PIRATES’ TREASURE
They all stared. It was, sure enough, the hunter whom the boys had
encountered in their exploration of the island.
“He’s coming to see us!” Bob exclaimed. “He’ll get stung to death if
he walks up here like that.”
“Stop him!” cried Alice, and they all ran down the slope toward the
visitor, gesticulating and calling to him to go back.
Candler had already heard the tremendous roar of wings and had stopped
uncertainly. At that moment a bee dashed into his face, and he jumped
back brushing frantically.
“Don’t come any further, Mr. Candler!” Carl shouted. “Wait—we’ll give
you a veil.”
Candler had got rid of his bee. He backed away a little, looking
savagely at the veiled faces. He seemed to regard Alice with
amazement, then he scowled at Bob and Carl, recognizing their features
at last through the black net.
“I done told you-all not to come round here no more!” he growled.
His temper was evidently much ruffled, but Carl laughed.
“Didn’t get stung, did you?” he said. “I know you warned us, but bees
don’t hurt us. That’s our trade.”
The hunter snorted contemptuously. He gazed up at the rows of new
hives that had replaced Dick’s old apiary.
“Them bees won’t stay in them patent gums of yourn,” he said. “Them’s
wild bees. And them bees don’t belong to you-all noways. You ain’t got
no right to ’em.”
“Yes, we arranged all that with the people who own the land,” said
Bob.
“They don’t own ’em neither. Me and my partners bought ’em from Old
Dick’s family. We’re fixin’ to melt ’em up for the beeswax. You-all
didn’t ought to done nothing till you found out who them bees belong
to. Now you’ll have to git.”
The young apiarists looked at one another for a moment in silent
amazement. Evidently Candler was affected by something more than the
irritation of being stung. He had come to give them notice.
“Well, we’re certainly not going to get out,” said Joe firmly. “I’m
Louis Marshall’s nephew, up at Magnolia Landing, and these are my
cousins. I know well enough Old Dick didn’t have any family. We’ve got
our title all fixed clear to these bees, and we’re going to keep
them.”
“We’ll see about that when my partners get back,” returned the hunter.
“That’ll be the end of this week. I’m givin’ you a friendly hint now.
My partners ain’t easy men to fool with, an’ if you ain’t gone by that
time you’ll wish you’d never seen this here River Island.”
He gave them another threatening glance all round and then turned and
strode down to his boat. Getting aboard, he rowed up the bayou toward
the interior of the island and vanished around a bend.
“What did he mean?” gasped Alice, with a choke. “We’re not going to
lose our bees?”
“Of course not. That fellow hasn’t the ghost of a claim,” said Joe.
“We got the outfit fairly, and nobody can run off with it.”
“I don’t believe we’ll ever see Candler again,” said Carl. “He saw
that we had something valuable, and he tried to bluff us out of it.”
“But he spoke of partners. You don’t suppose he’s one of the river
gang after all, do you, Joe?” asked Bob.
Joe thought decidedly not. Bees were about the last thing the river
pirates would ever try to steal.
“I think it was only a bluff, as Carl says,” he reassured. “Don’t let
him scare you, Alice. We’ll see the thing through.”
They walked back to the cabin, encouraging each other, yet without
recovering confidence. Candler’s attack had been startlingly
unexpected. They had imagined themselves free from any sort of human
intrusion, for by this time they had almost ceased to think of the
river pirates. Now the whole swampy wilderness took on an air of
danger. They hung about the cabin, listening to the roar and riot of
the bees, nervously on the alert, in spite of the confident and
cheerful things they kept saying.
The uproar of the bees died down with evening. The combs of honey had
been licked out perfectly dry. As it grew dark Bob and Joe climbed to
the highest point of the ridge and looked over the swamps in every
direction in search for the glow of a camp-fire; but not a spark of
light showed anywhere.
The wind had gone down and there were few mosquitoes, but the boys
spent a watchful and uneasy night. The next morning came up clear and
warm. The honey flow from the blossoms had recommenced, and the bees
were at work. Only a few inveterate robbers still hung about the pile
of combs, looking for a last drop. The apiarists still were uneasy and
tired after a more or less sleepless night.
“Let’s get to work!” said Carl, after they had lounged about
uncertainly for some time after breakfast. “Nothing’s going to happen.
I’m going to melt up this wax.”
It broke the spell; they all hastened to take a hand in the operation;
and, once more engaged in doing something, their uneasiness
disappeared.
Carl lighted a fire between four large stones, on which he placed Old
Dick’s wax-kettle. As soon as the iron was warmed through, the
contents came out in one great cake of solid wax, at least fifty
pounds of it, a valuable haul. He set the kettle back on the fire and
put in about ten gallons of water, filling it up from the pile of
broken combs that the bees had cleaned out.
By degrees this melted and frothed up in a yellowish, seething mixture
of wax and boiling water, along with the innumerable cocoons of
generations of bees that had hatched in those combs. Sam held a burlap
sack over an empty barrel, and Carl dipped out this thin, hot paste
into the sack. When it was half full he knotted up the mouth, and the
two of them squeezed and pressed the soft contents between two boards
till nothing more could be squeezed out. Then Sam emptied the sack of
its steaming black mass of refuse and cocoons, now almost drained of
its wax.
“We lose a good deal this way,” said Carl to Joe. “We ought to have a
regular screw press that would get every particle of wax out of this
slumgum; but it wouldn’t have been worth while to get one for this
single melting.”
Bob meanwhile had been filling up the kettle a fresh lot of combs, and
as soon as they were melted up Carl and Sam squeezed them out. It took
all the forenoon to finish melting and pressing that enormous pile of
broken combs, and when they were done the barrel was half full of a
black, oily-looking fluid, steaming hot still, but beginning to show
flakes of yellow as it cooled.
“Why, there must be hundreds of pounds!” Joe exclaimed, trying to tilt
the barrel.
“Wait till it cools. A good deal of that is just water,” laughed
Alice. “You always get disappointed when you come to weigh the wax.”
This active employment had quieted their nervous anxiety, and they ate
dinner with a much easier mind. Candler had said that his partners
would not come back till the end of the week. More probably they would
not appear at all, and if they did there was no sort of likelihood
that they would go beyond demands and threats.
Carl kept anxiously testing his beeswax, but the cake was not entirely
cool until the next morning, and then they had to break it to get it
out of the barrel, which was smaller at the top than in the middle.
The wax came out in three great lumps, with a great quantity of black,
syrupy water. They had no weighing apparatus, but Carl happened to
know that his shotgun weighed exactly seven pounds. On this basis he
constructed a rude pair of balances, arriving at the result that there
were a hundred and sixty pounds of wax—approximately. With Old Dick’s
cake they had more than a hundred dollars’ worth.
The weather had turned hot and moist—ideal weather for honey
secretion—and the bees were working furiously. Apparently the shock of
the transferring had stimulated them to double energy. Looking into
the hives, the boys found nearly all the new frames were built full of
comb already and being rapidly filled with honey or brood. The “pizen
bees” were growing more accustomed to being handled also, and were
less irritable than at first; but they were black and inferior stock
at the best, and Alice was impatient to begin to introduce Italian
blood.
The steamboat passed the next day, and Joe signaled it. He took out
the beeswax, packed it in a box for shipment North, and himself
embarked for Magnolia Landing. Late the next afternoon he came back in
Uncle Louis’s rowboat, bringing a sack of meal, a ham, and a quantity
of sugar and coffee; and while at the plantation he had mailed an
order to a queen-breeder near Mobile to send a dozen Italian queens in
care of the boat clerk. He also instructed the clerk to try to get a
dozen empty glucose barrels from one of the Selma candy-factories, for
it was plain that they were going to have honey to extract presently.
Candler had made no sign during his absence, and the bees had been
working heavily. The blackberry was coming into blossom now, and the
gallberry would follow. There would be an unbroken flow of honey from
one source or another for two months, and they began at once to
prepare supers, or top stories, for all the strongest colonies, to
give them more room for storage.
By way of keeping Sam busy, they set him to finding and chopping down
bee-trees—a task which suited him exactly. He cut six trees that day,
and Bob was able to transfer the bees and part of the comb in four of
them. The others were too badly smashed by the fall to be of any
value; and on the whole they hardly considered bee-tree cutting a
success.
“We’ve got enough,” Alice pronounced. “If we get any more bees, we’ll
have to order more frames and foundation, and we can’t afford that.”
The next day was the end of the week, and they looked out with some
anxiety for the return of Candler and his mysterious partners; but no
one appeared that day or the next. Late in the evening the boat came
down from Selma, bringing the empty barrels, which the boys paid for
and landed, ranging them in a row back of the cabin. It looked like a
formidable measure for the bees to fill, Joe thought.
“Not a bit of it,” said Alice. “I expect we could get a couple of
barrels right now, even before the supers are on. Only it isn’t
ripened yet. We’ll have to extract before you know it, and we must
have things ready in time. I wish some of you would go over the cabin
and make it really bee-tight. We’ll have to do the extracting there
and the floor is full of cracks.”
Bob undertook this task, finding plenty of small holes in the wall
that had been overlooked before. The floor was, as Alice said, in poor
condition. Many of the boards were cracked and rotted, and he
undertook to drive them tightly together and nail them down.
“Why, these boards aren’t even nailed!” he remarked; and a moment
later he uttered a loud cry of astonishment. “Seems to be a cellar
under this house!”
“A cellar!” exclaimed his sister, who was looking on. “I always
thought the floor sounded hollow there. Maybe there’s an ancient
treasure in it.”
“Old Dick’s gold!” said Bob, raising two of the loose boards. There
really was a deep, dark hole underneath.
“There is—there is something there!” Alice cried excitedly.
Indeed the hole was by no means empty. Bob could dimly see something
like a pasteboard box, and he lifted it out and opened it. It
contained two dozen pearl-handled pocket-knives, each wrapped in
tissue paper as it had come from the factory. Reaching down again, Bob
brought up an unopened box of cigars.
Joe and Carl, who had been nailing frames just outside, were attracted
by Alice’s scream, and rushed in. They all gazed at the find
incredulously. Sam too came up behind and stared over their shoulders,
his eyes widening at the sight of the buried treasure.
“How on earth did these things get here?” Carl ejaculated.
“Just guess!” returned Bob, with a glance at Joe.
He dived again into the dark hole. Two more boxes of cigars followed
the first, then a large case of rifle cartridges, a ham in its canvas
wrapping, and a box of cheap jewelry. As the litter accumulated the
bee-keepers looked at one another with increasing amazement.
“We must get to the bottom of this!” Bob exclaimed, and he got bodily
into the hole and began to throw the contents out upon the floor.
There was a heavy, unopened wooden box, marked to contain two dozen
cans of salmon, two sides of bacon, a little damp and moldy, a bolt of
muslin, and a box of new revolvers.
“Whoop-ee!” shouted Sam, unable to contain himself. “Ain’t dis de best
yet? We-all kin start a store! Glory! Mr. Joe, dis here Old Dick’s
cabin is shore ’nuff one lucky place!”
“Yes, Robinson Crusoe never made a haul like this!” laughed Carl; but
Bob did not laugh. His face was dark and frowning as he groped after
the hidden stores.
It took some time to turn the contents of the “cellar” entirely out,
and then the cabin looked like a general store after a whirlwind.
There must have been hundreds of dollars worth of merchandise of every
description, from canned tomatoes to gold watches, nearly all in
unopened packages, and in many cases bearing the stenciled addresses
of firms in villages along the upper river.
“What does it all mean?” cried Alice. “Old Dick never put all this
stuff there.”
“Can’t you guess?” said Joe, who had guessed already. “Warehouse
thieves. River pirates. Blue Bob.”
“That’s it,” said Bob curtly.
“Oh!” Alice gasped; and Sam’s jaw dropped at the name of the river
outlaw whom he had encountered once.
The Harmans had heard a good deal that winter of the depredations of
gangs of thieves along the river, who had been robbing freight
warehouses at the boat landings. Many of these warehouses are at
uninhabited points on the shore, built of plank and protected only by
a padlock, though occasionally containing valuable goods for a day or
two after the steamer’s arrival. Blue Bob and his houseboat men were
reputed to have been active at these piracies, but they had worked so
cunningly that no one could prove it, though ambushes and traps had
been set.
“That’s it, beyond a doubt,” said Joe. “This must be where they stored
their loot. You see, the bees were their guards. Nobody but a bee-man
would ever have dared to come up around the cabin. They spread the
word that these bees were man-eaters. They must have had to come up
here at night themselves. It’s the safest place imaginable. No wonder
they didn’t want us to settle here!”
“Then Candler must be one of that river gang!” Carl exclaimed.
“Not a doubt of it. At least he’s somehow connected with them.”
“Well, what are we going to do about it?” asked Carl, after a dubious
silence.
“Le’s pack all dis here stuff in de flat boat, an’ git away quick,”
Sam proposed.
“And leave the bees? Not much!” returned Bob. “No, we must put all
this plunder back, cover it up again, and never make a word or sign to
show that we know it’s there. If those fellows think we know nothing
about the stuff and are going away in a month or two, they may let us
go in peace. I think we’d better ship the packages of bees a little
earlier than we intended, and—”
“What’s that? Listen!” exclaimed Joe; after a moment of tense silence
he tiptoed to the window.
The others crowded after him. Bob choked a startled exclamation.
Beside the bayou a large boat was drawn up, and three men were
starting up the slope. Candler was in the rear, and both Bob and Joe
instantly recognized the man in the lead. So did Sam, for they heard
his dispairing ejaculation.
“Blue Bob! Oh, my golly!”
Joe wheeled, sweeping a glance at the plunder littered about the
cabin.
“The worst minute they could have come!” he exclaimed. “We mustn’t let
them get a look in here. Alice, you must stay out of sight. Get the
guns, quick. Don’t be scared. We’re too many for ’em!”
All the firearms were in the cabin, by good luck, and the three white
boys picked them up and stepped outside, shutting the door. The
intruders were coming up without paying much attention to the flying
bees, which were not vicious that day. The boys hurried down to meet
them with the most indifferent expression they could assume, and Joe
gave them a pleasant “Howdy!”
Blue Bob did not reply to the greeting. He tucked his repeating rifle
under his arm, and fixed a fierce gaze upon the apiarists.
“You-all ain’t gone yit!” he cried harshly. “Well, you’re sure goin’
now, an’ right quick, too!”
“What’s the matter with you?” said Joe soothingly. “You didn’t really
expect us to leave, did you?”
“We won’t anyway!” put in Carl, hotly. “We’ve got a right here, and
you can’t make us—”
“Hush up!” returned the pirate, with a violent thrust of his
rifle-muzzle into Carl’s stomach, so violent that the boy doubled up,
staggered a couple of yards, and tumbled. Blue Bob strode past him.
Joe threw up his own rifle, but met Candler’s muzzle leveled upon him.
“Don’t you start nothin’, now!” Candler growled. “Keep still if you
don’t want to be hurted.”
The boys stood irresolute for a fatal minute. Blue Bob walked straight
to the cabin, and was about to step upon the little veranda when the
screened window-frame swung open, and Alice appeared inside. She
looked white but determined, and she was training her long target
pistol straight upon the intruder’s chest.
“Stop where you are!” she commanded. “One step f-farther, and I’ll
certainly s-shoot!”
The blue-faced man stopped with a startled jerk. He gazed in
astonishment at Alice behind her pistol, and then broke into a short
laugh.
“Don’t shoot, ma’am,” he said. “I reckon I ain’t a-comin’ in.”
He wheeled about, and walked back to where Candler and Joe were still
glaring at one another.
“Put down your guns,” he said. “And look here, you boys, you take that
girl away from here, you hear me? This ain’t no game for women. If you
fellers want to stay and fight us—”
“We don’t want to fight anybody,” interrupted Joe. “You started this.
Look here, we’re going away in a month or so, just as soon as the
honey season is over.”
“I reckon you’ll have to git out quicker’n that,” said Blue Bob. “If
it hadn’t been for that girl we’d have pitched you into the bayou
to-day.”
“We’ll burn your cabin,” put in Candler. “We’ll smash your boat. We’ll
turn you into the swamps to starve.”
“We sure will,” the leader agreed. “You-all think ’bout it. We’ll give
you another chance, but if you ain’t gone when we come back by here
next—”
With a last ferocious glare the river-man turned back to his boat,
followed by the crew. They rowed down toward the river, and the boys
watched them out of sight, and then returned triumphant to the cabin.
Alice, pale but elated, still clutched her pistol.
“You certainly saved the day for us, Alice,” said Joe. “That fellow
would have been inside in another minute and seen all this plunder,
and then it would have been all up with us. But now I do believe we’ve
got them bluffed out, in spite of their ferocious talk.”
“I saw them glance at one another when Joe said we were leaving in a
month,” said Carl.
“That fetched them.”
“Well, I certainly won’t leave until the blackberry honey-flow is
over—yes, and the tupelo, too,” said Alice. “It means hundreds of
dollars worth of honey to extract.”
“Yes,” said Bob, grimly. “We may as well extract all we can—and then
ship all the bees away, and melt up the combs into wax, and burn up
the hives. For if we once leave here, we’ll never come back and find
any apiary.”