CONTENTS

I[Wreck in the Woods]
II[Old Dick’s Bees]
III[The River Orchard]
IV[Disappointment]
V[Buried Treasure]
VI[Disaster]
VII[Stolen Rosin]
VIII[The River Island]
IX[Bees and Rosin]
X[Down the River]
XI[The Bayou Bees]
XII[Taming the Wild Bees]
XIII[Pirates’ Treasure]
XIV[Under Fire]
XV[The Treasure of Rosin]
XVI[The Bee Raft]
XVII[War on the River]
XVIII[The Harvest]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE WOODS-RIDER
CHAPTER I
WRECK IN THE WOODS

Leaning from his saddle, Joe Marshall looked into the cup that hung on the turpentine-tree. One side of the great long-leaf pine had been stripped of its bark to a height of three feet, leaving a tall, livid scar, sticky with resinous exudation. A thick layer of hardened gum crusted over its lower edge, and two tin gutters near the top carried the gummy oozings into the two-quart tin cup suspended from a hook driven into the tree. It was only March, but the weather had been unusually warm, and the gum was running in thin viscous threads imperceptibly slow, but the cup was half full of the sticky whitish mass.

“I declare, we can begin dipping soon!” Joe said to himself, glancing around at the other pines, which were all similarly blazed and tapped.

This was the best corner of the Burnam turpentine “orchard.” The trees that grew here were splendid long-leaf pines, shooting up straight as arrows almost a hundred feet before they broke into palm-like branches; and many of them were so large that the turpentine gatherers had been able to chip them on both sides, and hang two cups on them.

For about two hundred yards this park-like growth lasted, where his horse’s feet trod silently on the thick layer of pine-needles; then a slight descent took him out into the open ground. The sunlight seemed blinding after the shade of the woods. The sky was hazily blue, radiating an intense heat. High overhead two buzzards soared in circles. The ground was a tangle of gallberry-bushes, and Joe rode through them by a trail that he followed daily on his rounds. From the gallberry flat it led down to a creek swamp, dense with titi and bay-trees and tangled with bamboo-vine, and it wound through this jungle across the creek itself.