The Keeper of the Bees/Chapter 5
The Little Scout
THE following day, as Jamie sat on the same bench, his mind occupied with the same subject, in a wide flare between earth and sky, a slender bit of a child sailed over the fence and landed expertly on the sanded walk of the garden. As the small figure righted itself one hand caught the band of a pair of particularly dirty breeches and the other stuffed more securely therein the tail of a not overly clean shirt. Standing on one foot, the youngster removed a canvas shoe from the other, shook the sand from it, and replaced the shoe on a bare foot. The child drew a deep breath and stood still an instant with a wandering gaze roving over the garden.
In that pause Jamie took mental account of the lean, flat figure. One trouser leg was fastened at the knee. The other had lost its fastening and hung halfway down the ankle with a loose strap and a flopping buckle. The sleeves of the green khaki shirt were cut off at the elbows and one of them was ripped lengthwise to the shoulder. Hands and arms and legs as well bore the traces of climbing and rough exercise. The little face was rather flat; the nose a faint pug; the mouth wide. The eyes seemed not overly large. At that distance Jamie could not decide what colour they were. The hair might have been brown if it had not been bleached by California suns until the outer layer was a flaxen tan; where it fell apart darker streaks appeared. It was cut evenly in a circle from ear lobe to ear lobe and across the forehead in a bang. “Dutch” Jamie supposed , and as he sat watching, the child with a movement exquisitely deft and graceful, began to pirouette, to dance in the sunshine.
Sometimes with arms curved above the head until the tips of the fingers touched, sometimes with the right arm extended and lifted and the left trailing behind like a flying Mercury, up and down the walk went the small figure, whirling, reaching as if snatching butterflies from the air, dancing all alone there in the mid-afternoon under the California sun. Then, tiring, a sudden change from the dance to a walk started the youngster straight toward Jamie. Halfway between lay the Madonna lily bed. Opposite it the child paused, bent forward, and peered at the lily faces, and then Jamie’s eyes widened and a queer, incredulous grin crossed his face. What he was seeing was a very small person on bended knees, elbows akimbo, hands at the sides, in a half-crouching attitude, with eyes rolled heavenward, ecstatically sucking, one after another, the pistils of the Madonna lilies!
Jamie’s grin widened to a chuckle when once he noticed that a pistil overflowing honey had dripped a drop on a petal and the child supported the under side of the petal and licked away the drop with an appreciative tongue and then arose and came slouching down the walk until Jamie drew back his toes because they happened to be particularly sore and tender and he did not want them stepped on.
The youngster stopped and looked at Jamie, from the crown of his tired, sick head to the soles of his very badly swollen feet, and an expression of wonderment crossed the small face, but there was not the slightest sign of fear and there was no backward movement. Ground attained was firmly held.
“Oh, hello!” said the child.
“Hello!” said Jamie, as cordially as he could say it in a voice that had so recently been roughened with the emotion of self-pity.
“Where’s the Bee Master?” asked the small person.
Jamie hesitated. He was near enough now to look to the depths of the eyes trained on him, and it struck him that they had more depth, more expression, more comprehension, than any pair of eyes that he had ever seen on a person of anywhere near that age. There were things lying away back in the depths of the brownish grey eyes meeting his that awoke Jamie to caution.
“He went away for a few days and left me in charge,” he answered.
“Oh! But we don’t know you," objected the small person.
“But I’m here,” said Jamie.
“So you are,” said the small person, “and you prodibly wouldn’t be here if the Bee Master hadn’t said you might, and whatever he says, goes!”
With that “goes” both hands were spread out on a level with the belt line and given an emphatic downward and outward sweep that seemed to cover long distances with perfect accuracy.
“I am glad you think I’ll do,” said Jamie.
“I haven’t had time to think anything,” said the small person. “I am no acrobat in my head. I can’t think quick. If the Bee Master told you to come here and stay here, you’ve got to come and you’ve got to stay and you’ve got to do. That’s all there is to that. I’m the Bee Master’s side partner. Look me over, Kid! It ain’t expensive!”
Jamie smiled, and when Jamie smiled, which was not any too frequent an occurrence, there were tiny dancing flecks of light in his eyes and a stretching of the skin over his lean face and a twitching of his lips that made an appeal that had not as yet failed in its effect. The child advanced a step and laid a hand on Jamie’s arm while an impish grin overspread the small features. The inquiry was shot at him suddenly.
“Did you see me pirouette?”
Jamie nodded.
“Did I pull it off pretty well?”
“I thought you did famously,” said Jamie.
“We got to do that darn stuff in school,” said the small person. “It’s the bunk! But when I get off where I think I’m alone, I practise it. I think I can do it better to the bee music and to the waves than any other kind. It’s sure goofy! I wish you could see Fat Ole Bill pirouette! But if your school makes you do it, you might just as well keep everlastingly at it until you do it a little bit better than the other fellow.”
“That’s sound logic,” said Jamie. “If you start out with that kind of an idea in your head and keep ‘everlastingly at it,’ there isn’t any place you can land except at the top of the heap.”
“That’s the way I’ve got it figured,” said the small person, casually. “And I’ve learned while only just as wide and just as high as I am this minute, that I can’t be Scout Master and Chief of the Robbers’ Den and First Assistant to the Bee Master unless I hoe it down.”
Jamie decided that the little figure before him was surely a boy.
There was a slight drawing closer, a lowering of the voice, and the small person asked confidentially: “When did they take him to the hospital?”.
Jamie drew back and looked inquiringly at the child.
“I didn’t say any one was taken to the hospital,” he protested.
“No. You didn’t,” conceded the small person. “But if you had known the Bee Master as well as I’ve known him, in all the time we’ve been partners, which is ever since I’ve been big enough to climb the fence, you’d know that there wasn’t any place they could take him away from this garden except to the hospital, and you’d know there wasn’t any way they could take him except flat on his back.”
“I suspect that’s about the truth,” said Jamie.
The youngster, in an instant gesture, threw out wide arms with spread fingers and nodded emphatically.
“That’s just edsactly the truth, because he has needed to go for months and months and Doctor Grayson’s told him to go, and coaxed him to go, and tried to make him go, and none of them could make him. He thought he’d do anything in the world for me. He said he would. So when I saw that he wasn’t going to go and couldn’t be made to go”—there was a sudden straightening of the small figure and a squaring of the shoulders—“I didn’t tell him to go to the hospital. I told him to stay at home and do what he felt like,” and here the youngster chuckled, “’cause I knew darn well that was what he was goin’ to do anyway, and I didn’t want to spoil my record! When you got a position to hold you might as well look a little to keeping up your fences.”
There was no reason that Jamie could see as to why he should not laugh, and anyway, he had done it before he knew it was coming. But it did not disconcert the small person; not a particle.
“When will they operate?”
The question upset Jamie. He slowly shook his head.
“I don’t even know what his trouble is,” he said.
“Neither do I,” said the child. “I guess it’s the only thing on earth that really hurt his heart that he didn’t tell me about. He told me about all the things that hurt him and drove him from his home in the East, and about the little girl with gold hair that he had to give up in such a horrid way, and I’ve been all through the big carved mahogany chest and straightened all the papers and seen all the pictures in it. I know about how he loved Mary, and I know about the home he lost. I even know the secret that broke his heart, and I know all he can teach me about the bees.”
The small person paused and dropped into a voice of absolute business impartiality.
“About bees, now. There’s so much to learn that the men who write the books haven’t found it all out yet, so, of course, the Bee Master couldn’t teach it all to me. But I know all he could show me about the hives and about the bee bread and foul brood and about queens and nymphs and workers and drones and nurses. That about nurses is the sky-blue limit! You wouldn’t hardly believe that a hive of bees would have nurses, now would you?”
Thinking of recent experiences, Jamie said slowly: “Nurses are among the most wonderful things in the world, and I have heard that bees are very wonderful, so I think it’s probable that they do have nurses.”
“Right you are, Pat!” said the small person. “I can take you to any of these hives and open them up and show you maybe as many as forty thousand nurses taking care of the white nymphs.”
And then, for the second time, Jamie faced the question: “Are you bee immune?”
And again Jamie answered: “I don’t know. I’ve had no experience.”
The small person chuckled appreciatively.
“Neither had I—until I got it. After I had stuck around from the first time I ever saw his white head and away back into his eyes until he said I might be his partner and help him with the bees, I hadn’t had any experience, so I went back one morning, down along the east side over there, to see whether I was bee immune, and we always thought afterward that I made a mistake. My scent wasn’t right.”
Jamie bit his lip and swallowed hard because, as a matter of fact, the young person before him smelled more strongly of horse than of anything else, while dog ran a close second, and mingled with the odours of horse and dog there was a strong hint of Madonna lilies and onions. The combination played on Jamie’s delicate sense of smell in a peculiar way. It was not so long since his eyes had been smarting with self-pity, yet at that particular minute he wanted to whoop. And there was no good reason at all why he should not. Without in the least understanding his mental processes, the small person proceeded gravely.
“My scent wasn’t right. You know, a bee has got smell hollows instead of a nose. They are in two little tubes that stick out where a nose would be if it wasn’t on a bee, and each one of the worker bees (which are the ones that do the business around a hive) each one of the worker bees has got five thousand smell hollows. And a worker isn’t a patchen to a male. A male’s got thirty-seven thousand eight hundred smell hollows, so he’ll be sure not to miss the scent of the Queen when he goes out to love her up. So, if a male came near me, a fat chance I had, all gummed up with horse and dog. That was the whole trouble—my scent wasn’t right. The Bee Master said it was too aggressive. I had been riding Queen and playing with Mom’s dog and when I get into a scuffle with Chum, half the time he’s on top and half the time I am, and I was all smeared up with dog and horse and things like that, things a bee doesn’t like. The Bee Master always said if he had used any judgment himself, it wouldn’t have happened. He always felt bad about it, but I didn’t mind so much. It’s a pretty good thing to know just edsactly what you are getting into and then, if you think you can stand it, why, most likely you can Anyway, I said I would go down before the hives in the east row the way the Bee Master went to fill the watering pans and to watch that there wasn’t any robbing going on and to see if the queens were all happy and laying a few million eggs or so, and I went meandering along, and first thing I knew , out came a big working bee zoomin’ right above my head, and behind it came two or three more, and they were between me and the Master, and I didn’t want to cut through his flowers—he’s just about as particular as anybody God ever made about flowers and I didn’t know edsactly how to get my chance to dust the home plate, ’cause I had only two eyes and each one of them had maybe six thousand on each side of its head.
“Then the Bee Master yells at me and he says: ‘Zigzag!’ And that was all right if he had a-said it in Spanish or French or something, but there wasn’t any use in talking English before his bees, because they understood him just as well as I did! I tried hard enough to do what he told me, but whenever I’d zig, the darn bee would zig, too; and whenever I’d leap to one side and try to zag, the bee had zagged just a little bit before Ihad, and just naturally, workin’ it that way, we interfered. Say, did a Black German ever zip you?”
Jamie’s face went black for an instant, and then he looked at the eager little face in front of him and let the instant pass as he said, quietly, “Not with the stinger of a bee. No. But I’ve had a few experiences with wasps and hornets out in the fields and woods when I was a boy. I get the general idea.”
"I hardly think you do,” said the small person. “I hardly think there’s anything, in the stinging profession, wearing six legs, that’s got quite such a sharp, long, ready to-use stinger as a Black German bee. By gravy! they can ping you to the liver, and when about three of ’em takes you on the back of your neck and around the ears and into your arm muscles, oh, boy!”
Both hands clenched and then unclenched and were thrown outward in a wide-spreading sweep.
“When I got back to the Bee Master, I was shaking like I had a chill and I bet enough salt water was running down my face to make a good soup spoon full of salt. Because the Bee Master says every bucket of water you take from the ocean is three and a half per cent. salt, but I bet two bits I’m saltier ’an that. If I’d a-died I couldn’t a-kept my salt water back. The Master said it was rotten, and he held me tight and rubbed off the stingers, ’cause that’s the way you must; if you pull ’em it makes them worse. And then he turned the hose on a clayey place and mixed a cool poultice of mud and spread on the stings, and he said he ought to be booted for lettin’ me go ’mong the bees when I was all smelly of dogs and horses.
“So I wiped up my eyes and I said I reckoned that was the trouble. What I ought to a-done was to put on his old bee coat and rubbed some lilies on my head and some cinnamon pinks on my britches. So I went to the back porch and got his coat and when I commenced putting it on, he asked me what I was going to do. And I told him I was going to get my scent right and ‘try, try again. He just sat there looking at me, and I never saw his eyes get so big and black and I never saw his face get whiter when the pain was hurting him the worst, and away back under his breath, so I could barely hear, he whispered, ‘Before God, you wouldn’t do it, little Scout?’
“And I said, ‘God ain’t got nothin’ to do with this. It’s between you and me, and I’m going!’
“And so I buttoned up the coat and I went down to the cinnamon pink bed and I just about rolled in it. I don’t know but I treated the pinks rougher than the Master liked, but you’ll understand if you ever get stung by a Black German why I was anxious to get plenty of cinnamon on. And then I smashed the sweetest lily I could find and I rubbed it in all over my hair. And then I started down the east walk. I thought I’d try the Italian bees first. They’re a lot decenter than the Germans. I ain’t much of a whistler, but I whistled ‘Highland Mary’ the best I could, and I went along, soft and easy, and I ain’t right sure but I carried the last lily in my hands, and keeping serene—around bees you just naturally got to keep serene; no rough stuff goes, but I wasn’t oozin’ certainty so’s you could notice it—I stopped by the door of every last Italian and they never done a thing to me. So the Master was right. I took my medicine because my scent was wrong. So I rubbed up the lily a little when I headed for the Black Germans and I went and stood in front of them and counted ten. Then I double dared ’em to come on and sting me. They sort of fussed around a little and two of ’em came pretty close, but when they got the flowers strong, they went away again. Any way, I faced ’em down. And when I went back to the Bee Master, he took me up in his arms and he said he wished to God he’d lived to see the day when his little Mary would’ve showed spirit like that, and he hugged me so tight he nearly cracked every bone in my body, and he gave me the first kiss I ever got off him. And I ain’t had half a dozen since. Believe you me, he’s no necker! And he said that I could be his partner and help him about keeping the bees. Let me tell you, you’ll get on your uppers and you’ll do something worth while, you’ll stir your think-tank posolutely to the bottom, before the Bee Master comes across! His coat’s hanging on the back porch and there’s flowers a-plenty here in the garden. Any time you want to find out how the bees feel about your soul, you can soon get it over with, includin’ war tax. But, oh, boy! lemme tell you this! Before you go near the hives of the Black Germans, get your scent right!”
“But how do I get my scent right?” asked Jamie.
“Well, for one thing, I’ll show you the right coat. Put that on and then go and stick your head in the cinnamon pinks and rub it all around like I did, and then take a Madonna lily and smash it and rub it all over your hands, and maybe you better go down by the water tap where there is a little spongy place and pull a handful of mint and rub that all over your britches. Whatever you do, don’t weaken! You better whistle the right tune. Can you whistle, slow and easy, ‘Highland Mary’? That’s the one the bees like best. Her name was Mary. And if you can whistle it real soft and easy, and lots of love, and lots of coaxin’, and lots of lonesomeness, if you can work it up just right—you are about his height—the bees might not know the difference. Yes, I guess they would, too. You prodibly never heard of such eyes as bees have got. A worker after you has got six thousand eyes on each side of its head, and a male—’cause on account of the Queen again, when she flies clear nearly to Heaven, way above the birds and everything—a male has got thirteen thousand eyes on each side of its head. So you better believe, if one got roused up about you, he’d see that your head wasn’t white, All the bees would miss the Bee Master’s white head. It was always bare. And they’d miss his beard and his big, dark eyes. Ain’t he wonderful?”
“Yes, I have an idea, from the few minutes I saw him and from his home and his library and his profession, yes, I’ve an idea that he is rather wonderful.”
“He’s just the only wonder of his kind,” said the small person with the wide-spread downward gesture that was becoming familiar to Jamie.
Then the question came abruptly: “Was he awful sick?”
Jamie looked into the wide eyes of comprehension before him and thought of neither lie nor evasion.
“Yes,” he said. “He was the sickest man I ever saw, and I’ve certainly seen some sick ones!”
“You can’t tell me much about him,” said the small person. “I’ve helped him up the back walk and to the davenport and gotten the ammonia a few times when I didn’t ever think I’d pull him through. I’ve seen him suffer until the sweat would run right down and drop off the tip of his nose, just a drop at a time, slow, and fall on his shirt front, splat! splat!—and I’ll tell the world, it’s pretty awful! If he’s sick like that again, maybe he’d better go on and die.”
At the casual tone in which the suggestion was uttered, Jamie reeled back on the seat and stared hard at the impersonal face of the youngster before him. He had been under the impression that this child adored the Bee Master. At that minute he felt that he was facing a little pagan who did not adore anything, or even have a fair conception of what the word might mean. Yet there had been considerable conception of what the word might mean in the instructions as to how he was to whistle “Highland Mary,” so Jamie, through narrowed eyes, looked steadily at the little Scout and then he said tentatively: “I thought you liked him.”
“Liked him?” said the little Scout. “Say, look here!”
Before Jamie’s eyes was thrust a grimy right hand. Smash down like the blade of a knife came the left across the wrist. Slowly the fingers of the right hand opened and closed.
“I need that in my business,” said the little Scout. “I couldn’t ride Queen; I couldn’t be leader of the Scouts; I couldn’t paddle my canoe; I couldn’t be the Bee Master’s partner without it, but if it would take that pain out of the Bee Master’s side, I’d give it to him, just like that!”
The right hand was severed and discarded in mighty effective pantomime.
A great big lump rose up in Jamie’s throat, threatening very nearly to choke him.
The small person stood on one foot and set the other on the bench and clasped a pair of grimy hands around the bended knee and leaned toward Jamie.
“I guess you got me wrong,” was the surmise that fell on his astounded ears. Then suddenly that position was relinquished and Jamie felt a small body beside him and a small head leaning precariously near the wound that made red stains on his breast, and one little abused hand Jay down on one of his hands, and a small face was lifted to his, and a voice, low and mellow and exceedingly sweet of tone, said to Jamie, softly: “Do you know how beautiful dying can be?”
Perhaps that hit Jamie the hardest of all, because he had not been contemplating Death as a beautiful thing, and he had been contemplating it day and night for other men for more years than he liked to enumerate. In his own case, two was plenty. He could not speak, so he shook his head.
“Just like me,” said the small person. “I didn’t know anything at all about it, but Nannette did. Nannette’s my big sister. She had the rottenest luck. At the lake where we went last summer, a man got drowned and next day Nannette was playing along the shore with some other kids and ran right into him just as they got him out of the water, and he had been in long a-plenty and the turtles hadn’t done a thing to him. And she came home and Mother said she had the hysterics, and she kept on havin’ ’em in the night in her sleep ’til I got so I saw about what she’d seen. So not long ago, my mother’s little old Aunt Beth went to Heaven and first Mother said we couldn’t go and say good-bye to her. She went in the night, you know, in her sleep, with her hands folded on her breast and the strangest little mysterious smile on her face. It was like she knew a beautiful secret that she’d love to tell, and she was smilin’ over it while she decided whether she would tell or not. Dad said maybe it’d be a good thing to let us go. Maybe Nannette would see something that would make her feel better. Nannette didn’t want to go, but after Dad said that, Mother made her. So we went after dinner when we had come home from school. Mother washed us up and put on our Sunday clothes and Dad took us in the car, and right at the front door the beautiful part started.
“There was a big wreath that nearly covered the door and it began in little blue forget-me-nots and violets and heliotrope, and it ran into white hyacinths and gold hyacinths and blue ones, and there were sprays of lavender heather and white roses and pale pink roses, and at the clear to the porch floor, the loveliest white lilies. I never bottom where it was tied with lavender chiffon that hung saw anything that was so beautiful.”
The small face lifted to Jamie’s.
“Did you ever see anything as lovely as that?” he was asked.
Jamie shook his head.
“In the living room, where, ever since I’d known her, Aunt Beth had sat in a wheel chair, it was just flowers everywhere. All our family sent them, and all the neigh bours sent them, and her church sent them, and people we’d never heard of sent them, because everybody loved Aunt Beth. Mother said she was the biggest little liar in the whole world. Days when you could see she was twisty with pain, she’d look you straight in the eye and say she was better. She was always better. And she had the funniest house. You never went to it that from somewhere she couldn’t pull out a cooky with candy on it, or red peppermint sticks, and she always had the best raisins. My! you never tasted such raisins as she always had! Or sometimes popcorn, or doughnuts, and the last time I had been there, the spiciest gingerbread—it smelled like the geography of India sounds!
"We went back into Aunt Beth’s bedroom, and over her bed there was a lavender satin spread, and she was lying upon her pillow and her hair was soft and wavy she had a big roll of hair and it was bright brown. She was eighty-seven and you couldn’t hardly find a gray hair on her head. It was in soft, silky coils and it waved so pretty.
"And Death had gone and magicked her. There wasn’t a line in her face, and her throat was round, and her lips were smiley. My! she was the prettiest thing! And her dress was like it was cut from soft gray clouds and the sleeves and down the front was all cobwebby lace, and at her wrists it tied in perky little bows.
"Nannette stood and looked at her and she kept creep in closer to her and she looked and she looked and then she grabbed me and she said, ‘Why, I thought she’d be like the man I saw!’
"And then Dad and all of us found out for the first time that Nannette thought all the dead people everywhere looked like the man that had been in the water among the turtles and everything; and I’ll tell you, we were glad then that we’d brought Nannette to see Aunt Beth! She was so pretty—Nannette wanted to untie the ribbons in her sleeves and fix ’em the way she wanted ’em, and that made me want to do something for her, and so I asked what I might do, and they said that I might put her slippers on her. They turned back the lacy spread with the lavender lining that covered her and I got to put on her feet her little gray slippers with white fur on ’em. They were the prettiest little things! And then I fixed her skirts, her gray satin petty and her lacy dress; and Nannette fixed her sleeves and we covered her up and kissed her good-bye, and we came away, and you can’t scare us with being dead any more!
“Nannette hasn’t jumped in the night since, not once. We know now that there are several kinds of being dead. There’s the kind where you’ve had a bad heart and you haven’t told true and you’ve taken things that didn’t belong to you, and you haven’t played the game square with God, and you haven’t had any respect for your government, and, of course, you ain’t goin’ to look very well whether you’re dead or alive if you’ve got things like that inside you. And then, added to that, there’s accidents that might happen to anybody—lyin’ in the water a long time and turtles is one thing, or bein’ burned in a fire or blown up in a factory. That’s your hard luck. But if you get to die at home, just to go to sleep softly in your own bed in the night, so softly that you never lift your hands off your breast, and when you see God a little sweet smile creeps over your face—— Gee! I bet God and all the angels were tickled to pieces to see Aunt Beth when she came walkin’ in, all slender and straight and young in her softy cloud dress! Nannette put forget-me-nots and Parma violets and heliotrope in her hands when she got her sleeves tied right. If she still carried them when she got to Heaven, all around her would be smelly with flowers. None of us wanted her to go. We all liked to take care of her. We all liked to take her fruits and flowers and books and papers. Every one of us saved every funny story we found to tell her, but at that we were all kind of glad when she went, ’cause her bones must have hurt her, and she couldn’t have told true when she always said she was better, because she had to give up and have the doctor sometimes, bad as she hated it.”
The little Scout stood up with outflung hands in a gesture of finality.
“After I’ve told you that, you can see how the Bee Master might look if God decided that he should go to sleep in the night, and there wouldn’t be any more pain in his side or any more sweat drippin’ off his nose. I bet all the harps and all the trumpets in Heaven would go ‘Zoom! Zoom!’ and all the angels would come flocking if the Bee Master went through the gates! I bet God Himself would stand up when the Bee Master came up so straight and tall to salute Him, because sometimes, some where he’d been in a war. He’s got a bully uniform and he can pull off the snappiest salutes! He’s been a soldier and I bet you’ve been a soldier, too, ’cause you look like a soldier and you move like a soldier, and I think it’s punk that you ain’t got your uniform on. I just love uniforms!”
And then Jamie’s mouth fell open and his eyes widened. A cautioning hand was thrust backward toward him. A sibilant hiss that was intended for a warning to silence struck his ears. Leaning forward, softly, a step at a time, one hand thrust outward for balance, one thrust back for caution, the little Scout crept in a crouching attitude down the walk, eyes fixed straight ahead. Leaning over to get the alignment, Jamie saw a big bumble bee clambering over the entrance petal to the horn of a trumpet flower. He saw the little Scout measure off a certain distance, crouch, and then quick, quicker almost than he could sense what was happening, a stream of saliva shot straight and hit the bee, knocking it off its moorings. The little Scout sprang into the air and uttered a whoop that would have startled an Apache on the war path. Wildly whirling and shouting, with beating hands, the child, in a shrill, boyish voice, cried, “Hit him! By Golly! I hit him! Knocked him ping!”
Then, turning, the small figure made a rush toward Jamie and a hand gripped each of his knees.
“Say, if I bring Fat Ole Bill and the Nice Child and Angel Face, will you tell ’em? Will you say I did it? We got a bet. I’m two bits to the good. I’ll lick the hide off ’em if they don’t take my word, but I could put up a heap bigger swank if you’d tell ’em you saw me.”
Jamie finally got his mouth arranged in a position in which it would speak recognizable English.
Then he said, “Surely! Any day you want me to, I’ll meet your pals and I’ll testify that fairly and squarely you hit the bee.”“I’ve been practising on that for a week,” boasted the small person, proudly. “I’ve been trying and I bet a quarter that I’d do it, and two bits is some bet, lemme tell you! There’s lots of things you can do with two bits!”
Jamie thought of times when he had contemplated less than two bits in an open palm during the past few days, and admitted the truth of the assertion. Talking of money evidently started a new train of thought. With inquiring eyes the youngster studied him.
“Will you go to the hospital to see the Bee Master any time soon?”
“I’m waiting for a telephone call,” said Jamie. “Doctor Grayson told me that he would call and report progress and as soon as the Master is able to see me, of course I’ll go.”
The little Scout dipped in a breeches pocket and brought to light a handful of numerous things, and from strings and buttons and buckles and pebbles, with the left hand, selected a dime and two nickels and held them over to Jamie.
“When you go, will you stop at the nearest lunch counter and get a hot dog and a bottle of strawberry pop for him and give ’em to him from me with a tight hug and a kiss?”
Jamie accepted the money with a sober face.
“Surely,” he said, enthusiastically.
“I’ll give you the kiss for him right now,” said the small person, and without any preliminaries Jamie had pasted fairly on his lips the hardest, hottest, sweetest little kiss of all his experience. He found his hands on the shoulders of the small person and his eyes intent on the face.
“Look here!” he said. “Are you a girl or a boy?”
The small person, with a deft twist, slipped through his fingers like shifting sand and took a step or two backward.
“If you can’t tell, it doesn’t make a darn bit of difference, does it?”
And Jamie was constrained to admit that it did not.
“I guess I’d better be goin’,” said the little Scout. “I wish you’d get on the job with that hot dog impressive. The Master likes ’em with the bun toasted and the boiled wienie split and fried and striped with a line of mustard and a thick slather of fried onions on and a slice of dill pickle. Can you remember that? Is that the way you like ’em?”
“Love o’ Mike!” said Jamie, licking his lips, “I haven’t had one in ages! Sure I can remember!”
“Then that’s that!” said the small person. “Do you feel like you’re sure goin’ to get on the job and you’re sure goin’ to take care of things here?”
“The level best I can,” said Jamie. “But I’ll have to tell you as I told your partner, I don’t know the first thing about bees.”
“And you don’t look chipper enough,” said the small person, “to coast down the east side and climb up the west side of two acres of bees. You sit still and I’ll go see if they are all right myself.”
So Jamie sat under the jacqueranda and waited while the little Scout went down the east side, carefully inspecting every hive of bees, and returned with the report that the water pans were all right, the queens were all laying eggs, the workers were all busy, the drones were droning, like the disagreeable, mussy things they were. There was not any foul brood, and there were no robbers at work.
“Just common, honest bees,” said the small person, “working hard to gather up all the honey they can find in the flower gardens where the Sierra Madres smash The small party insisted on leading Jamie into the through the Santa Monicas right into the sea.”
The small party insisted on leading Jamie into the house and showing him the library of bee books. All the volumes that could be read with profit to find out how to take care of the bees were pointed out, and then a light finger ran over volumes on a shelf by themselves with the comment: “Now these are the funny ones.”
A small blue volume which opened of itself was selected and from it an amused voice read, “There are several kinds of bees, the best are small, round and va-ri-e-gated.’ Can you beat it?” asked the youngster.
Jamie, glancing over the little Scout’s shoulder, caught “Aristotle” on the title page and had perhaps his hundredth shock for the afternoon. After the volume was closed and set back on the shelf, the child turned toward him: “And Pliny says that when bees cross the Mediterranean in migration they each one get a little pebble and carry it with their feet to make them heavy enough that the wind won’t blow them away!” And a laugh that was clear and silvery broke on Jamie’s ears. “Ain’t that the bunk? You ought to hear the Bee Master laugh when he reads Pliny on bees! And there are a lot more of them that are just as funny, but these are not funny at all. These are mostly what you need to know to get really interested.”
The small finger ran across Lubbock and Swammerdam with the remark in passing: “He has got wonderful pictures of how bees are inside,” and paused on Huber. “You’ll want to read Huber,” the little Scout said. “He was blind, but he thought out all the experiments and made all the investigations, and a man with eyes kept the records. He’s wonderful, too. His book is named ‘New Observations on Bees.’ Pretty good for a blind man, I’ll say. You know, being a bee master is a lot of other things besides just bees.”
The explanation was offered off-hand, gratuitously.
“It’s being outdoors most of the time. It’s flowers and what flowers bees like best. It’s a case of quick eyes and a steady hand, and I’d say you’d got to be decent. You’d better be certain you’re hitting on all your cylinders before you go around bees. The Bee Master says that bees know, and if anybody’s a liar and a cheat and got the odours of sin and selfishness hangin’ around ’em—tell it to Papa! The bees know it like a shot, if you’re mean; and they haven’t got a bit of mercy. The minute they get a whiff of what you are, they punks her your tire. If you know, away down deep inside you, that you ain’t right, and that God wouldn’t let you into Heaven if you went to sleep in the night, you better throw up this job and let me hunt somebody else to look after the bees.”
Jamie stood very straight. He emptied his pocket of his distinguished service decorations and lowered them to the eyes of the small person.
“In so far as I know,” he said, quite seriously, “there is no reason why the bees should dislike any odours that might emanate from my exterior or even from the most secret places of my soul.”
“Well, then, that’s all to the good,” said the small person. “You just look tome sometimes as if you wasn’t sure whether you was going to stay or whether you was going on.”
“I’ll admit,” said Jamie, “that it has been difficult for me to decide whether I’d stay or whether I’d go on, but if you will help me, I think it would be better for me at least to try what I can do.”
Jamie stood still and watched the small person go down the walk toward the fence which had afforded the means of entrance. Poised on the top of it and in the act of swinging over, there came clear to his ears the admonition, “Better stick around, Bo! You’ll like it!”