“Why on earth didn’t you tell me sooner? I asked you about it long ago!” cried Joe.
“Didn’t remember ’bout it dat time. But, Mr. Joe, we don’t wanter fool with no bees now, not whilst we’re huntin’ dat rosin.”
“The bees might be worth as much as the rosin,” said Bob. “What do you think they’d be worth if we had them up North, Sam?”
“Dunno what they’d be worth up Norf,” said the negro, “but down yere where dey is, dey’re worth jes’ mighty near nothin’.”
“I guess that’s so,” Bob admitted, “but if they were in Canada I’d expect to make a thousand dollars out of them next summer.”
Sam laughed loudly, taking this to be a joke.
“The question is, how many gums are there?” said Joe.
It was impossible to tell. The blackberry-canes screened the ancient apiary, and only dimly could be seen the shapes of the gums, swamped by the undergrowth. Some of the gums were doubtless dead, but from the numbers of homing bees in the air Bob declared that there must be dozens of live ones, at any rate.
“We’ll have to clear away all this jungle before we can tell anything about it really,” he continued. “We’ll have to have something to cut the blackberries away, and we’d need veils and smoke, too. These wild bees are going to be cross, sure.”
He looked about as if he thought of starting operations immediately, but at that very moment sounded, faint and far off through the trees, the report of a gunshot.