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.