“School started, and Tom and Annie Brierly did not wait for Charlie and me as they had always done. If they had not gone to school before we came along, they waited until we had passed by before they started.
“Charlie and I worried a great deal about the coldness between the two families and the unhappiness it was causing. We were always making plans to discover who took the honey and so clear things up.
“One day when Charlie was eating his dinner at school he noticed that Flora May Henlen had something on her bread that looked like honey. He told me to watch her, and the next day at noon I took my dinner and sat down near Flora May to eat it. Sure enough, it was honey she had on her bread. But then I remembered that they had bees and she had a right to have honey. Still I watched Flora May for several days, and she always had honey on her bread.
“‘Did your bees make lots of honey this year, Flora May?’ I asked her one day.
“‘Oh, yes,’ she answered, ‘every few days the boys bring in a pan of honey.’
“That evening Charlie made an excuse to stop a while with one of the Henlen boys, and in the orchard back of the house he saw their bee hive lying on the ground among some rubbish and rotting leaves.
“We told our discovery at home, and my brother Truman said the Henlens had had no bees at all for months. They had been starved or frozen out the winter before.
“The next morning Father stopped Asa and Longford Henlen as they were passing our house on the way home from mill and told them he knew they had taken the honey. At first they denied all knowledge of the honey, but when they found that in some way Father had found out about it they were scared and admitted that they had chopped down the tree and, finding more honey than they had expected, had taken our tub to carry it away in.
“Mr. Brierly and Father decided that if the boys would work out the pay for the honey and promise not to steal any more they would not tell anyone.