The Keeper of the Bees, page 40
“It is,” said Jamie.
“Well, then, hadn’t we better get busy?”
Jamie smiled.
“Can’t you give a man a day off?” he asked. “Don’t you see that when I get my coat on I’m all dressed up in my Sunday clothes?”
“Yes, I see,” said Jean, “but Molly ain’t all dressed up in her Sunday clothes, and I ain’t all dressed up in my Sunday clothes. The sensiblest thing you can do is to go and take them things off and get into your working clothes and come on and get to work on my stable. And besides that, if your ears wasn’t all gummed up you’d hear that there’s about three swarms of bees on the rampage, and one of them is mine, and two of ’em’s yours. I heard ’em way down the street.”
Jamie hesitated, his mouth open, and looked at Molly Cameron. Molly was Scotch only one remove herself.
“You must save the bees, of course!” she said. “Change to your bee clothes and capture the swarms. If you want to celebrate, I will go where I can dress and we’ll celebrate this evening.”
“All right,” said Jamie, and went to his room.
It was while he was making a lightning change that he heard a shrill whistle and looked out of his window in the direction from which it came. He was in time to see the faces of Fat Old Bill and the Nice Child and Angel Face peering over the fence from the vantage ground of the lumber pile, a row of faces forlorn past description. It seemed that Jean Meredith’s cars had been awake to other sounds as well as the bees. Jamie watched her as she came down the side of the house and started in the direction of the call, looking precisely the same little Scout that he had known from the beginning.
He opened the door and called softly to Molly: “Come see this. The Scouts mutinied the other day and beat up the Scout Master and almost broke her heart. Now they are calling her.”
Together they stood at the window watching to see what would happen.
Within a few yards of the fence Jean paused, hooked her thumbs in her trousers’ belt, and with an immobile face surveyed her Scouts.
“Well,” she said, tersely. “What do you want?”
Fat Old Bill evidently had been elected spokesman He stood up and said, “Aw, come on! Let’s go down on the beach and play! We’ll play pirates or bandits, or whatever you say!”
“Yes, you will!” said the former Scout Master with fine sarcasm. “Yes, you will! After the way you served me the other day! After the way you broke your sacred oath! You’re nice Scouts, you are, taking a sacred oath and then going back on it. Yes, I’ll ever come with you again!”
Then the Nice Child brought the battery of black eyes into full play.
“Aw, come on!” he pleaded. “Ain’t nothing no fun without you! We didn’t know you thought up everything. Honest we didn’t! We didn’t know we did what you told us to. We just stand around and look at each other like three fat-headed fools. We ain’t had no fun since we acted so mean. Aw, come on! We won’t do it any more! We’re awful sorry. Ain’t we, Old Bill? Ain’t we, Angel Face? Ain’t we awful sorry?”
“Yes,” said Angel Face, “we are awful sorry. We apologize. It’s like both of ’em says. We ain’t having any fun. Won’t you please come on? You can be the Limit again. Won’t none of us say a word.”
Jamie’s shoulders lifted; his chest drew in. He leaned forward and rested his hands on the window sill and brought his face level with the child’s head. He opened his lips and then waited a second to be sure. But there was no hesitation whatever on the part of Jean Meredith; she slowly shook her head.
“You might as well go on and think up something you can do. Do all the things that we used to do over, and do them better,” she said. “I’m through. I ain’t risking no more of what you give me the other day! This morning when I was brushing my teeth, I saw the calendar and it’s the thirty-first. I ain’t going back to risk a licking from three boys after this only on the thirty-second of the month! You get me? You can just go on! I’m not afraid of you. I can lick any of you yet, or I can lick all of you. I’m not afraid of you. I’m just done with you. Anyway, them boards you are standing on are to make Chief a stable and I’m going to do the stunts that Scout Camp Number Twenty-two is doing. I’m through with make-believe. I’m going to be a real Scout after this, and I’m going to ride a horse and I’m going to carry a crop and hit him a crack if he goes to back over too steep a place. But I ain’t a-going to hit him any other time. But I ain’t a-going to hit anything else that ain’t big and strong as I am. Laugh that off! I’m through!” Jean Meredith turned on her heel, hitched up her trousers, and marched in the direction of the back porch. The Keeper of the Bees, leaning on the window sill, tightened his arm around the Storm Girl and studied the face of Jean as she came toward him. The lines of it were unalterably set.
“She means it! She’ll stick!” said Molly Cameron. And Jamie hugged her tight and said, “Amen!”
The End
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1925 by Gene Stratton-Porter
Cover design by Amanda Shaffer
ISBN: 978-1-5040-6615-0
This edition published in 2021 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Gene Stratton-Porter, The Keeper of the Bees
