CHAPTER XIII
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.”