Joe got back to Burnam’s camp to find gum running freely again. Morris, who had been riding the river orchard in his absence, reported that everything looked promising, and Joe found it so when he rode over the woods on the day after his return. The negroes were glad to have him back; they saluted him delightedly. Sam said that the gum might be dipped in two more hot days, and Joe began to feel much more confident of the camp’s future.
But the next morning there was a different story. He was a little later than usual in arriving at the woods, and when he turned into the pines he found his whole gang of chippers collected and waiting for him.
“What’s the matter? Why aren’t you boys at work?” he exclaimed.
“Capt’n, somebody’s done emptied our cups,” said one of the negroes, solemnly.
“What! Stealing gum!” cried Joe. He had heard of thefts of raw gum from turpentine tracts before. The stuff is marketable, and can be sold at any still.
“If any of you have been robbing the cups, I’ll put you where you’ll never steal any more,” he threatened.
“No, suh, capt’n! No, suh, Mr. Joe!” declared the man. “Ain’t none of dis gang wouldn’t steal gum. An’ de cups is gone, too.”
“Somep’n queer ’bout dis yere, capt’n!” chimed in another chipper.
Joe’s eye lighted on Sam, standing rather sheepishly in the rear.
“Sam, what’s happened? What’s the matter with this gang?” he called.
“Spects dey’s scared, Mr. Joe. Scared of spirits, I reckon.”
“Yes, suh, capt’n!” said another, gaining courage to speak out. “Some of our boys was down yere one night huntin’ ’possums, an’ dey seed mighty queer things—yessuh, powerful queer. Dere was queer lights movin’ round dis way, dat way, an’ people travelin’ ’bout. But, capt’n, dem waren’t no real lights, an’ dem waren’t no real human men.”
“Everybody knows dat ol’ Marshall place is full of ha’nts!” another chipper muttered.
“What nonsense!” cried Joe. “Come, let’s see where the cups were robbed.”
They did not have to go far. From one of the first pines in the orchard the cup was missing. In its place, a red cord with a piece of black cloth and a severed chicken’s head hanging from it had been tied around the tree.
“What foolishness is this?” exclaimed Joe angrily, tearing down the mysterious red decoration.
None of the men replied. They shuffled their feet and looked stealthily at one another. Even Sam looked furtive. No white man ever quite fathoms a negro’s superstition. What the red string meant the turpentine workers did not know themselves, but it stirred in them dim, barbaric ideas of voodoo and conjuring, and they were desperately afraid of it.
“Some one’s been trying to scare you,” said Joe. “Ghosts don’t steal gum, do they? Spirits! Spirits of turpentine, I reckon!”
It was a rather feeble joke, but a little joke goes a long way with negroes, and they all laughed uproariously. They brightened up at once, and under the protection of the white man’s presence, they ventured into the woods. For some distance Joe found no more cups missing; but as he rode on he began to find more and more robbed trees, and soon he came to a tract where hardly a cup remained. There were no more red strings, however.
The theft of the gum was not very important, but the loss of the galvanized cups was a much more serious matter. So many of Burnam’s cups had been crushed in the wreck of the storm that the supply of extra ones was low. They were expensive now, and, worse still, it would take a week or two to get a fresh shipment.
He sent a man to camp with a note to the foreman, requesting him to send down two hundred cups, and he shepherded the chippers back to their work. They went reluctantly and showed a disposition to keep together, and Joe had to follow them closely all day. A little before noon a wagon came with the cups, and Burnam came with it, in great indignation.
“Won’t do to have this happen again,” he said. “These are about the last cups in the camp. Find any trace of who did it?”
There seemed to be no trace. The two of them searched the woods for several hours, without finding how the cups had been taken. The smooth carpet of pine-needles showed no track of wheels or hoofs, and yet so many cups could hardly have been carried away by hand.
It was only after Burnam had gone that Joe came upon a clue. He discovered a single wheelmark in the damp earth near the creek swamp—apparently the track of a wheelbarrow. It seemed to have passed that way several times, and the track did not appear to lead toward that part of the woods where the cups had been taken, yet there could be hardly any doubt that the thieves had used the barrow for transporting the stolen gum.
Within a hundred feet he lost the trail on the smooth pine litter. He searched the woods in widening circles, scrutinizing every spot of soft ground. He was lucky enough to pick up the trail again a hundred yards away; lost it, found it again, and within half an hour more he came upon the wheelbarrow itself, cunningly hidden under a dense gallberry-thicket.
The implement was smeared with unmistakable, telltale marks of gum and rosin. Joe was about to confiscate it, but, on second thoughts, he left it where it was, and went away immediately. Probably the thieves would attempt to use it again that night, and it would serve as a bait.
He sent Sam back to camp to bring down some food, and tell the foreman that he would not be in that night. He had determined to lie in wait in the woods and solve the mystery.
It was a mystery which thickened, for as he was riding away Snowball trod in something curiously sticky and Joe glancing down, saw that it was turpentine gum. Dismounting, he found fully two gallons of the stuff loosely covered with rubbish. It might have been spilled by accident, but it looked as if it had been poured there intentionally.
Why anybody should have taken the risk of stealing the gum only to pour it out again Joe could not imagine. The negroes finished work and started up the road. Sam brought him a packet of meat and corn-bread and a bottle of cold coffee, and left him. Joe ate his supper, tethered Snowball where there was grass, and, as the woods darkened, he ambushed himself behind a screen of young pines near the hidden wheelbarrow, laid the little rifle across his knees, and waited.
It was a hot night once more. Mosquitoes hummed viciously, and numbers of large bats circled overhead. A strange, hot smell rose from the river swamps close by, full of the odor of flowers, of bay-leaves, of rotting vegetation; it was so strong that his head swam. Fever was in that heavy air.
It was dark and dead silent, but soon the moon rose and flooded the woods with light. Whippoorwills began to call; great moths and beetles flitted and hummed, and once he heard the screech of a wildcat far down by the river. It was windless and so hot and damp that the sweat stood on his face. It was a lucky thing, he thought, that his cousins had had no such weather on their recent camping trip. Unused to the climate, they would certainly have got a dose of malaria.
Joe found it hard to keep awake. He had been in the saddle since early morning; and as he crouched there with his eye on the thicket where the mysterious wheelbarrow lay he found himself dozing.
He shook himself awake, but toward two o’clock he gave up. If any one was going to steal gum that night he would have been at it before this; and Joe buried his face in his arms and fell soundly asleep.
He awoke, feeling stiff and weary. The woods were growing gray with dawn. It was past four o’clock. Examining the thicket, he found the wheelbarrow undisturbed. His head and back ached, warning him that he would need a strong dose of quinine that day. He hankered after hot coffee, thought vaguely of riding to camp, but at last wandered slowly toward the entrance of the orchard to look for Sam with his breakfast.
Tired and listless, he sat down in a wide, open glade. There was a chill in the dawn air, and he felt cold, empty, and depressed. He pondered the series of misfortunes that had come upon the turpentine-camp, of which this gum-stealing was the latest. “Burnam’s surely in hard luck!” he said to himself, digging aimlessly into the pine-needles at his feet. He found hard bits of rubbish among them; he picked them up, crumbled them, and threw them away indifferently, until he noticed that they were bits of rosin, and he wondered how they had come there.
Picking up a sharp stick, he drove it into the loose ground, and noticed that it struck something hard only a foot below the surface. He scraped away the mixture of earth and pine-needles, and found that a hard cake of rosin was buried there—how large he could not tell, but it seemed to be as solid as a boulder.
Joe was so accustomed to seeing lumps of rosin scattered everywhere about the camp that his finding the mass in that spot did not at first strike his preoccupied mind as anything remarkable. He continued to poke aimlessly into the ground, and only by degrees did he come to realize that this was an extremely large lump.
“I wonder how much of the stuff there is here!” he muttered.
With a stronger stick he probed into the ground about two feet away. There he encountered the same hard substance, a little deeper down. Two more soundings at different points showed the same solid “bed-rock.”
“Gracious! There’s yards and yards of it!” he exclaimed, amazed.
He had ridden over this very spot several times without ever suspecting the presence of that peculiar substratum. He dug down to hard bottom in another place to make sure that the stuff was really rosin. It was rosin indeed, blackish and much mixed with bark and dirt, but real rosin, and he could not guess how it had come to be buried there. Then, as he looked about the open glade, he remembered the old distillery that his grandfather and his great-grandfather had operated in those woods.
As a child Joe had heard it spoken of, but it had been demolished long before that, and he never had known the exact spot where it had stood. In those early days only the spirit of turpentine was considered of any value. The rosin was not worth the cost of shipping it out, and in nearly all the country stills it was run from the retort into a huge pit and allowed to harden there.
An old distillery would thus sometimes accumulate an enormous amount of waste rosin, and Joe remembered having heard of some of these old pits having been dug up with great profit. One rosin-reef in Clarke County had yielded, if he remembered rightly, nearly eight hundred barrels of good rosin, which sold for six dollars a barrel. And rosin was higher now.
All this rushed through Joe’s mind in a sudden flood, and with increasing excitement he began to search the glade for further evidence. Under the gallberry-bushes he discovered a few crumbling bricks moldering in the soil; digging beneath them, he found traces of charred wood. More digging revealed an old, rusted iron bar, more charred wood, and a few pieces of tin, mixed up with scattered lumps of rosin. There could be no doubt that this was the site of the old turpentine distillery.
As the full force of his discovery grew upon him, Joe almost shouted with delight. Here was the way to recover what he stood likely to lose in Burnam’s camp. He marveled that no one had remembered the old still before. It had been run for many years, and its accumulation of rosin might easily yield as much as the reef in Clarke County. At the present prices of rosin, this great bed might be worth several thousand dollars.
With the old iron bar he began to probe the ground in every direction to ascertain exactly the size of the rosin pit. Wherever he struck the hard deposit he drove a little stake; thus he soon ascertained that the bed was more than twenty feet long and about half as wide. Its depth was the most important point, and he had no means of ascertaining this; but he drilled deep with his iron bar without going through it. As a pit had usually been dug in the earth to receive the rosin, he thought it might be ten feet deep. At a low estimate, the “mine” should contain four or five hundred barrels, worth perhaps two thousand dollars. At any rate, it would bring back a great part of what Burnam owed him, if he failed to recover it otherwise.
Then, all at once, the question came to him: Who was the real owner of this deposit? Burnam, it is true, owned the land; but the rosin had belonged to Joe’s grandfather and to his father. Burnam had known nothing of the deposit when he bought the land. Morally, Joe felt that there was no doubt about his right to reclaim the stuff which his family had inadvertently left behind. But the legal side of the matter was more dubious; the uncertainty fell like a wet blanket over his first enthusiasm. At last he rose, pulled out his stakes, hid the iron bar, and kicked pine-needles over the old bricks. He had not yet decided what he would do. Until he came to a decision he was going to keep the valuable secret to himself.
He hunted up Snowball and rode thoughtfully down the road, to look for Sam. The excitement of his discovery had made him for a time forget to be hungry, but he was beginning once more to feel extremely empty, and he was glad when the negro boy hove in sight with a package of food and a tin bucket of coffee, which he reheated quickly over a small fire. The rest of the gang came down a little later, uneasy at first about entering the woods, but, finding no more red strings or chickens’ heads, they presently scattered about their work.
The rosin “mine” weighed heavily on Joe’s mind all that day. The more he thought about it the more certain he felt of his moral right to the waste from his grandfather’s old still, but how the tangled problem would work out in law he could not say. He shrank from the idea of consulting a lawyer; secretly he was afraid that the decision might be against him. Of one thing he felt sure: He would rather let the secret die with him than allow Burnam to mine that rosin, especially if the camp collapsed into bankruptcy.
An instinct led him to keep away from the place of his discovery. The wheelbarrow remained untouched, and as he rode the woods that day he was continually on the lookout for any fresh clue to the gum-stealers. No gum had been taken that night. Whether this was due to his rather careless watch he could not say, but he felt that a guard should be kept the next night as well. He did not himself feel inclined for another night in the woods, and the negroes demurred instantly to the proposal. Even Sam shrank from it, but at last he did get three of them to consent to stand guard, in consideration of a dollar apiece and plenty of coffee.
He had grave doubts whether they would stay awake, but the next morning they swore that they had not closed an eye and had heard no disturbance. An examination showed no gum had been taken, but the wheelbarrow had vanished. Some one had visited the woods that night.
However, Joe thought that the thieves had probably been frightened away, and the next night he left the woods alone, with some uneasiness. It turned out all right, however; no cups were found missing, and as the following night had the same result Joe’s fear began to wear off.
The weather had remained hot, and the run of gum had been excellent. Within a few days there was enough for “dipping,” or collecting the contents of the cups. Mule teams came down from the camp with the dip-buckets and barrels, which were set down at intervals through the woods, and in the afternoon the dipping gang came in, and began the heaviest, hardest work of the turpentine harvest.
The wooden dip-buckets weighed thirty pounds even when empty, but the dipper moved at a trot from tree to tree, deftly scooping out the thick, whitish gum from the cups with a wooden paddle. When the bucket was full he poured it into the nearest barrel, and by night many of the barrels were nearly half full.
Joe was greatly delighted with this result, but when the dippers came in the next morning they found that some one had forestalled them. Fifty or sixty cups were missing from the trees, all of them ones that had been nearly full. A prolonged search failed to find any of them. Joe sent a hurry call to the camp for more cups. Mr. Burnam was not there, but the foreman managed to collect a few dozen, and Joe replaced as many of the missing ones as he could.
He had feared greatly for the safety of the partly-filled dip-barrels standing about the orchard, but an examination showed them all untouched. Perhaps they had been too heavy to handle; but Joe felt that they would have to be guarded in the future until they were hauled back to the still.
This mysterious lawlessness was intensely irritating and disturbing. It occurred to Joe that the thieves might possibly have come in a boat from the other side of the river, and he rode down to the shore to reconnoiter for tracks.
A heavy growth of willow, titi, and sycamore made a dense belt along most of the waterside. Usually he could not see the river until he was within twenty feet of it, and he rode along, peering through the thickets, scrutinizing the ground for tracks, till he came to a deep, narrow bayou that ran inland for about fifty feet. A few willows grew along its banks, and through them Joe spied the black houseboat that he had seen floating down the river several days before.