“Mr. Burnam, I want you to do something for us. We’re going on an exploring trip into the woods soon, for three or four days, and we must have some one with us who knows the country. We want you to let us have Cousin Joe.”
“Down here in the South we never refuse anything to a lady,” returned the turpentine man. “And when she’s young and pretty like you we give her everything without asking. Sure you can have Joe if you want him.”
Alice blushed hotly at this, and Joe, taken by surprise, started to protest.
“No, I’ll be able to spare him for a while, as soon as we get the cups hung and the gum running in the river orchard,” Burnam went on more seriously. “Fact is, with half our tract ruined, I don’t really need three woods-riders any more. As soon as he gets the new orchard started Morris can look after it for a few days.”
“I knew you could fix it!” exclaimed Alice, beaming.
“But he’ll have to work double hard when he gets back, to make up,” said Burnam, with affected severity.
CHAPTER III
THE RIVER ORCHARD
The next morning, after his cousins had departed in Burnam’s automobile, Joe rode down to look over the river orchard, feeling considerably more optimistic about the future. Burnam had appeared good-natured and confident; all might yet be well with the camp. The notion of the honey business, too, had taken strong hold on Joe’s imagination. He had as yet only the vaguest conception of how it was practised, but as he rode down toward the river he turned over in his mind the astonishing things he had heard from his cousins. Alice had appeared the chief expert. The others always deferred to her opinion when it came to bees; and Joe thought he had never seen a girl so clever, so practical, and so alive with enthusiasm and spirits.
He took the seldom-used road that they had traveled the day before, up past the old Marshall house, and then by a trail down into the woods of the river orchard. That great tract of pine had a very special interest to Joe, for, as he had explained to the Harmans, it had belonged to their family, he had been born on it himself, and with a little good luck it might have been his own that day.
Before the Civil War it had formed part of the great Marshall estate that lay along the river. The property had been huge in area but of little cash value, for most of it was uncleared and uncultivated. Lumber was of no value then; turpentine was not worth much, though Joe’s grandfather had operated a small still somewhere in the woods, shipping turpentine down to Mobile and throwing the rosin away. That had been more than half a century ago, and no one now knew even where the still had been located.