“Oh, there’s such a thing as buying on easy terms,” returned Bob. “Those bees belonged to a man who had no more sense than to try to start a farm among the rocks. I’m certain he never made anything out of the land, but he surely did have the right instinct for beekeeping. He died sometime ago, his wife and children moved away, and I guess everything he owned was mortgaged, including the bees. Anyway, the whole outfit has come into the hands of the owner of the mortgage, who lives at Morton—a queer character, if there ever was one. He doesn’t know what to do with all those bees. Last summer he hired a man to look after them, and the fellow either cheated or muddled, for old Farr—that’s his name—told me that there wasn’t much money in bees, and he thought of melting the combs all down for the wax. But he’d be glad to sell them and take easy payments.
“He’d let us keep them on the land rent-free, and he’d take five hundred dollars cash down. When we sell the summer’s honey we pay another five hundred dollars, and the rest in one year, with interest at ten per cent., a chattel mortgage on the bees and positive assurance that he’ll sell us out if we don’t come down with the money on the required dates.”
“Could we handle a hundred and eighty colonies? We’ve never had over a dozen here, you know,” said Carl, dubiously.
“I’ll guarantee that we could handle them. I’ll see to that!” cried Alice. “But could we make the money?”
“I believe we could,” said Bob, earnestly. “The woods up there are full of solid masses of wild raspberry thickets for miles around, where the timber has been cut or burned over. Nothing yields honey like the raspberry bloom, they tell me. There’s lots of basswood, too. Shouldn’t we be able to get a hundred pounds of honey to the hive, Alice?”
“It sounds to me as if we ought to. It depends on the weather, of course.”
“Well, at ten cents a pound wholesale, that makes eighteen hundred dollars that we could count on this year, and next year we should get far more, for the bees would have increased. Why,” he exclaimed, growing enthusiastic, “I don’t see how we could possibly lose on it!”
“No clover up there, I suppose?” asked Carl.
“No, nor grass either. Nothing much but rocks and sand, hemlock and jack-pine and birch, wild raspberries, and little lakes, and a deep river that runs right through the bee farm.”
“We’d camp out there!” exclaimed Alice.