We walked over to the dead pine and talked for a minute about the best way to begin. Wampus wanted to take the pick and dig right into the baked soil, but Skippy had another idea of it.
“When this pine was planted,” he said, “it must have been a very small one, and if Murrell’s men buried the treasure under it they must have buried it close to the tree. Then the tree grew, and now, probably, the treasure is right under the tree, or under its big roots. I think we can save time by taking the axe and cutting down the tree.”
“Oh, now you are talking like Jibby Jones!” Wampus said, and it was easy to see that he was plumb disgusted with Jibby Jones. “Go ahead and chop, if you want to; I’m going to dig.”
He raised his pick above his head and brought it down hard into the dry soil, and Skippy swung the axe and chopped into the dead pine tree. Almost that same instant Tad Willing jumped about four feet into the air and yelped like a scalded dog, and when he hit the ground he grabbed his ankle and yelped again, and then broke for the brick house at about forty miles an hour, batting at his head and yipping like an Indian.
And Skippy and Wampus Smale were not far behind him.
“Wouch!” Wampus cried, and Skippy yelled, “Ow-wow! Bumblebees! Owp!” And they went for the brick house in big jumps. I did not have to look at them to learn how to lope, either. I was already on my way, and the thing I said when the first bumblebee jabbed his stinger into the back of my neck was not “I beg your pardon!” I don’t know what it was. I was too busy to notice. I said what I had to say and I did what I thought was the best thing to do, and I did not bother to put on any trimmings.
Along in May you can’t pick up a bumblebee and kiss it, because affection of that sort is one thing a bumblebee does not understand much about, but a May bumblebee is a gentle violet alongside of a September bumblebee. By September a bumblebee is as grouchy as a snake with a sore tail, and is just aching to stick his stinger into somebody. I suppose a bumblebee spends the whole summer sharpening its stinger and getting ready for battle, and by September it wants war. And this was the meanest day of September for hostile bumblebees. There were about ten million of them in the nest under that old pine tree, and every bumblebee was fully ripe and as big as a plum, and it seemed as if they had let their stingers lie out in the sun until they were red-hot. It was the meanest lot of bees I ever got acquainted with. Bees that would have flown aside to get out of your way in May were now so eager to jab a boy that, if one of them had been on its way from New York to Boston to attend its grandmother’s funeral, it would have swerved aside to Los Angeles, California, to sting a brass Cupid on a fountain.
When we gathered our scattered forces together in the old brick farmhouse, I had five stings in me, and Skippy had eight lumps that were like young mountains and still growing, and Tad had seven honorable wounds and one bee still skirmishing in the thick growth on his head, and Wampus—well, Wampus would not stand still long enough to let us count him. A couple of bees had gone down inside of his shirt and Wampus was disrobing by jerks. He yanked at the collar of his shirt so hard that a pearl button flew eight feet and hit Tad on the neck and Tad jumped and yelled. He thought it was another bee come to bury a red-hot bayonet in him.
Three bees—some of the cavalry, I suppose—had followed us to turn our retreat into a rout, and they came right into the old brick house without knocking, and for three minutes Tad and Skippy and I had all we needed to do whacking at those bees with our caps. Then one of them stung Tad and was satisfied, and the other two took Wampus’s bare back as an insult, and Wampus yipped twice more.
Then there was silence, except for low moans and loud “Ow-wow-wows!” Wampus began to cry. I suppose he felt like one of the devastated regions after the Germans had shot it full of shell-holes. Skippy was the first to show any sense.
“Gee whiz!” he said, hopping on one leg. “I’m stinging all over! This is no place to be. We’ve got to get to where there is some cool mud to daub on these stings.”
Right then I knew why Jibby Jones had said that we had better follow him to the Run after we had dug treasure awhile, and why he had said it was too dry by the pine tree, and why he had said there was plenty of mud in the Run.
We trotted toward the Run as fast as we could, because every sting was doing its best to burn, and as we went I began to see the best kind of good sense in every word Jibby had said that we had thought was foolish. He wanted to go to the green sand because that place was far from the bumblebees, and he knew there were bumblebees at the old pine tree because the Tough Customer had yipped and sprinted
