“Dodged ’em!” exclaimed Bob.
They could still hear the dipping paddles, and a faint mutter of voices. In another minute the new-comers would perceive that the big boat was gone. But for the present the boys were screened from sight, and a stretch of fairly open water lay ahead. Joe stepped cautiously out of the cabin and seized the great steering-oar, trying to hold the houseboat straight down the channel. But she was clumsy to handle. She banged against a tree-trunk, struck a snag with a terrific jar, and then drifted sidewise around a bend. Bob came to help at the helm, but their united efforts were incapable of holding the boat straight.
“You-all better git your guns ready,” Sam advised. “Dem fellers goin’ find out de boat’s gone, an’ be after us mighty sharp.”
Joe was extremely angry at Sam’s rash act in cutting the boat loose. The heavy craft could never keep ahead of paddles, and at any moment the channel might end in a log-jam or a lagoon. And, to intensify his fears, there was a sudden shout of surprise and anger from behind. The thieves had discovered the loss of the houseboat.
“If you hadn’t been such a fool we wouldn’t be in this scrape!” Joe exclaimed. “Now I think we’d better turn this boat loose and take to the woods.”
“Dey’re bound to cotch us anyways,” returned Sam pessimistically.
It was not so easy to take to the woods. The shores were flooded on both sides. Water stood among the trees wherever they looked; there was no place to land. To plunge into that snake-haunted lagoon, into possible quicksands, was worse than to face the guns of the river-men.
In spite of their weight on the steering-oar, the heavy craft wallowed from one side of the channel to the other, moving with maddening slowness. Joe craned his head around to look forward; he thought he saw drier ground ahead, and then the boat grounded heavily on a great sunken log.
“Help me shove her off!” he exclaimed. “Run forward, Sam. Get that other oar.”
There was another big sweep at the bow, which the negro hastened to secure. The boat, pivoting round on the current, drove further on the obstruction, and heeled so far over that the deck sloped at a sharp angle. Joe and Bob shoved furiously. But the craft still stuck, and, as they hung there helplessly, there was another shout behind, and they saw a canoe just poking around the bend of the bayou.
By instinct they all dropped flat where they stood.
“Crawl back into the cabin,” Joe whispered. “They mustn’t see us.”
The two boys wormed back, flat on their faces. Looking through the cabin they espied Sam also crawling toward them, his eyes rolling with fright. He too had seen the coming canoe. Joe gestured at him, and he lay down just inside the door leading to the “dog-trot.”
As yet they had evidently not been seen. Joe took a cautious peep at the approaching canoe. It was their own canoe, as he had guessed, and he was relieved to see that there were only two men in her. They were coming on carelessly, talking as they paddled. It appeared that they thought the houseboat had broken adrift by accident.
“Lucky she stuck here,” he heard one of them say. “I done told you-all that rope wouldn’t hold, noways.”
The canoe came up alongside, and both the boys saw it plainly. In the bow was the sallow-faced man with whom Joe had spoken up the river. At the stern was a tall, heavily-built man, with long black hair, and a cruel, brutal face. Across his brow, exposed by the pushed-back hat, was a great blue-black mark or stain, probably made by the powder-marks of a gun fired too close to his face. It was the relic of some deadly brawl, no doubt, and Joe guessed that this must be the redoubtable Blue Bob himself. Both men had guns laid back against the seats, and both carried sheath-knives.
Bob looked at his cousin questioningly, and touched his rifle. Joe hesitated, lying with the powerful little rifle cuddled against his face and his finger on the trigger. He could easily have picked off both the men as they came up, but a boat-load of rosin did not seem worth two men’s lives. But more than that was at stake. It was a question of saving their own lives. In a fight their only chance would lie in shooting first.
He put his head close to his cousin’s ear and whispered:
“We’ll let them come aboard. The moment they’re on the deck we’ll draw a bead on them and make them drop their guns.”
The canoe ran alongside the houseboat, touching her at the end of the “dog-trot,” which now slanted so steeply that the lower rail almost dipped under water. Blue Bob stood up carefully in the canoe, gun in hand, and prepared to step aboard.
Bob and Joe had their sights on him. The river-man had one foot on the deck and the other still in the canoe, when Sam leaped up with a yell of absolute desperation, and seized the barrel of rosin that stood in the passage. With a violent swing he half hurled it, half rolled it. It went like an avalanche down the steep slope. It caught the pirate on the legs before he could dodge it. The flimsy rail crashed under the three-hundred pound weight. There was a yell, a curse, and canoe, barrel, and men collapsed into wreckage together.
“Whoop-ee! Dere dey go!” yelled Sam, wild with triumph.
Joe raised himself and caught a glimpse of the smashed canoe, of the men’s heads struggling in a seething mass of muddy water. And at that moment the houseboat floated clear, whether by the jar of the fracas or by the lightening of the barrel cast overboard. She ground slowly off the log, swung about and began to drift again.
“Lie down!” said Joe under his breath, pulling Bob back as he was about to jump to his feet.
It occurred to him that the river-men had seen only Sam, and would attribute the whole affair to negroes. He had expected the pirates to clamber aboard out of the water but a cautious peep showed them crawling ashore, dripping, only one of them still with a gun. Climbing out in the mud of the bank they both shook their fists toward the retreating houseboat, shouting threats and curses whose words were hardly distinguishable.
It was impossible to stop the boat or to give them any help, and neither of the boys had any sort of inclination to do so. These woods were familiar to the river-men; they would make their way to some accustomed spot, and there were almost certainly more of the gang somewhere about, who would give them assistance.
It was not till the clumsy craft sagged around another wooded bend that the boys ventured to stand on the deck. Sam approached them, all one broad grin of triumph.
“Reckon I put dem fellers out ’er bizness dat time! What you say, Mr. Joe?” he exclaimed.
“You surely did, Sam. You did nobly,” Joe admitted. “It was just the thing. But now you’ve got to steer us out of this bayou.”
For the present nobody could do anything but steer right ahead. The stream widened a little; the shores became higher and drier. Joe thought by the direction that they must be approaching the main channel of the Alabama, when Bob seized his shoulder and pointed ashore.
The ground went up in a slope, overgrown with blackberries, small pines, and oaks, and through the thickets he caught a glimpse of the gray planking of a cabin surrounded by blackberry-thickets.
“Gracious! Old Dick’s place!” he gasped.
“That’s what it surely is,” said Bob. “If we’d just waited here we might have seen the houseboat come right down past us before long.”
“I declare!” said Joe, still in amazement. “I never dreamed that it was the same bayou. Well, we know where we are at last. We don’t want to go ashore here, do we?”
“No, I guess not,” returned Bob, looking longingly up at the home of the bees. “I guess we’d better get out of this River Island as soon as we can. But where are we going in this boat, and what are we going to do with her?”
“Float her down into the river,” said Joe. “Of course we don’t want to steal their boat, and we’ll tie her up and leave her at the first landing we come to. They’ll be sure to come looking for her down the river, and they’ll find her all right. I’m going to confiscate these four barrels of rosin, though. They’re worth thirty or forty dollars. We’ll either get the boat up to Magnolia or get somebody to drive us over to the railroad. I suppose I’ll go back to the plantation with you. I’ve got nowhere else to go now.”
The consciousness of his unfortunate position came upon the woods-rider with extreme gloom. He had made up his mind that nothing was to be expected from Burnam, and he had counted on this rosin to recoup his loss. This had turned out an utter failure, and he no longer had his job.
“I suppose I might get another place as woods-rider somewhere,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I’d thought quite seriously of going into the bee business with you, if this rosin mine had only panned out.”
“I wish you could, Joe,” said his cousin earnestly. “We’d like to have you, and you’d find it’d pay better than turpentining.”
Sam, who had been listening, burst into a peal of laughter at this.
“Bees pays better’n turpentinin’!” he shouted. “Hi-yi! Dat shorely is a joke!”
“You don’t know anything about bees, Sam,” said Bob severely. “Up North we owned close to ten million bees and two hundred queen bees. Every queen would lay ten thousand eggs a week, and every egg would hatch into a new bee. We’ve had pretty near a car-load of honey at once. One hive will make more honey than you could carry. I’ve seen nearly one of those rosin-barrels full of honey taken off of one hive—worth fifteen cents a pound. These gums down here aren’t big enough to hold a crop, and the bees swarm and go away. Our hives are made so that they can be enlarged as the bees fill them up. They grow higher and higher, till they’re higher than your head, all full of bees and honey and wax from top to bottom. There are men who made ten thousand dollars out of their honey in one summer. I’ll bet Burnam never made as much as that.”
Sam’s face had grown sober under this lesson in apiculture. He looked very doubtfully at the Canadian, uncertain whether it was a joke.
“Is all dat so, Mr. Joe?” he enquired dubiously.
“I reckon it is,” Joe returned.
“Well, den,” said Sam thoughtfully. “Don’t you reckon we-all’d better leave off turpentinin’ an’ go into de bee bizness? I knows where dere’s heaps of bee trees. Only,” he added, “I’s afraid dese here swamp bees ain’t never learned to do no such stunts as you-all talk ’bout.”
“Sam’s right,” said Bob. “These swamp bees are a pretty scrub lot, I expect. Breed counts as much in bees as it does in horses. But all we have to do is to give these bees an Italian queen-mother. All the new bees hatching out then would be pure Italians, and in a few weeks the whole swarm would be through-bred.”
“Well, it sounds mighty interesting,” said Joe, “and I’d like to go into it, if I could only raise some capital. I’m sorry now I left Burnam in such a hurry. I think I’ll see him when we get back, and find out what he’s going to do.”
“Hi!” shouted Sam suddenly. “Dere’s de river!”
So it was. The bayou had opened out, and just ahead they saw the wide flood of the Alabama.
“Thank goodness! We’re out of the swamps at last!” Bob exclaimed with great feeling.
But as the houseboat came into the current of the big stream, turning southward, her bottom grounded. She swung off a little, turned half about, and stuck solidly.
“Stuck on a sand-bar at the last minute!” Joe groaned in disgust.
Sounding with a stick, they found scarcely three feet of water over the side. The boat was hard and fast, and the current was pushing her more into the shoal at every moment. The boys stripped off the greater part of their clothing and got overboard. They heaved and hauled at the boat, tried to scrape away the sand, labored in the water for more than an hour, and finally gave it up temporarily and returned on board to rest. Then they attacked it again, but it was late in the afternoon when they finally got her afloat again, by the use of enormous levers brought from the woods.
Pushing out into the full current of the river, they let her drift, feeling at last tolerably sure that the adventure was almost over. They got out the provisions and ate them on the foreward deck-space. The sun went down; the dusk fell fast, but they saw no light ashore that would indicate any landing where they could put up the houseboat and find transportation for themselves.
Dark had completely fallen when they heard a tremendous roar, reverberating and reëchoing over the forest far ahead. It was the steamboat coming from Mobile, but she was still miles away. They heard her powerful whistle again and again, and at last beheld a shaft of white light playing on the trees, shooting into the sky, like a small, brilliant aurora. It was the boat’s searchlight, picking out the intricate land-marks of the channel, but the steamer was still far distant, and it was not for almost an hour that she really came in sight around a curve a mile below.
For half an hour they had seen her as a pale luminosity reflected on the sky through the trees, and she was an imposing spectacle as she swept around the curve, looking like a great white glow on the water, with the long dazzling shaft of the search-light shooting ahead. As she came closer they made out the red glare of her furnaces on the lower deck, the rows of lighted cabin windows, the glass pilot-house high over all where the steersman manipulated the searchlight. Her tall chimneys rolled out black smoke and sparks, and they heard the pounding of her engines and the “crash-crash” of her stern paddle-wheel.
“She isn’t going to run us down, is she?” exclaimed Bob.
The houseboat was certainly a big enough object for the pilot to see. For an instant the searchlight rested on them blindingly, then flickered away. The boat came on, blazing and roaring; she was going to pass several yards to the west, and would have paid no further attention to the houseboat, but Joe snatched up Bob’s rifle, fired three shots in the air, and shouted.
The search-light turned on them again, dazzling, questioningly. The steamboat slowed, and somebody hailed them roughly.
“We want a tow!” Joe yelled.
He knew that these river boats would carry anything or tow anything that they were paid for. There was a little delay, and then the steamer sheered over toward them. They could see the black, interested faces of the roustabouts along the rail, and somebody threw a heavy rope. The houseboat jarred against the steamer’s side, and the hawser was pulled tight. On account of the stern-wheel, towing had to be done alongside and not astern.
Joe stepped aboard the steamer, edged through piles of freight on the lower deck, and made his way to the forward stairway, intending to interview the captain. There were very few passengers aboard, and at the top of the stairway almost the first face he saw was a most familiar one.
“Mr. Burnam!” he exclaimed.
“Why, Joe Marshall!” returned the turpentine operator, in equal surprise. “What on earth are you doing here? Taken to house-boating? And whatever have you been doing to yourself?” gazing at Joe’s tattered and muddy clothing.
“This isn’t my houseboat,” said Joe. “I want to get towed to the next landing and leave it there.”
He looked at his late employer with some doubt, remembering their most recent encounters, but Burnam’s face expressed the greatest friendliness.
“Give this boat a tow to Dixie Landing, Captain Andrews,” he said to the steamboat captain, who had come up behind them. “You can charge it up to me. I’m mighty glad I ran across you, Joe,” he continued. “I wanted to see you. Come with me into the clerk’s office, where we can talk.”
There was no one in the little den which the boat clerk used for his business, and the two established themselves there and shut the door. The steamer got under way again, with the houseboat hitched alongside. By looking out the window, Joe could see Bob and Sam in the electric light, still aboard the captured craft.
“Morris told me all about your leaving,” Burnam began, with a smile. “Reckon I don’t blame you much. But I don’t remember anything about jumping on you and firing you the night of the fire. I do things like that sometimes when I get excited, and I sure was excited that night. I’d have fired anybody sooner than you. You’ll just have to forget it.”
“Why, I—of course!” Joe stammered, taken aback by this frankness.
“Now I’ve just been down to Mobile to see about getting a new retort for the still,” the turpentine man went on. “I find that I can’t get one inside of a month, and it’s cost about double what it’s worth at that. Nearly all my chippers have cleared out, too. The turpentine camp’s going to shut down.
“But don’t you worry, Marshall!” he went on earnestly. “You haven’t got stock in the business, you know. You’ve got my personal note for your money, and none of Bill Burnam’s notes has ever been dishonored yet. I’ve made a contract to sell the timber off the river orchard, and I’m going to cut it next winter. That’ll clear all my liabilities and leave a handsome profit.
“Now I wish you’d come back and help us close things up for a week. In fact, I’ll be using some men all the rest of the summer in the woods, and next winter you can help to manage the timber gangs, if you want to. Same wages, and I can pay off your note next spring; or maybe I could let you have a little sooner, if you needed any.”
“Why, Mr. Burnam,” said Joe, nervously. “I’ll come up for a week, sure; but the fact is, I’ve been thinking of going into the bee business.”
Burnam laughed.
“Along with your cousins from the North?” he inquired. “Well, that’s all right, Joe. Hope you make a big hit, and if it doesn’t pan out you can always come back and get a job with me, you know.”
“Look here, Mr. Burnam, I’ve got to tell you something,” burst out Joe, whose conscience had been troubling him. “I’ve found—no, come along with me, and I’ll show you.”
He hurried Burnam down the stairs again, and over the rail to the houseboat, where the turpentine operator recognized Bob and Sam with astonishment. In the cabin Joe pointed out the four barrels of rosin, and rapidly told the story of his discovery of the “mine,” and its removal.
“You’re a wonderful woods-rider, Joe,” Burnam commented with a laugh. “It seems you can get rosin even out of the swamps. But I knew all about that old still in the woods. I didn’t know exactly where it was, but I’d always planned to prospect for it, and dig up the rosin. It legally belongs to me, you know, the same as any other deposit in the ground, even if your grandfather did put it there.”
“I was a little afraid it might be that way,” Joe admitted.
“But you boys certainly deserve to have it,” Burnam continued, “after the wild chase you’ve gone through. You can have these four barrels, anyway. They’re worth thirty dollars, and I’ll buy them off you now. I’ll write you a check in the office. And if you can locate the rest of the stuff, why,”—he hesitated a moment,—“we’ll go halves on it, and you can hold my half until my note is paid in full.”
“Thanks,” said Joe. “But I’m afraid there’s not much chance of my ever locating it. I expect it’s all sold in Mobile long ago.”
“Likely that’s so,” Burnam admitted. “We’re a few weeks too late, I reckon. Well, come along and I’ll give you the check for this, anyway, and there’s some wages due you, too, that you may as well have.”
Joe was richer by sixty-five dollars when the steamer reached Dixie Landing, a few miles below the River Island. Here they left the houseboat, tying it carefully to a tree, to wait till the owners should reclaim it. That black houseboat, Joe found, was tolerably well known along the lower river, and no one would dispute Blue Bob’s claim when he should come after it.
The four barrels of rosin were transferred to the steamer, to go with Burnam’s next consignment. The boys remained on the steamboat also, Bob to get off at Magnolia Landing, and Joe and Sam to return to the turpentine-camp for the closing up of the establishment.
“I’m going back to get Old Dick’s bees, you know,” said Bob with determination.
“Of course,” Joe returned. “Wait for me, though. I’ll be able to go with you in another ten days.”
“All right, and meanwhile we’ll get everything ready,” Bob agreed, as the light at Magnolia Landing came in sight.