It was dark and dead silent, but soon the moon rose and flooded the woods with light. Whippoorwills began to call; great moths and beetles flitted and hummed, and once he heard the screech of a wildcat far down by the river. It was windless and so hot and damp that the sweat stood on his face. It was a lucky thing, he thought, that his cousins had had no such weather on their recent camping trip. Unused to the climate, they would certainly have got a dose of malaria.
Joe found it hard to keep awake. He had been in the saddle since early morning; and as he crouched there with his eye on the thicket where the mysterious wheelbarrow lay he found himself dozing.
He shook himself awake, but toward two o’clock he gave up. If any one was going to steal gum that night he would have been at it before this; and Joe buried his face in his arms and fell soundly asleep.
He awoke, feeling stiff and weary. The woods were growing gray with dawn. It was past four o’clock. Examining the thicket, he found the wheelbarrow undisturbed. His head and back ached, warning him that he would need a strong dose of quinine that day. He hankered after hot coffee, thought vaguely of riding to camp, but at last wandered slowly toward the entrance of the orchard to look for Sam with his breakfast.
Tired and listless, he sat down in a wide, open glade. There was a chill in the dawn air, and he felt cold, empty, and depressed. He pondered the series of misfortunes that had come upon the turpentine-camp, of which this gum-stealing was the latest. “Burnam’s surely in hard luck!” he said to himself, digging aimlessly into the pine-needles at his feet. He found hard bits of rubbish among them; he picked them up, crumbled them, and threw them away indifferently, until he noticed that they were bits of rosin, and he wondered how they had come there.
Picking up a sharp stick, he drove it into the loose ground, and noticed that it struck something hard only a foot below the surface. He scraped away the mixture of earth and pine-needles, and found that a hard cake of rosin was buried there—how large he could not tell, but it seemed to be as solid as a boulder.
Joe was so accustomed to seeing lumps of rosin scattered everywhere about the camp that his finding the mass in that spot did not at first strike his preoccupied mind as anything remarkable. He continued to poke aimlessly into the ground, and only by degrees did he come to realize that this was an extremely large lump.
“I wonder how much of the stuff there is here!” he muttered.
With a stronger stick he probed into the ground about two feet away. There he encountered the same hard substance, a little deeper down. Two more soundings at different points showed the same solid “bed-rock.”
“Gracious! There’s yards and yards of it!” he exclaimed, amazed.