“There’s one thing I’ve got in my mind, and it’s this,” Bumpus went on to remark. “Now’s goin’ to be the time for Allan here to keep his promise to show me a bee tree. He told me that summer was the time to do it, when the bees were on the wing, and he could work his little game; but that he’d try his best to ’commodate me any time, once we got up here in Maine.”
“And so I will,” replied the other, smiling at the earnestness with which Bumpus kept talking on that one subject. “Perhaps Jim, or Eli here, will help me find a tree. If the bees are hived up for winter, then the only way we can do it is to listen when the noonday sun is shining. Sometimes, before the weather gets too cold, the young bees come out of their hole, and buzz around, trying their wings. I’ve found a hive in the dead top of a tree that way.”
“And got a lovely stock of juicy honeycomb too, I guess?” said Giraffe, making a face to indicate that the subject certainly appealed to him from the standpoint of a sweet luxury, if from nothing else.
“Sure we did; and a lovely lot of stings thrown in,” chuckled Allan.
“Well, they say bee stings are good for rheumatism, and I’ve sometimes thought I was getting a touch of that in my legs,” Davy Jones observed, thoughtfully.
“There wasn’t much rheumatism about you when that bear dropped down on us,” said Giraffe, scornfully. “The way you scooted out of the way would have made the best short distance sprinter turn green with envy. Rheumatism! Wow! that goes in line with cramps, I guess, now.”
“What’ll we put all the honey in?” asked Bumpus, just as though he counted the finding of the bee tree an accomplished thing, because Allan had agreed to do what he could to find one.
“I’ll hold all I can,” retorted Giraffe, complacently; “but then you mustn’t expect me to keep on loading up, till I bust. I c’n stretch sometimes; but even that’s no sign I’m made of injy rubber, is it?”
“Well, we won’t cook our rabbit till we’ve got him,” said Allan. “Sometimes most of the honey in a bee tree is old, and candied. The new stuff is what counts. The other is dark colored and sickening sweet. But wait and see, if so be we’re lucky enough to strike one.”
After supper was over they enjoyed sitting there before the fire, and listening to Eli tell stories about the old cabin; which, according to his accounts, must have seen many queer happenings at least equal to the one surprise to which they had been treated, on their first acquaintance with it on this night.