“I dunno,” Sam muttered, still sniffing. He pushed forward into the dense shrubbery, poked about a few minutes, and then uttered a loud yell. Before the boys could turn back he emerged, trundling a battered wheelbarrow, caked with dirty rosin—the identical wheelbarrow that Joe had discovered in the river orchard. He recognized it at once.
“But this wasn’t much to smell, Sam. Can’t you do better than that?” laughed Bob. “Not much rosin on this.”
“Dis here wasn’t what I done smelt—no suh, Mr. Bob,” replied the negro. “Smelt somethin’ heap powerfuler’n dis—yes-suh.”
He sniffed again, growing serious and intent. Neither of the white boys could smell anything, but a negro sometimes has wonderful olfactories. Sam dived into the thicket again; they could hear him crashing about, out of sight. A long, green whip-snake bolted from his feet. He penetrated deeper, stopped, threshed about for a minute, and then they heard him calling in a startled voice:
“Mr. Joe, come dis way! Come ’long quick!”
The boys rushed after him, tearing through the dense tangle of shrubs and interlacing vines. Sam stood with his head thrust into a particularly dense thicket of tall, close-growing titi-shrubs, and the boys parted the shrubs and looked also.
To their astonishment, the thicket was hollow. The whole interior of it had been cut out, and the open space was occupied by a great mound of rubbish—the lopped-off shrubs, leaves, vines, palmetto-tops, partly dead, partly showing still green.
“What on earth?” Bob muttered, puzzled.
But Joe, with an energetic exclamation, plunged forward and flung the cut branches aside. A piny smell came out. A cascade of brown lumps rattled down, great fragments of brown and amber, caked with bark and pine needles.
“The rosin, by jingo!” Joe shouted.