They set up the tent also, but it, like the cabin, was to be used chiefly as a shelter from rain. Even the kitchen was outside, an oven of large stones which Sam brought laboriously nearly two hundred yards, and Alice’s few cooking-utensils hung on the outside of the cabin. On the shady side of the building Bob constructed a workbench, and as soon as the housekeeping arrangements could be rushed through they began to saw up and nail together the new bee-hives, with their covers and bottom-boards. This was highly expert work, for the parts had to be interchangeable and uniform to an eighth of an inch; and Bob and Carl attended to it, while Joe and Sam undertook to clear up the ground and lay the old gum-yard bare to the sun.
In spite of his enthusiasm for the “bee bizness,” Sam demurred at going into the blackberry-jungle where the old gums were hidden. He preferred to clear up the shrubbery and saplings about the cabin with an ax, and Joe therefore put on a veil and long-sleeved gloves, tied his trousers around his ankles, buttoned up his coat, and attacked the thicket with a heavy knife and a pair of pruning-clippers.
The bees, however, were working so well that they were not much disposed to molest him, except when he accidentally stumbled into one of the gums. This was frequently unavoidable, and after half an hour of work he had accumulated a considerable following of cross bees that hung in a cloud about his head, trying to get through the net veil. Secure in his armor, Joe was able to go ahead, but irritated bees began to pervade the whole place. Sam was stung twice, but he bore it heroically, only shifting his wood-cutting to a more remote spot.
As Joe cut away the thorny branches he raked them out and carried them away to a great pile back of the bee-yard. The old gums began to appear, showing how they had once stood in rows, but now irregular, fallen, rickety, rotten. The home-coming bees hovered in clouds overhead, failing to recognize the place at first. Joe did not find any bones of beasts or men, as the hunter Candler had said; but about the middle of the old yard he did make a find of some value. It was a great iron kettle, partly buried in the earth, and half full of a hard substance resembling dried mud. He heaved it loose and carried it out to show the others. It was as much as he could do to lift it.
“Just what we needed to melt our wax in!” exclaimed Carl. “We’ll get Sam to clean it out, and if it doesn’t leak—”
Alice was digging into the hard brown contents with a knife.
“That’s what it’s been used for before,” she said. “This stuff is beeswax. This must have been Old Dick’s wax melter.”
So it was, and the old kettle contained forty or fifty pounds of good beeswax, worth fifty cents a pound—probably the remains of the negro bee-keeper’s last “run,” and left behind by some oversight.
When he came near the farther end of the thicket Joe made a less agreeable discovery. Dislodging an empty and overturned log hive, a snake glided out, a snake about four feet long, a sliding streak of yellow-brown with a checkerboard pattern of black down its spine. It ran only a few feet, then piled itself into a heap, turned its flat head, and the tip of its tail sent out a swift, buzzing whirr.
Joe stepped hastily back and retreated toward the cabin for a weapon. He didn’t want to let that snake go; it was far too dangerous a neighbor to live. He didn’t wish to have Alice see it either; but he beckoned the boys, and they had a look at the rattlesnake—the first they had seen—before Joe blew its head to pieces with the shotgun.