the honey, and the bees starved to
death,” Bob suggested shrewdly. “Anyhow, I don’t think it would be
worth while to look much more, even if we weren’t out of grub.”
There was grub enough for that night and for breakfast, with a little
for a bite on the way home. They sat about the camp for some time next
morning, reluctant to start. It had not been a very pleasurable or
successful trip, but it was rather hard to call it over, and start on
the fifteen mile row upstream to Magnolia Landing.
Carl picked up Joe’s rifle and started up the bank, trying rather
half-heartedly to get a shot at a gray squirrel in a gum-tree. He
disappeared through the thicket, and a few minutes afterwards they
heard him calling. He was standing at the foot of a dead black-gum,
looking upward.
“Bees!” he exclaimed, as they approached.
“Only a bee-tree!” said Alice in disappointment, at the first glance.
Twenty feet up, there was a dense cloud of flying insects about a
small hole in the trunk. They were coming and going in much
excitement, and the loud roar of their wings sounded plainly on the
ground.
“But what’s stirring them up so?” said Bob, puzzled. “Can’t be
swarming at this time of year.”
“No, they’re robbing—they’re fighting!” cried Alice. “This bee-tree is
being robbed out by some other wild bees—or—”
Carl uttered a yell.
“Old Dick’s bees! Where are they coming from?”
From the bee-tree they could see the insects coming and going in a
direct line over the woods toward the north.
“Follow them! Track them down!” Bob exclaimed.
They all started at a run along the line of the bees’ flight. Once
they had the direction, they had only to keep on, for bees fly in a
proverbially straight line. They went down a slope, crossed a little
creek in a belt of titi thickets, up another slope, and then Bob in
the lead uttered a whoop of triumph.
There before them, between two great magnolias, stood the wreck of a
small board cabin. Windowless and doorless, it looked a long-deserted
ruin. A tumbling log outhouse stood near, and there were surviving
indications of a fence.
“Old Dick’s cabin, for sure!” exclaimed Carl. “And there’s the bees!”
At one end of the cabin stood three “gums,” made of sections of a
hollow log, about three feet long and standing on end. The top was
covered with a piece of plank, and through the rotted entrance-hole at
the bottom excited streams of bees were flying and entering. Two more
gums showed no activity and were evidently dead; and several more lay
overturned and empty.
“But where’s the enormous gum-apiary?” cried Alice.
The bees in the gums, wild and jet-black, were cross and inclined to
attack. The party kept well away from them and searched all through
the blackberry-thickets and undergrowth, at first with full
expectation, then with failing hopes, and at last with disgust. There
were no more bees than the three colonies they had first seen.
“So much for Old Dick’s hundreds of gums!” said Bob. “Another legend
busted!”
Alice gazed at the disappointing result of their search, and then
began to laugh.
“Rather a joke, isn’t it?” she said. “After all our expectations!”
“Afraid that’s just what it is,” said Joe. “This is probably Old
Dick’s shack, all right. These hollow-log gums are just what the Old
nigger is said to have used. Probably some of them were stolen, some
died, and likely he never did have many. Those niggers’ stories are
apt to be awfully exaggerated.”
“Well,” said Bob, after they had looked for some time at the gums,
“there’s no use in staying any longer, is there? Unless you want to
carry these gums home in the boat.”
Nobody expressed any desire to undertake this, and, after another look
about the cabin, they tramped back to the river.
“And now for home!” said Carl. “Never mind! When we came South we
didn’t know anything about Old Dick, and we’ve still got all the
country to look for bees in.”
They packed the outfit and turned the boat upstream. It was a long,
hard pull against the current, under a hot sun, and it was well after
noon when they arrived at Magnolia Landing. Leaving the camp kit to be
brought over by wagon, they tramped up the road, meeting Uncle Louis
on horseback within half a mile of home.
“Hello! I was looking for you back,” he cried. “Did you find Old
Dick’s bees?”
“Oh, yes, we found ’em!” returned Joe, sadly.