“It’s a roof over our heads for to-night, anyway,” he said. “Shall we camp in it, or rough it outside?”
Bob did not answer. He was looking curiously into the air, into the cloudless blue of the late afternoon sky. In the dead silence there was a curious low murmur, a faint drone.
“Sounds to me like—like something!” Bob muttered, still with his nose in the air. Looking up likewise, Joe perceived small dark specks coming down from the sky, coming over the tree-tops with the rapidity of light, and plunging down among the thickets around the cabin.
To the left of the old shanty the whole earth was a sea of blackberry-thickets, an acre or more of impenetrable, thorny jungle, growing almost shoulder-high. Bob advanced as close as possible, tried to part the canes, and peered in. He recoiled with an exclamation, brushing at his cheek, where a black bee was clinging and stinging furiously.
“I thought I knew that noise!” he cried. “It’s bees. See ’em coming through the air! That thicket’s chock full of bee-gums. I can see ’em.”
“Shore ’nough!” exclaimed Sam. “I bet dis yere’s where dat old nigger Dick uster live, dat dey tells ’bout.”
Bob looked at his cousin with comprehension dawning in his eyes. “That’s it!” he said. “Joe, we’ve found Old Dick’s bees after all!”
CHAPTER IX
BEES AND ROSIN
“I do believe we have!” Joe exclaimed. “Yes, I hear the bees now. I didn’t know what that humming could be.”
“Yes-suh, dis shorely is dat Old Dick’s cabin,” Sam assured them. “I remembers now dey said he lived way down in dis yere River Island.”