“Fixin’ to make a smudge, I reckon,” said Sam, who had keen eyes.
Two of the men had put their heads together over something, and a dense smoke suddenly arose. The boat turned toward the raft, rowed slowly and cautiously, and as it approached the men could be seen to turn up their collars and pull their hats down over their faces. Muffled to the eyes, Blue Bob stood up in the bow, holding a tin pan full of some burning substance that smoked heavily.
“He’s certainly got nerve,” Joe commented. “But he can’t stop that riot with a pan of smoke.”
Holding the pan before him, Blue Bob leaped on the raft. The bees drifted momentarily away from the smoke-cloud, but it was not enough to subdue them, and the outlaw seemed to move in a mist of flying insects. He kept his head, however, made his way to the box of plunder, and handed it down into the boat. He had to set the smoke-pan down to do it, and he must have been fearfully punished, but he stuck gamely to the task and passed out the second box. His companions in the boat were less courageous; they squirmed and swore and beat at the bees around their heads.
Determined to get all he could, the outlaw reached for the boys’ box of tools and ammunition; and in doing so he contrived to knock off the cover of the nearest hive. A fresh cloud of doubly maddened bees boiled up. It was more than the boat’s crew could stand. Frantically fighting bees, they pushed off, and backed away twenty feet.
“He’ll be stung to death!” Joe ejaculated.
With savage oaths Blue Bob commanded the deserters to come back for him; but they refused to face the bees again. They yelled to him to jump and swim. He caught the smoke-pan. It had gone out. He flung it down and brushed and beat frantically at his face. The boat drifted farther away, its crew still calling on their chief to jump.
“He’ll be killed if he doesn’t jump!” Joe exclaimed; and at that moment his ears caught a distant, approaching “thud-thud,” sounding up the river. But he did not guess what it was; he did not look that way, absorbed by the drama in mid-river, till Sam uttered a wild yell:
“Look yander, what’s a-comin’, Mr. Joe. Whoop-ee! Oh, glory!”
A boat was coming around the next bend above, a motor-launch, going fast, and apparently full of men. With a cry of joy, Joe fired his rifle in the air. A shot answered it from the boat, and somebody waved a speck of white among the crew.