“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.