# The Keeper of the Bees/Chapter 3

The Bee Master
MA, DO you think we’ve shook ’em?” inquired William Brunson over his shoulder along in the cold, still hours between three and four the next morning.
“Got any idea how many miles we’ve come?” asked his wife, and William said he had not. He had forgotten to look at the speedometer when they stopped to make camp but he was certain that he had turned a hundred corners and taken every crossroad he saw, and the small town they were entering appeared as if there might be some place in it where they could find a clean bed and have a few hours of rest. As they drove down the main street they saw the open door and the lights of a hotel and so they decided that they would have beds and a good rest, and then they would have baths and breakfasts, and after that they would hold a counsel and decide what they would do.
When it came to leaving the car, they found their guest of the road sleeping so heavily it seemed a pity to awaken him, so they locked the car, threw an extra blanket over him, and left him to the luxury of the entire back seat. That was how it happened that when the ​life of the town began to stir on the streets that morning, James MacFarlane awoke with a bewildered sense of being lost. He had no idea what had happened to the Brunsons or where he was, but he speedily learned that, by reading signs on the streets around him, and he figured that nothing could have happened to the Brunsons in a town of several thousand population; so his first thought concerned breakfast. He had hoped the night before that he would be with the Brunsons, probably at the location on which they were camped before making a start for the day. Now, evidently, their plans had changed. They would probably come from the hotel before which the car was standing, refreshed with sleep, baths and food. He reflected that he had enjoyed refreshing sleep, he could postpone the bath, but there was an insistent demand in the pit of his stomach for food. He was in no mood to be particularly choice. He was so ravenously hungry that he felt he could have eaten almost anything, and tantalizingly there arose from restaurants, from the hotel building, from cafés and corner stands around him, the odours of ripe fruits. Later the aroma of coffee and cooked foods assailed his nostrils, so he began to figure on how he could materialize breakfast.
It occurred to him that he would step from the car and stretch his legs on the sidewalk and see if he could shake himself into slightly better circulation. He found himself sniffing ham and fried potatoes and toast and coffee and bacon and waffles somewhere in the immediate neighbourhood; merely from force of habit, because he knew there ​was not a penny in his pockets, he ran his hands into the region where the pockets of a male are usually located and stood in stupefied bewilderment because he brought the hand back to the light, and in it there was quite an assortment of nickels and dimes, a quarter or two, and a fifty-cent piece. His mouth fell open slowly and his eyes widened, and without in the least knowing why he did it, he looked above the line of the buildings over the range of the mountains in the distance and on across the cloudless deep blue of the California sky and said, very politely: “I thank thee, Lord.”
He could not have told how long it had been since he had reverently said, “I thank thee, Lord.” He had been figuring that in the few years past he had not experienced very much for which to thank the Lord, at least not since a fire had been eating in his breast and weakness had assailed his limbs and shaken his big, capable hands. He did not stop to reflect either that the Lord might not have had much to do with the fact that he was wearing another man’s trousers, but, after all, Jamie felt that he needed the trousers, he needed them exceedingly, and he had given his own, which were much better looking and infinitely cleaner, in exchange for the ones he had acquired, the looking down upon which filled his fastidious soul with repulsion. He reflected that if he had been in a position to see the trousers he might have risked one more day wearing his uniform.
Having no idea when the Brunsons might return to their car, and being increasingly hungry since there was ​money in his fingers and he need not delude himself with the idea that he was not hungry, he squared his shoulders and looked around to see if his particularly sensitive nostrils could detect from which of the surrounding places where food was being cooked exactly the most delicious odours were emanating. That recalled him to the change he held in his palm. He spread his right hand in line of vision and with the forefinger of the left slowly pushed the coins around. He was so rejoiced over his findings that he could have shouted like a small boy. The half and the quarters made a dollar; the nickels and the dimes and a few pennies for good measure to totalled eighty-seven cents.
He reflected that by judicious ordering, by making it mostly coffee with a little toast and bacon to add back bone, he would not be utterly at the mercy of the world for another day at least. Since he had thanked the Lord merely for the feel of small change in his hands, it occurred to Jamie, even in his hunger and his desire to keep near the car, that he might ride further if possible, that it would be a good thing once more to pay tribute. So again he looked to the sky, and this time with a burr that might have descended to him from the tongue of a grandfather on either side of his house, he said, right out loud there on the sidewalk of the California town: “It’s unco gude o’ you, Lord.” And when his ears heard him talking like a Scot they telegraphed the strange proceeding to his brain and Jamie, who a few minutes before had felt decidedly aggrieved, laughed aloud and, turning, started down the ​street toward the most insistent odour of bacon and coffee that he could detect.
It was while he was sitting on a high stool with his feet on a railing before a counter that the clothing he had adopted drew closely around him and he became aware that he was wearing a hip pocket that contained something that from the feel of it might have been several things; but at first shot Jamie decided that he would guess a bill book. Then it occurred to him that it might be a good thing, since one pocket had yielded a living for a day at least, to go through all of them. And so he began on the outside breast pocket of the coat in which he found a couple of cheap cigars. In the other pockets there were some bits of string and several buttons and a filthy handkerchief, the big revolver and a handful of cartridges. Then he tried the inside pockets and found a couple of letters which he decided to attend to later. Then he ran his hand in his left pants pocket and brought it away empty. And then, to finish the job, he reached around to the hip pocket and brought out the bill book. It really happened to be a bill book, and it really happened to have several bills in it, and instantly Scot caution asserted itself in Jamie’s mind. He had heard considerable about bandits and light-fingered gentlemen and taking your neighbour’s property without his knowledge or consent. On the mere knowledge that there were two or three bills that might be of reasonable denominations, he slipped the book shut and slid it back in his pocket, and ​then he leaned his elbows on the counter and thought deep and fast.
He was not a thief. He never had been. But he was on a great adventure. It was becoming greater every minute. He reflected that if his little mother, up close to the throne, had been looking down at him and praying with all her might for his safety and his success in his undertaking, and if the Lord had been bending her way and listening with loving, indulging ears, Jamie thought he could not have gotten along much better so far. Only half a day, only a night, and through the blessing of an automobile—two automobiles, to be exact—he was more than two hundred miles from where he had started, and since those two hundred miles led to the north and the west, he must be considerably nearer the sea. Precisely why all his being had begun clamouring for the sea the minute he had gotten to his feet and made his start, Jamie did not know. He had not taken time to analyze himself or to try to find out why he wanted water, worlds of water, clean, jade- green and sky-blue and indigo-blue water, salty water, and foam, great swaths of snowy foam. He wanted to see waves, big waves, piling up high on a beach, and then he was obsessed with the ridiculous feeling, probably because he missed his morning bath, that he wanted to get in that water. Then he wanted to lie on the sand and bake in the sun and sleep endlessly and go back to the sea water again. Possibly it was not boiling water from an interior spring that was needed to ​fit his peculiar conditions. Maybe it was cold water, salt water, sea water that would turn the trick.
He was thinking so intently of the bare possibility that the sea might do something for him that the springs had not done that he almost forgot the odours of food around him. He could afford to forget, since he would not be forced to abstain. He was going to have a cup of coffee, with thick, rich cream in it, and crispy toast and real bacon in only a minute. About the money in his pocket—he did not know precisely what the man to whom the breeches he was wearing belonged, owed society in general, but he had an idea from the enterprise in which he had found him engaged, from his talk and familiarity with the situation, that this man might owe a fairly heavy debt. Jamie had the feeling that, since he had captured two guns and defeated the brutes, the two of them, in what he had heard them saying aloud in clear English that they intended to inflict upon a man who evidently was a very decent man and who, through long years of economy and hard work, had amply earned the vacation he was taking, he was entitled to the contents of their pockets. As for the fresh young girl and her equally wholesome and interesting mother, a wave of nausea swept Jamie’s whole being, and regardless of who might be looking, he pulled the bill book from his hip pocket and opened it wide and emptied it, and found in his amazed fingers exactly forty nine dollars even, in ones, fives, and tens. This time he was really stunned, and the ceiling of the restaurant was so uninviting that, if he did glance upward, even involun​tarily, he forgot his thanks. He made a wild and desperate resolve on the instant: When he had eaten the food he had ordered, he was going to have a bath, he was going to have clean, fresh underclothing, he was going to have trousers and a coat that fitted and would not fill him with repulsion, and he was going to have a hat in which he might appear at least as attractive as it was possible for him to look.
He gave the ethics of the case very slight consideration. He had frustrated the attack on the camp; he had gotten away from two men with their artillery. He had been of sufficient benefit to William Brunson and his wife and daughter so that they should be willing for him to have forty-nine dollars as his reward, and from the depth of his soul and the ceaseless grind of the wound in his left breast he felt that the Lord would absolve him for buying clothes that were new and clean. What was it the doctor had said? That he was the best breeding ground imaginable for germs? One glance at the legs of the trousers he was wearing made him feel like the original factory in which germs had been invented. So he stuck his long arms as far out of the coat sleeves as he could and pushed the side lapels as far back as they would go and gulped coffee so hot it almost scalded him and ate bacon that really was crisp and toast that was properly browned. He paid his bill and, carrying the wealth of a mint on his person, went back to the sidewalk and looked for the Brunson car.
It was standing where he had left it, so he went over ​and walked past the hotel office. He could see no sign of any of the Brunsons, so he went to the clerk and asked to see the register. When he found what he was looking for, he told the clerk to tell his friends, if they came down before he returned, that he had gone to get a shave and some fresh clothing. Someway he got a decided feeling of uplift from the fact that he would not have to tell William Brunson and his wife and daughter that he was whipped and sore, a broken hulk of a man with not a penny in his pockets and fleeing from a government with whose regulations he was not even familiar so slight was his own prospect of release. Such a thing as walking from the care of the Government without any notion as to where he was going or what would happen to him had never occurred to him, even among far-reaching possibilities, and now that he was doing the thing, he had to admit that he did not know whether he was a deserter or not. Certainly he could not be a deserter, because the war had been over for so many long months. Of course, there was some formality that probably had been gone through with to keep him on record and in care of the Government. There was the barest possibility that a day might come in which he would want to ask for the official history pertaining to the decorations he carried.
He left the hotel with instructions from the clerk as to where the best outfitting store of the town could be found and bought himself the clothing he needed to make him clean and comfortable. Sparingly, of the cheapest things he could find that would possibly serve his needs, ​he bought what he felt he required, and then he went into a barber shop, and when his hair was cut and he was freshly shaved, he paid for a bath, and this he followed up by a change into his new clothes. When before a mirror in the bathroom he tried on his new hat, he reflected that if he had red blood in his veins and a hundred pounds of beef steak on his bones, he might not be such a bad-looking man. Tall he would always be, and big boned like his Scottish ancestors; his lean hands were tapering, his features were finely cut, and his deep, blue-gray eyes at least looked as if they might be honest eyes, kind eyes, interesting eyes.
So Jamie went back to the hotel carrying a neatly wrapped bundle which contained another man’s coat and yet another man’s trousers. He meant to drop it by the wayside somewhere along his journey, merely in case some man as sorely pressed as he had been might find it and it might fill a need, even as his needs had been served.
When William Brunson walked into the office, Jamie, fortified by neat gray trousers and a coat that really fitted him and a shirt that was clean and fresh, arose smilingly, holding out a hand, but instead of recognition he received a cold stare. He had to remove his hat and work his Scottish burr before William Brunson would accept him as his passenger of the previous day; while the wonder with which he had gone to sleep as to whether he was leaving his car in the possession of a third bandit for ever vanished from his mind. There had not been even the ghost of a bandit for ten generations in the an​cestry of the man before him. On that William Brunson would have taken oath. As he stood holding Jamie’s hand, he looked at him laughingly and said: “Well, I’ll be darned! I didn’t know you, and if I stand away from you, I bet Ma and Susy won’t either!”
Jamie laughed in return. “I made that lightning change in the dark last night,” he said. “Moonlight is a mighty deceptive thing. I only wanted to shed the uniform of Uncle Sam pronto, so I took the first chance that offered, but when I woke up this morning and found that my clothes were better fitted to walk than I was, I decided that I’d see how quick I could change them.”
“Come on to breakfast,” said William Brunson.
"Thank you, I’ve had my breakfast,” said Jamie MacFarlane. “If you are going to be good enough to let me ride with you so long as you are going north and west, that will be fine.”
“There isn’t any question about how long you may ride with the Brunsons,” said the husband and father of the Brunson family. “You may ride just as long as you darn please. It doesn’t make any difference to me if it is all the way to Iowa!”
So Jamie picked up a morning paper and read until Mrs. Brunson and Susy came into the office, and they really did not know him, so he had to work the burr on them before they would believe that he was their passenger of the previous night. Both of them quite agreed with the judgment of their husband and father: They did not care how long this man rode with them, and he did not care either. ​So they went a considerable distance that day, with dinner by the wayside and the night at a small hotel, and then Jamie felt that the time had come when he must turn west. He could journey by easy stages. He had enough change in his pockets to carry him through food and lodging for several days, he figured, and so, throughout the long, sunny day, plodding along, he made his way west. Then he found he had gone too far north, so he laid his course west by south.
He had no desire to go where cold would wrack his aching bones. He wanted to stay where the sunshine was uninterrupted and penetrant. He went slowly and sat awhile frequently and at a noon rest when he felt that it was almost time to be thinking about lunch, in the mottled sunshine of a live oak, with his arm on a stone for a pillow, he fell sound asleep, and when a passing drove of cattle finally awakened him he rose, picked up the stick he was carrying, and stretched himself for his journey. As he did so he missed something. He had to think a minute to recall what it could be. It struck him that his trousers were not setting exactly as they had when he fell asleep, and running his hands around his body he encountered an empty hip pocket, and then an empty coat pocket—the gun, too!
Almost sick with shock and disappointment, Jamie sat back on the rock and looked around him. Lying on the ground a few yards up the mountain-side he could see the bill book he had appropriated. There was no use in exerting himself even to climb to it. It lay spread open, ​rifled of course, and so he was once more about where he had started. Enough remained of the nickels and dimes in his breeches to carry him through that day and perhaps breakfast for the morning, but the bed which he needed almost more than food had gone as mysteriously as it had come.
Jamie looked more nearly Scot than he did American as he sat on the stone, dourly frowning. Exactly why he had not put that bill book in his breast pocket and buttoned his coat he could not imagine. He had found it in the hip pocket, it fitted there, and he had put it back mechanically. If he had been using his brains, he reflected, he would have practised caution. He reflected, also, that there must be something in the fact that a large part of the world had lost its ancient sense of honour. There had been no question of honour between the bandits who meant to prey on the Brunsons. They had talked as if anything the Brunsons had might belong legitimately to them. Jamie recalled the fact that he had not been troubled by any particular qualms about taking what he had found in the bandit’s trousers. He spent a minute on the subject and still remained firm in his convictions that he had acquired a right to it, and that was why he was feeling so particularly sore that he had not taken better care of it. When a bed meant the question of whether he lived slightly longer or died very speedily, and probably very painfully, why had he been so careless with that which meant necessities and fresh bandages that he would soon be needing?
​After a while Jamie arose to his feet and laid out his course still west by south. The honest hunger that had been in the pit of his stomach an hour before was replaced by a flat nausea and he had not gone far when he found a cold perspiration beginning to break out in his palms, at his temples, on his body. He did not even look up at the sky to decide whether he would voice an appeal or not. He deliberately walked in all the sunshine he could find because, from a taste of night out of doors, he thought he would need all the stored warmth he could accumulate.
At his last resting place he took all the change from his pocket and carefully divided it. He might reach a town where for fifty cents at some cheapest of lodgings he could hire a bed. What remained would have to be equally divided between supper and breakfast. After that he was at the mercy of the world again, and at that minute he was feeling that the world might very possibly be quite as much against him as it was for him. The one consolation upon which he could rest was that if a call had been sent out from the hospital and descriptions of him had been posted, thanks to the bandit, he was so changed that no one would feel that he was the man who answered the descriptions that would be given. So Jamie followed his program me until after breakfast the next morning, and then, with only a few cents left, still headed west by south, he stumbled on. He realized that he was almost at the limit of endurance. Persistent walking had tired his feet and legs until they were beginning to swell so that his shoes were feeling too small. The sun had beaten on his ​unaccustomed head until he was dizzy. His eyes were so tired that he could have cried for the relief of dark glasses, and the price he might have paid for them at that time yesterday was lacking when he needed it so badly to-day.
Of the greater part of that day Jamie had no very clear memory remaining. The most he knew was that he had alternated walking as long as he could walk with dropping any place he could sit or lie when he could go no farther. Just where he got into a road that led him into a canyon, he did not know. He had been pushing on so nearly insensible to everything around him that he had not realized that the road had narrowed to a bridle path and the bridle path had narrowed to a footpath, and the footpath had begun to wind around the base of one side of a mountain that in the general upheaval of things had been split asunder from top to bottom. He had rounded a curve and faced the panorama before him suddenly, and at one and the same time he realized two things. He was hearing singing water. He was hearing water that was rushing and falling and spilling and laughing and doing all the heartening things that water knows how to do when it is left to follow a rocky bed down a canyon.
Jamie stood still and looked to the right and to the left and at his feet. On the right he saw walls opening up that began at ordinary range and climbed higher and higher until hundreds and then thousands of feet had been attained. These walls had stood through so many ages that the crevices and irregularities were filled with live ​oak and holly and sage, with yucca and frosty, blue-green cotyledon. Ferns were hanging down near places where the high walls seeped water. On the left the same panorama of exquisite beauty spread before him, and at his feet lay a well-defined smoothly worn path, a path that he could see had been beaten by the feet of countless foot passengers, and here and there his eyes, even though overtired, could detect the hoof print of a horse: a range rider, he thought probable.
The water at his feet seemed clean. It had to be cool. It was falling over rocks. It was leaping small precipices. It was dropping down before grottoes, fern-lined, of delicate beauty, and trim little ouzels were darting through the spray, very likely to nesting places that lay protected by falling water.
Jamie promptly sat down in the sunniest place on the warmest rock he could find and studied the situation, and after he had rested awhile he got down and drank from his cupped hands. Then he dusted off his new clothing, which was getting rather rough usage, and took up his stick and followed the footpath. It was not so difficult to follow, because it was downhill all the way, and before he had gone any great distance he began hearing voices. Then he realized that a place of such exquisite beauty would attract people, that probably campers or picnickers might be enjoying themselves beside the water that ran so impetuously that never before had he seen water travel in such haste. Jamie reflected that there was a possibility that he had done the wrong thing in discarding his uni​form. From the frequency with which he had been offered rides when he wore it, from the utter indifference with which cars had whizzed past him hundreds of times that day even when he had stood very close and raised his hand to ask for passage, he figured out that a man in uniform would be given assistance. A man in civilian clothes might be loaded with revolvers and have a mind full of evil intentions. The day seemed to be past when any traveller having a vacant seat would have despised himself if he had failed to offer any one journeying on foot the privilege of riding.
There was no question of riding now. Right foot forward, then the left, and then the right again, and oh, but they were swollen stiff, and oh, but they ached! Just when Jamie decided that he would take off his shoes and stockings and bathe his feet in the cold water and see if he could not reduce the aching and the swelling, he came face to face with a freshly painted big notice which stated that the water before him supplied Clifton, no doubt a town near by, that a ranger rode the canyon to protect it, and that any one who in any way polluted the water would be promptly arrested. So Jamie smiled dourly and looked down at his aching feet and realized that he had better leave his shoes where they were, since if he ever removed them there was a large possibility that he could not induce his feet to return to their capacity.
At any rate, his direction was right. Each step he forced himself to take was carrying him west and south. At first, tired though he was, he had not been able to ​ignore the beauty of the canyon through which he travelled. Within reach of his hand Hunter’s rock leek was blooming. There were ferns and mosses; there were red larkspur and lavender, blue, and yellow lupin and the red of pentstemon and many yellows, and one little pool filled with the pearl-white of blooming lizard’s-tail with its rank foliage, its attractive flowers. None of these Jamie knew, for none had been included in his study of botany in the East.
On and on Jamie went down the canyon. How slowly he went he did not realize himself, but by and by he began to see people. Then he knew that he had been right when he thought he heard voices. There were places where smoke ascended and suddenly and joyfully Jamie felt his problem for the remainder of that day solved. All he had to do was to wait until the picnickers left the canyon and then he would search where they had been and gather up the dry wood of dead branches and twigs that they had collected or that had fallen, and in one of the places where they had been cooking he would make a fire so big and warm that he could spend the night in comfort. So he sat down and waited until the sounds of the canyon had been reduced to bird notes and falling water, running water, laughing water, singing water. Then he began picking up everything big enough to burn and in the crook of his left arm he stacked it as he went along, until he had as big a load as he could carry. Presently he found a cavern of stone in a side wall of the stream where people had been cooking, and far back in the ashes, over which ​water had been poured, he found a few living coals. So he scraped the wet ashes away and drew the coals to the front and petted them with tiny twigs and dried grasses, and by and by, he coaxed a feeble flame, and this he fed until, as the sun went down and the air grew chill, he had heat with which to comfort his aching body.
Then, on one of his excursions after wood, he crossed the stream and made his way down the right-hand bank close at the foot of the mighty wall leaning over and frowning above him. There he came to a small open plateau of stone and what he saw made him laugh aloud. The picnickers who had spent a happy day there had left the remains of their lunch. They had set it out on the rocks for the birds and the squirrels; and the squirrels had not yet found it, and the birds had long since gone to rest. There were several slices of bread and butter. There was a cold tongue sandwich; there was a hard-boiled egg and the half of a dill pickle, not to mention crumbled pieces of cheese.
So the soldier of the Government, now a soldier of adventure indeed, sat down on the big rock, still warm from the heat of the day, and ate all the supper he wanted of very excellent food. When he arose to go the father in him said: “Leave what remains for the wee folks as you found it.” And the mother in him said: “Take with you every crumb that remains against the morrow. The wild things know how to fend for themselves. You are sick and you are almost at the limit of endurance, and you ​will need, oh, so badly! the slice of bread for your breakfast in the morning.”
Jamie thought that over. He had not cared particularly if he took the bandit’s breeches. He had not cared enough to keep him from using the contents of the bill book. He had filled his stomach to repletion with what had been left for the wild folks, and none of the wild folks had preyed upon him or refused him anything. It might festooning the walls that shut him in there was food better be that in all the greenery climbing and trailing from, and to the liking of the wild than what had been left for them. But there was a streak of something in Jamie, the same streak that had carried him to the woods and the forests, that had sent him uncounted miles along the banks of the trout brooks of his boyhood, a streak of decency and cleanliness in his soul, and that streak now said to him: “Take your chances as the wee folk take theirs.”
So Jamie got back on his knees and crumbled the bread and broke the crusts. Whimsically he laid one last piece of crust on his tongue and then he went on hunting wood. When he felt that he had enough accumulated, he built his fire and, warm and as comfortable as need be, he curled up before it and with his arm for a pillow and a stone for its support, he fell sound asleep in a very few minutes. He never felt the tiny lizards that ran over his feet; he never saw the trade rat that sat on its haunches and surveyed him with questioning eyes to see whether there was anything about him that it would like to exchange for ​the half of a pearl button that it carried in its left cheek. The hardness of his bed awoke him in the night before the fire was gone, and so he piled on the remainder of the wood and turned his cold side toward the flame and the warm one down and went back to sleep again.
When morning came he washed his face and hands by wetting his handkerchief in the stream, and after that he wet his handkerchief several times and wrung the water over the coals he had left, scattering them widely and obliterating every trace of fire that could possibly spread. Then, with feet still aching in the shoes he had not dared to remove, he started on down the canyon.
About ten o’clock that morning he met the Ranger. The Ranger of this particular canyon was not so lonely as were the range riders of the mountains, but for all that he was friendly. He stopped to talk a minute and as he casually glanced at Jamie he saw the attenuation of his figure, he saw the whiteness of his hands, he saw how the skin of his face settled on the lean bones, and being young and full of life and having in his veins quite a bit of the milk of human kindness, he said to Jamie: “My mother tells me that if I keep in the saddle too much I will develop gout in my feet. What do you say to taking the horse for the next few miles and letting me exercise?”.
Jamie said if that would be any accommodation to the Ranger he would be glad to ride for him, but he had not figured on what the gait of a horse would do to his left breast. Fit himself to the saddle as easily as he could, riding was torture he could not endure for long, and so, ​after a mile or two, he was forced to walk again. But he was thankful for the offer and dimly he was beginning to formulate in his mind the feeling that the world is made up of good people and bad people, of selfish people and thoughtful people, of cruel people and kind people, and it was merely a case of luck as to which kind you met when you went on a great adventure.
From the Ranger on, Jamie’s adventure stretched lagging miles of torture, still west by south, until nearly three o’clock that afternoon. Nobody had left a lunch box and there had been no place where the few pennies he carried would buy food. He had left the canyon and followed a road that had widened until it would accommodate horses and vehicles, here and there a car—not a greatly travelled road; not a busy, well-kept road; a road that became increasingly more difficult for Jamie to follow because his feet had endured almost all that human feet can endure when they are attached to a sick man who is gamely driving himself to the ultimate limit.
Near four o’clock the hunger that had been in abeyance since the night before began again to torment him. He was exhausted to the point at which he found himself taking two or three sidewise steps to keep from lifting his feet even a slight degree higher to step over a small irregularity in the road. He was beginning to realize that there was slight chance of shelter for the night. There was equally small chance of food. So far his adventure had yielded its bright spots, its thrills, its pains. At that minute, between the scorching in his breast and the burn​ing in his shoes and the general ache all over his tortured body, he could not see much in it. He began to wonder if he could make his way back to the hospital and whether they would take him in, and then he thought of the White Plague which they said had not as yet attacked him, and so he shut his lips very tight and stood swaying on his feet as he peered like a half-drunken man down the road before him, trying to decide whether the wheel track on the right seemed the least bit smoother than the wheel track on the left. When he had decided that the one on the right was the one for him to travel, he reeled widely and started forward, and furtively his eyes began to search the road on either side for the spot where ultimately collapse would come. He wondered if he stumbled and fell and could not arise, if he lay unconscious in the middle of the road, whether any one would find him and what they would do with him if they did.
It was from searching the sides of the road that Jamie missed the point where there was a turn until he found his feet following it, and then he looked ahead and his eyes widened and his breath came in a light gasp. Down the road, only a few rods on the right, he could see a small house, and of all the houses that he had ever dreamed about and thought that he would like particularly to own and to live in, that house appealed to him as the most inviting.
It stood close to the road. A white picket fence ran along the front of it. A neat white gate shut it from the highway. Its painted face was soft and attractive. New ​England was obvious all over it. Flowering vines were climbing up its corners and over the tiny front veranda. Outside the gate he could see a circle of crushed shells and he thought the walk that led to the front door might be made of shells. It seemed to lie very close to the road and there was not much ground on either side of it. All that there was seemed to be filled with the very flowers that Jamie had helped take care of in his mother’s New England garden. He could see hollyhocks as high as the eaves of the house, and in many colours to the left and to the right he could sense the gay hues of nasturtiums and zinnias and marigolds, and his sensitive nostrils could pick up the tang of heliotrope and mignonette and forget-me-not and violets; but above everything else he had the impression of a cloud of blue, sweet, restful blue.
Jamie rocked on his feet and stared at the house yearningly. His vision carried beyond it, and he saw that on the other side of the line fence there was another dooryard and another house, and then houses began gathering in a friendly way on either side of the road and leading away as far as he could see here and there were other houses, other signs of life. At that instant there came softly to his ears the slow, steady wash of what might possibly have been a low tide of the sea.
In his exhaustion, his senses numbed with pain, he had travelled most of the afternoon, a plodding, half-conscious thing, but now, touched by the nearness of humanity, touched by the beauty of somebody’s home, excited with the prospect that by some possibility he might find shelter ​and food, his sluggish blood surged up, his head lifted, his dull eyes brightened slightly, and his keen nostrils turned to the west and sniffed inquiringly. Then said Jamie, right out loud, right from the depths of nowhere:
“‘If my old nose don’t tell no lies, ’Pears like I smell’—
what ought to be the Per-cific Ocean!”
He had not the faintest notion either why he called it the Per-cific Ocean. He probably did it because he was so desperately tired that if he did not manage a chuckle about something, there was every probability that he was going to tumble down in the road and lie still without giving his new clothes the slightest consideration, or any other thing in all the world.
At that minute the screen door that led from the veranda into the secret of the beautiful house whose whole exterior was one delicate luring invitation, opened and there came through a man, a tall man, a slender man, an aristocrat from head to toe, lean, and with long silken white hair flowing back from his forehead and a soft, short beard of silver-white wavy silk coming down on his breast, a man with long, slender nose, big, deep-set eyes, and white lips. He reeled as he came across the veranda, and both his hands clutched his left side and he kept on wavering to the right and the left until he reached the gate. Then he took his hands from his side and clung to the gate. He leaned over it and hung on to it and he looked up and down the road, and there he spied Jamie. He lifted one of his hands and beckoned.
​Jamie stood there staring at him, and then slowly and deliberately, slapping one swollen foot and then the other on the hard road, he took a few steps in the man’s direction. He stopped again to stare at him, to note the fine lines of the anguished old face, the immaculate apparel, the stricken attitude of the frame hanging across the gate. So, with all the strength that he could muster Jamie took a few more steps and came within speaking distance, and on his dazed and incredulous ears there fell the strangled cry, “Help! For God’s sake, lad, help me!”
One minute before Jamie would not have believed that he could help anybody or anything. He had been figuring that he had reached the end of his endurance, that if he did not have help himself in a very few minutes he would be past the place where he would ever need it. There was something about the whiteness of the fine old head, something about the breadth of the shoulders and the leanness of the frame that reminded Jamie of his father, and possibly because he was reminded of his father, Jamie lifted his eyes above the wonderful white house, above the lace of the trees surrounding it, above its sheltering vines, away up to the blue, and far down in his heart he gave an imperative order. “Now you’ve got to help me, Lord! You must help me now!”
Then he clenched his fists very tightly at his sides and covered the three steps more to the gate. He found the combination by which it opened and he put his arm around the old figure leaning on it and in a dry, breathless voice he heard himself saying: “Why, of course I’ll help you!” ​and he had not the faintest notion whether he could manage three steps farther himself or not.
But he did accomplish the three steps farther, he pulled the screen door open, he headed the stricken man he was trying to support toward a big davenport and let him down on it, easing him back against the pillows that he punched up hastily. Then on his knees, grasping the side of the couch, he spoke again in his voice of dry breathlessness: “What must I do?”
Instinctively both hands of the stricken man had sought the region of his heart. Jamie’s thought, as his mind cleared at another man’s extremity, was: “He’s got it mighty near where I have.” And so he repeated again: “What must I do?”
The answer came: “The telephone. You must call my doctor. He must get me to a hospital.”
Pushing against the couch, Jamie rose to his feet and looked around him. Then he saw a telephone on the wall and a small table before it and an open telephone book, so he sat down on the chair and drew a deep breath or two. Then he asked over his shoulder: “Can you give me the number?”
After a paroxysm of pain that brought sweat to the white dome above the white brows sheltering the big eyes that were pools of darkness, there came the answer: “You will find the number and the name on the list beside the ’phone. Doctor Grayson.”
Jamie hunted down the line and found the name and number, and then he put in the call, and while he waited ​for it he again asked over his shoulder: “Whom shall I say?”
The gasping reply was: “The Bee Master.”
So presently Jamie found himself insisting that Doctor Grayson come to the telephone personally, and when he had the assurance that Doctor Grayson was speaking, he found himself mustering strength to say: “The Bee Master has been stricken with a very hard attack. He wants you to come and to bring an ambulance. He wants to be taken to the hospital immediately.”
The answer had been: “All right. I can reach him inside of an hour.”
Then Jamie had cried into the telephone: “Instructions! Give me instructions! What shall I do for him?”
The answer was: “Aromatic spirits of ammonia. Bathe his face and hands. Give him a few drops. Keep him nearly upright. I will cut the time as much as I can.”
So Jamie went back to the davenport, and as he laid hands on the stricken man he whispered: “Now, help, Lord!” and from somewhere he drew strength to pull the Bee Master more nearly to a sitting posture and to pile the pillows higher behind him. Then he began looking around to see from what direction he might conjure aromatic spirits of ammonia. The doctor had spoken as if the remedy might be somewhere near and its use customary. When he could not see anything that suggested a bottle, he ventured a question and a wave of the hand directed him to an adjoining room where, on a table beside a bed, there stood a bottle labelled “Aromatic spirits.” ​So Jamie brought it and then he stumbled to the back of the house and in a hasty survey of the kitchen in which he found himself, he caught up a towel. For one brief instant he glanced from the back door, and that back door led to a porch and on over a few level feet and then a walk started in a slope none too gentle that seemed to lead down, and down, and down, and with a quick look Jamie exulted softly: “My God! I’ve reached the sea!”
He caught up the towel and hurried back to soak an end of it from the bottle and surreptitiously as he thrust it toward the sick man, he carried it past his own face and inhaled to the depths of his lungs. He kept very near as he managed bathing the hands and face, and from the ammonia he drew enough strength to stand and return to the kitchen. There he took the liberty of prying the paper lid from a bottle of milk he had seen at the back door, and slowly with deliberation he gulped half its contents. That so put heart into him that he was able to find a suitcase in the top of a closet in a bedroom; he was able to open a chest and transfer to the case certain papers, and to relock the chest and give the key into the possession of the stricken man. Then he found an overcoat and slippers and other small articles he was instructed to collect, and when everything was ready, he sat with the ammonia-saturated towel to await the ambulance. Then he heard himself being asked to remain in the house, to take care of the bees until it was ascertained how ill their keeper was, and when he would be able to return to his work.
​“I don’t know the first thing about bees,” protested Jamie. “I can’t take care of them. Can’t you direct me to someone who can see to your property in an intelligent way?”
“There is nothing to do,” said the Bee Master. “Keep the water pans filled. My next-door neighbour brings my food. You can sleep in my bed. You look tired and sick yourself. I am not afraid to trust a man having your touch, your face, your voice. Promise me that you will take my place until my return.”
So Jamie reached in his pocket and held out the decorations for valour before the eyes of the stricken man. He said that he had recently been discharged, that he had no home at present, that he would be glad to remain in such a friendly house and do what he could, but that he must have instructions, full instructions, as to what he must do for the bees.
The Bee Master smiled a rare and illuminating smile and sank back on the pillows as if he were content, and then he said: “Any day the little Scout may walk in, my side partner, and you can ask anything you want to know and you’ll get an intelligent answer. Margaret Cameron next door can tell you a good deal, and she is a rare cook. Tell her what you like, and help yourself to my clothes and bed.”
Then he shut his eyes and dropped over the edge into unconsciousness.
A few minutes later the ambulance came and the frame of an old man having a face suitable for a model for the ​most exquisite likeness of any patriarch of old was started on its way to a hospital. In only a minute with the doctor who had come for him, Jamie had secured the hospital address, and the promise of a telephone call after an examination had been made. He had liked Doctor Grayson, had liked the touch with which he laid his hands on the fine old wreck on the davenport, liked the sympathetic way in which he bent over the stricken figure, liked every tone of the voice in which the explanation of the case had been given.
“The Bee Master has been putting off his evil day to the limit. He must go to the hospital. He must remain for an operation he has been fighting for a year or two. I hope you can arrange to settle here, if you are the man he has selected, for several months at least.”
Jamie lifted a shaking hand to dry lips and iterated and reiterated: “But I don’t know a thing about bees! I don’t know a damn thing about bees!”
After the ambulance had driven away, he staggered back into the house and straight through to the kitchen, where he finished what remained of the milk, and that so heartened him that he stepped through the back door and looked down the side of a small mountain where all the world seemed alive and aglow with flowers upon flowers of the same old-fashioned kinds that bloomed around the front, and on either hand, down the outer line of a wide stretch that must have covered at least two acres, there were literally hundreds of domed white hives toward which heavily laden bees were winging in a low humming. ​Then he could see a stretch of sands that looked like silver, and then he could both see and hear the rhythmical sweep of the Pacific at low tide.
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