The Last Three Soldiers

by W. H. Shelton

There was nothing else to be done but to walk about for the rest of the day; for until nightfall there was a line of bees from the house to the tree. The soldiers secured the bear by closing the door and windows, but it was not yet clear how they could obtain the honey. Coleman and Bromley were city-bred, but Philip had been brought up in the country, and he had received some other things from his uncle besides kicks and cuffs and a knowledge of how to run a mill. He remembered the row of hives under the cherry-trees beyond the race, and how the new swarms had come out, and been sawed off with the limbs in great bunches, or called out of the air by drumming on tin pans, and how at last they had been enticed into a hive sprinkled inside with sweetened water.

So, under Philip's directions, a section of a hollow log was prepared, covered at the top and notched at the bottom, and pierced with cross-sticks to support the comb. As a temporary bench for it to rest upon, they blocked up against the back wall of the house the oak slab, which they no longer respected as a gravestone.

After it became quite dark, the bees had so far settled that a few broken pieces of honeycomb, which had been tossed off into the grass from the falling tree, were secured to sweeten the new hive, and it was finally propped up on the rubber poncho in front of the thickest bunch of bees. Tumbler was kept a close prisoner in the house, and early the next morning the bees began crowding after their queen into their new house, and by the afternoon they were carrying in the honey and wax on their legs. So it was the second night after cutting the bee-tree before the soldiers removed the hive, wrapped about with a blanket, to the bench behind the house, and got access to the honey in the broken log. There was so much of it that, after filling every dish they could spare, they were forced to empty the gold on to the earthen floor, and fill the cask with some of the finest of the combs.

What remained was given up to the bear and the bees, who got on more pleasantly together than you can think; and in time they cleaned out the old log and scoured the wood as if they had been so many housemaids.

During the remainder of the summer the gold lay neglected in the corner together with certain wilted potatoes and fat pine-knots and the sweepings of the floor. If a shining coin turned up now and then in some unexpected place, it doubtless served to remind Coleman how handy these small tokens of exchange might be if there were any other person in all their world of whom they could buy an iron pot or an onion; or it may have suggested to the clever brain of Bromley some scheme of utilizing the pile as raw material. Worthless as the gold was in its present form, in the hands of the soldiers so fertile of resource and so clever in devices to accomplish their ends, it was not possible for so much good metal to remain altogether useless. They soon saw that, if they had the appliances of a forge, they could tip their wooden spades with gold, and make many dishes and household goods. So after the harvest they set to work in good earnest to build a smithy, and equip it in all respects as well as their ingenuity and limited resources would permit.

The first thing they did was to dig a charcoal pit, into which they piled several cords of dry chestnut wood, setting the sticks on end in a conical heap. Over this they placed a layer of turf and a thick outer covering of earth, leaving an opening at the top. Several holes for air were pierced about the base of the heap, and then some fat pine-knots which had been laid in about the upper opening, or chimney, were set on fire. These burned briskly at first, and then died down to a wreath of smoke, which was left to sweat the wood for three days, after which the holes at the base were stopped and others made half-way up the pile. Late in November the dry, warm earth about the charcoal pit was a favorite resort of Tumbler, and he tried several times to dig into the smoldering mass, with results more amusing to the soldiers and less satisfactory to himself than those of any digging he had ever tried before.

When the smoke ceased to come out of these holes at the sides, they were closed up and others pierced lower down, and so on until the process was complete.

While this slow combustion was going on, a pen was built about the fireplace of the old hut and filled in with earth to a convenient height for the forge. The flue was narrowed down to a small opening for the proper draft, and a practical pumping-bellows, made of two pointed slabs of wood and the last rubber blanket, was hung in place. Besides nailing, the edges were made air-tight with a mixture of pitch and tarry sediment from the bottom of the charcoal pit, and the first nozzle of the bellows was a stick of elder, which was very soon replaced by a neat casting of gold.

Bromley was the smith, and his first pincers were rather weak contrivances of platted wire; but after half the barrel of one of the carbines had with the head of the hatchet been hammered out on a smooth stone into a steel plate to cover their small anvil-block, it was possible to make of the iron that remained a few serviceable tools.