Bob only laughed. He knew well that Alice could not be kept out of any such adventure, and in fact she was as capable of traveling through the wilderness as either of her brothers. Probably he would have objected strongly to leaving her behind, indeed, for she was a great expert in camp cookery.
As they expected to be out only three or four days they did not need a heavy outfit. Joe had brought his rifle, his cousins their own fire-arms, including Alice’s pistol, which she wore strapped around her waist in a belt of cartridges. They had fishing-tackle, and they carried several loaves of fresh-baked “light-bread,” with pork, corn-meal, and a large number of hard-boiled eggs. One of the plantation mule wagons carried them and their equipment down to Magnolia Landing early the next morning, and they embarked aboard the boat and started down the big river.
For two hours they went on, rowing and floating with the current, round bend after bend of the twisting stream, banked on each side with the incessant swamps and forests. Occasionally there was a bottom-land patch of corn; occasionally a glimpse of low pasture where scrawny and half-wild cattle were grazing.
“What a different country from Canada!” Alice remarked.
All the Harmans had been secretly impressed with the desolation of the scene, the pitiful farming, the dwarfed cattle, so different from the great Holsteins and Herefords of the Ontario clover-pastures; but they had been too polite to voice their impressions to Joe.
“Yes, this is no country for farming,” Joe admitted. “Land too poor, I reckon. It’s a turpentine and timber country. What they’ll do when the pine is all cut off I can’t imagine. But this sand strip along the river is the very worst bit of the State. North and east of here you’ll see as fine plantations as anywhere in the world.”
“But this is a great country for cheap bees,” said Bob, “and that’s the main thing just now. When do you suppose we’re coming to that big bayou?”
Joe thought they must have come six or eight miles, and within another mile a wide opening did appear on the other shore of the river. They pushed the boat into it with great hopes. On either side it was tangled with dense cypress and sycamore and cotton wood, heavy-laden with gray Spanish moss, but within fifty yards it shoaled off into a morass of liquid mud.
“This certainly isn’t it,” said Carl, contemplating the depressing spectacle.
“No, Old Dick never lived here,” Joe admitted. “Well, there are plenty more bayous to look at.”