“we’ll have to sell the store,” said bob harman, with decision. “no use blinking it.”
“what, sell harman’s!” cried his sister alice, aghast.
“well, why not?” bob demanded. “it’s bringing nothing in. it hasn’t been paying expenses for ever so long. we’d all be richer if it had been sold years ago.”
“very likely,” muttered carl. “but fancy harman’s going out of the family!”
all three turned and looked at the weatherbeaten side of the frame building adjoining the house—the store that for half a century had been known as “harman’s.” it had been a great place in its day, had harman’s. almost the first recollections of all three children were connected with the store. they had played behind the counters, been weighed on the big scales; and the familiar, rich smell of molasses and tea and hardware and cloth was like an odor of home. later they had helped to serve customers—it did not keep them very busy—and for the last year carl had managed the business almost single-handed. it did seem impossible to give up the store.
the three orphans were holding a council on the front veranda of the old brick house where the harmans had lived ever since they came as pioneers into upper canada. once there had been three hundred acres of land, and capacious barns and stables, and stock, but all this had dwindled away, till the farm was represented by ten acres behind the house, and even this was rented to a neighbor.
the april sunshine was warm on the veranda, although the fields were still brown, and patches of snow lay here and there in sheltered nooks. the maples at the roadside were red, and in alice’s garden green sprouts were bravely pushing up. on the south side of the fence were the twelve white-painted hives of her bees, and the hum of flying insects filled the air.
nearly eighty years before the harmans had been among the first pioneers who broke into the wilderness north of lake ontario. they had helped to open the roads; they had cleared land; and they had started a frontier store on the new highway. for two generations the hamlet that sprang up there was known as “harman’s corners.” it lay on the direct road to toronto and it had its great days before the railway came. in winter the laden sleighs went past by scores, carrying wheat and meat and timber to the growing city, and the drivers all stopped at the cross-road. the corners supported three taverns, all doing a thriving trade. the fourth corner was occupied by the store.
as there were no other stores in that district, harman’s had a monopoly of trade, and its owner should have grown rich. but the harman of that day lacked business enterprise. he was good-natured, slow, procrastinating, and spent more time at the taverns than behind his counter. the store lost ground, and when the railway was built and passed three miles away to touch at woodville, the corners received its death-blow.
produce went to toronto by rail instead of by sleigh or wagon. harman’s was out of the line of traffic. the three taverns closed one by one. at woodville the elliott brothers established an enterprising store, with all the modern tricks of trade. the farmers went thither to do their buying, and harman’s stock grew shop-worn and out of date.
still, mr. harman clung to the business, keeping no proper books, but cherishing a vague idea that the store was maintaining his family, while, in fact, it was losing money daily, and all but ten acres of the farm had to be sold. for the last two years he had been ill; for nearly a year carl had had virtually entire management and had discovered the truth. during this time the elliott brothers had repeatedly offered to buy the store. they wished to run it as a branch of their woodville establishment, and carl had urged his father to sell. mr. harman, however, refused to entertain the idea for a moment, and remained firm up to that march day when he died. mrs. harman had died four years earlier, and the three children were orphans, with what looked like a losing inheritance.
alice was eighteen years old and had been keeping house for the family ever since her mother’s death. she was tall, brown-haired, and gray-eyed; an out-of-door girl, full of energy. she was a great chicken-raiser and an indefatigable gardener. the bees she had had for three years, starting with three hives, and had already acquired a very cheerful bank account of her own from the sale of honey.
bob was nineteen, dark-haired, rather short, and powerfully built. his turn of mind was highly scientific and practical, and he was trying to get through a course of electrical engineering at the toronto school of science, where he was better known as a half-back on the varsity team.
carl was a year and a half younger than alice and was her chief assistant with the bees, but he lacked his brother’s muscles. he had an idea that something in journalism would suit him exactly, but it was a long way from harman’s corners to a daily newspaper office. meanwhile he looked after the store and attended the woodville high school when he could, riding to and fro on his bicycle, and tried to prepare for the university.
but educational prospects looked rather bad just then. everything had to be subordinated to the question of making a living, and bob had come up from toronto to help in threshing the matter out.
all the property had been left to the three children, and an old neighbor and friend, isaac ferguson, was appointed executor and trustee till the heirs should come of age. but an inventory of the property revealed a disastrous state of affairs.
all the land and buildings were heavily mortgaged. although no proper books had been kept, it was plain that the store had not been paying expenses for a long time, and there was an appalling collection of unpaid bills—many of them bills for stock that had grown old and worthless. when all these liabilities were cleared off, there would not remain much more than a thousand dollars from mr. harman’s estate.
part of this state of things was no surprise to carl, who had been in closer touch with the business than either alice or bob, but even he rather inclined to the idea that it would be best to clear out the old stock at any price, get in some fresh stuff, and try to float the business for a little longer, at any rate.
“even if we did sell out,” he argued, “we wouldn’t get enough to live on for long, and we’d have no chance of making any more.”
“elliott’s would pay one of us forty dollars a month to stay here as clerk. i was talking to them yesterday,” responded bob. “that would be a good job for alice.”
“no, i’ll never do that, and i don’t see how you could go to see those people!” cried alice, hotly. “if i only had a hundred hives of bees like these we wouldn’t need anything from anybody,” she went on after a moment’s indignation. “why, last year i made over one hundred and twenty-five dollars from only eleven hives.”
“i wish we had them, too,” said carl, “but we haven’t, so what’s the use. bees cost about ten dollars a colony here and hard to get at that. i declare, allie, you could get nearly as much for your apiary as the store is worth!”
“i wouldn’t sell them, though, not for twenty dollars a hive!” the girl declared. “i’d rather see the store go, by a great deal. what do you think we ought to do, bob?”
“i don’t know,” returned her brother, slowly. “maybe i’ve an idea, but the present question to be settled is whether we want to accept elliott’s proposition—to buy us out, i mean.”
they discussed the worrying problem all the rest of the afternoon and at supper and during the evening and at intervals the next day. then bob had to return to his classes in toronto and he went away, leaving the matter still unsettled.
spring came on with the breathless haste of the north. the last patches of snow vanished. the grass grew greener daily; tulips were budding; and the bees were gathering honey profusely from the pussy-willows. alice and carl went through the hives, cleared out the winter’s dirt from the bottom-boards, spaced the combs properly, scraped away excrescences of wax and propolis. they were so engaged, when bob suddenly appeared without any warning, ten days after his departure.
“hurrah! what’s up?” shouted carl, pulling off his hat and bee-veil and rushing to meet him. “you’ve got some news. i can see it.”
“nothing much,” returned bob. “anyway i won’t say anything about it just now. go ahead with your work. and, say, have you got an extra hat and veil? i’d like to look on.”
bob had never handled the bees much, nor taken any great interest in them, so that both carl and alice were surprised at his request. however, they were too busy at the moment to discuss it, and he was provided with a mosquito-net veil, which he draped about his hat. he leaned over the hives as they were opened, peered in, and asked innumerable questions.
“what’s happened to you, bob?” said alice at last. “you seem to want to learn the bee business.”
“maybe,” said bob, enigmatically. “now what’s the best the bees ever do, alice? how much honey do you get from them, on an average?”
“well, this is my pet colony,” said the girl, raising the cover from the hive nearest her. under the board cover was a canvas quilt, which she peeled up, revealing the tops of the combs, each in its wooden frame. at the disturbance, a yellow froth of bees boiled up from between the combs, but alice unhesitatingly laid hold of one of the center combs and lifted it out for inspection. it was covered on both sides with a thick layer of bees, crowded as closely as they could stand. there were some old veterans that had wintered over, with shiny, worn bodies and ragged wings; there were just-hatched bees, fluffy and yellow like young chickens; there were bees with yellow balls of pollen on their legs, looking for an empty cell to store the bee-bread. they all remained quiet, seeming but little disconcerted at being lifted so suddenly into the daylight. only the bees near the top of the comb, where a little honey shone in the cells, dipped their heads and began to suck it up in haste. they felt that, if this strange earthquake was going to destroy the hive, they would at least save what they could. over alice’s fingers and bare wrists the bees crawled, but made no attempt to sting. they were the purest italian breed and were almost as yellow as gold.
“i paid a dollar and a half for this queen last year,” said alice, “and—look, there she is now.”
she indicated a point about the center of the comb, where the queen, twice the length of a worker-bee but much more slender, was walking slowly and with dignity over the cells, looking into each one to see if it held anything. finding one unoccupied, she gravely inserted the point of her long abdomen into it and deposited an egg. during this process she was attentively watched by her own guard of half a dozen bees, who kept their heads always pointed toward her, and proffered her honey on their tongues when she had finished. day and night, alice explained, this went on, a good queen often laying a couple of thousand eggs in twenty-four hours. these eggs, hatching in three weeks, mean a vast army of workers for the honey harvest.
“this colony brought me in more than twenty-five dollars last year, all by itself,” said alice, putting the comb carefully back into the hive. “it gathered something over a hundred pounds of comb honey, worth twenty-five cents a pound. if one had a whole apiary like that!—but such things never happen. on the average, it’s a good colony that makes ten dollars’ worth of honey, and less than that, of course, if you were running a large apiary and only getting wholesale prices.”
“well, i call that good enough,” remarked bob and said no more until that evening after supper, when he consented to bring out what was in his mind.
“it was only a vague notion that i got in my head,” he explained, “from what alice said about wanting a hundred hives of bees. perhaps there’s nothing in it yet. i don’t know. but anyhow, there’s a fellow in our class who lives at a place called morton, away up in northern haliburton, and he mentioned to me about a month ago that a man up his way had a lot of bees for sale. i wasn’t especially interested then, but when i went back to town last time, i thought of it and made further inquiries. then i wrote to the owner. then i felt as if i ought to go up and look into the thing, so i went.”
“you’ve been there? how many hives? what’s it like?” cried alice and carl together.
“just got back. well, it’s about the wildest, roughest place i ever saw. the bee outfit is fourteen miles from the railroad, away back in the woods, and you can take your choice of driving over a fearfully rocky trail or going up the river in a boat or tramping it. the bees are on a deserted backwoods farm, where nobody has lived for nearly a year. goodness knows why anybody ever went there in the first place. but the bees are there all right—a hundred and eighty colonies, all packed outdoors in big sawdust cases. it was too cold to open the hives, but the bees were flying and seemed in good shape. very few, if any, were dead. then there’s a great heap of apparatus stored in the barn, a honey-extractor, empty combs, supers for comb-honey, smokers—a regular outfit, in fact.”
“yes, but the price?” demanded carl, anxiously.
“fifteen hundred dollars.”
“that settles it, then,” said alice, with a disappointed sigh.
“oh, there’s such a thing as buying on easy terms,” returned bob. “those bees belonged to a man who had no more sense than to try to start a farm among the rocks. i’m certain he never made anything out of the land, but he surely did have the right instinct for beekeeping. he died sometime ago, his wife and children moved away, and i guess everything he owned was mortgaged, including the bees. anyway, the whole outfit has come into the hands of the owner of the mortgage, who lives at morton—a queer character, if there ever was one. he doesn’t know what to do with all those bees. last summer he hired a man to look after them, and the fellow either cheated or muddled, for old farr—that’s his name—told me that there wasn’t much money in bees, and he thought of melting the combs all down for the wax. but he’d be glad to sell them and take easy payments.
“he’d let us keep them on the land rent-free, and he’d take five hundred dollars cash down. when we sell the summer’s honey we pay another five hundred dollars, and the rest in one year, with interest at ten per cent., a chattel mortgage on the bees and positive assurance that he’ll sell us out if we don’t come down with the money on the required dates.”
“could we handle a hundred and eighty colonies? we’ve never had over a dozen here, you know,” said carl, dubiously.
“i’ll guarantee that we could handle them. i’ll see to that!” cried alice. “but could we make the money?”
“i believe we could,” said bob, earnestly. “the woods up there are full of solid masses of wild raspberry thickets for miles around, where the timber has been cut or burned over. nothing yields honey like the raspberry bloom, they tell me. there’s lots of basswood, too. shouldn’t we be able to get a hundred pounds of honey to the hive, alice?”
“it sounds to me as if we ought to. it depends on the weather, of course.”
“well, at ten cents a pound wholesale, that makes eighteen hundred dollars that we could count on this year, and next year we should get far more, for the bees would have increased. why,” he exclaimed, growing enthusiastic, “i don’t see how we could possibly lose on it!”
“no clover up there, i suppose?” asked carl.
“no, nor grass either. nothing much but rocks and sand, hemlock and jack-pine and birch, wild raspberries, and little lakes, and a deep river that runs right through the bee farm.”
“we’d camp out there!” exclaimed alice.
“no, there’s a log-house that we can live in. but i’ll tell you one thing—living up there wouldn’t cost us much. i must have seen fifty partridges on my way in, and the man that drove me told me that there are lots of deer, and now and then a bear. once in a while a moose strays down from the north, and there must be ducks on the river. i know it’s swarming with trout. of course we’d be taking a chance on the season. it’s generally either a feast or a famine with the bees—a big crop or a failure—but what do you say?”
“take the chance! take it!” cried alice, jumping up in excitement.
“it does seem too good a thing to lose,” said carl. “but we hardly want to exile ourselves up there in the north woods for years, do we?”
“why not? i think it would be glorious!” said his sister. “but we don’t have to. the bees need to be looked after for only four or five months of the year. they’ve been up there for over a year, with hardly any attention at all, and they’ve got on all right. we can leave there in october, sell our honey, and come back here, or go to the city, or do anything—take a trip to europe, if we’ve had a good season. carl can go to the university. don’t you see that it’s the very thing for us? it’s the solution of all our difficulties.”
“the backwoods all summer, and the city in winter! it would give us some variety in life, anyway,” said carl.
“yes, and there’s no way of making money so nice as keeping bees. it’s sweet and clean and honest. it’s kid-glove work, too, not muddy and dirty, like farming. and it’s all scientific and fascinating. every colony has its own peculiar nature that has to be studied. some you can pet, and some you have to bully. no one could ever make any success with bees who didn’t feel the fascination and wasn’t full of the love of the thing.”
“well, you’ve got love of it enough to supply the rest of us, alice, though i believe we’d all like it,” said bob. “but we mustn’t forget that we can’t do anything without mr. ferguson’s consent. we’re infants in the eyes of the law, and he’s our guardian.”
it was too late to go to see mr. ferguson that evening, but they talked over the scheme till nearly midnight. they went into all the details and made calculations of their probable profits, till they had worked themselves up into a high stage of enthusiasm. as bob said, it hardly seemed possible to lose. with a hundred and eighty colonies of bees in a good honey district, they were sure to make some money; but they began to feel desperately afraid that mr. ferguson could not be made to see it in the same light.
the next morning they went to see him in a body, primed with arguments. to their delight, however, they found him by no means obdurate. their guardian was an elderly, shrewd farmer, who saw clearly that the store could never be made to pay, and he had been pondering for some time upon the best investment for the orphans’ inheritance. he promptly advised them to make the best bargain with the elliott brothers that they could, but the idea of the apiary came upon him as a shock.
“fifteen hundred dollars worth of bees!” he said doubtfully. “a pretty big order, ain’t it?”
alice and carl plunged at him with arguments and examples. mr. ferguson, however, knew the success that alice had made with her bees, and he was willing to listen, questioning them closely about probable crops, prices, and risks. he seemed in a fair way to be convinced, but refused to give any answer at once, saying that he was going to get the opinion of a cousin of his near toronto, who kept bees. this must have been satisfactory, for within a few days he announced his approval of the enterprise.
bob immediately went to woodville and closed the deal with the elliotts. now that their dream was changed to reality, it was something of a wrench to the young harmans, for the store seemed like an inseparable part of home itself. but they had made up their minds and they went through with it. bob remained at home a little longer to help take the inventory of stock and complete the formal transfer; and then suddenly there was a new sign over the door that had been “harman’s” for more than fifty years.
they also sold the ten acres of land. the house and the garden and orchard they kept, for only the direst necessity would have made them part with that. there was still a mortgage of $800 on it, but the payments were easy and might be allowed to stand. when all their other liabilities were paid up, they found themselves with a capital of slightly over one thousand dollars, which was a little more than they had expected.
“when we’ve paid our first five hundred on the bees,” said carl, “we’ll have nearly six hundred left. that will be ample for us to live on till the honey crop is sold, and after that there’ll be money to burn!”
some of this capital, however, had to go toward bob’s expenses in toronto. it was of the utmost importance that his studies should not suffer, for he was virtually sure of a well-paid position after his graduation.
“but i can take a week or ten days off,” he said, “and come up and help you get started. i’m well ahead with my work. we needn’t move up there till the middle of may. my exams will be all over in june, and then i can come up for the busy season with the bees. that will be plenty of time, for the raspberries don’t blossom nearly so early up there as they do farther south.”
the next thing was to buy the bees, and this was arranged through mr. ferguson and a lawyer at morton. they paid five hundred dollars down, and gave a mortgage on the apiary for the rest, covering whatever number of hives of bees it might contain. this was a shrewd wording, if not a tricky one, for it not only released the seller from any responsibility as to the number of living colonies in the yard, but it also covered any increase that might be made afterward. the bees were not to be moved from the place without permission, and they were to pay the second installment on august 1, by which time, they calculated, the honey crop would be sold.
now that all was settled, alice and carl were impatient to be off. it was hard to see elliott’s sign over harman’s store, to see the old goods sold off at slaughter prices, and to see the new paint, woodwork, and fresh stock that the old place was getting. alice declared that she would go all the way to woodville rather than buy anything next door. it was still early, however, to go into the north woods, but, toward the end of april, carl paid a flying visit to their new property and came back full of enthusiasm.
“i hadn’t time to look into many hives,” he said, “but i counted one hundred and twenty colonies carrying in pollen in great shape. the maples must be coming in flower, but everything looks pretty cold and dismal up there still. the season seems fully a month later than here. i looked into a few of the rest of the colonies. some were flying a little, and i found only three dead ones. on the whole, i think they’re coming into first-class condition, and i believe we’ve got a bargain.”
alice was more impatient than ever at this news, but a week of cold, backward weather followed; there were many preparations to make, and it was another two weeks before they finally made ready to leave for the north. it was decided that carl should go a couple of days ahead of the others and try to make their quarters somewhat habitable. alice was to follow with bob, and he once more interrupted his studies for a week to come up and help with the last preparations.
with great care and consultation they got together an outfit that was slim for housekeeping or elaborate for camping, as one might choose to regard it. alice selected blankets, pillows, cooking utensils, and tableware. bob packed his fishing tackle and his rifle, a good 38.55 caliber repeater, with plenty of cartridges. they took two hams and a side of bacon from their own homecured stock, beans, two bags of potatoes, flour, sugar, and other groceries, together with several large loaves of fresh bread that alice baked herself. another package had to be made of gardening implements; a hoe, a rake, and a spade, and an abundance of different seeds. if she was going back to the land, alice said, she was going to do it thoroughly.
an ax was needed, too, and a sharp hatchet, a saw and hammer and assorted nails. in fact, there seemed to be no end to the things to be taken—necessaries, all of them. one thing after another was forgotten and remembered at the last minute—lamps and a washboard, soap, books, a looking-glass, a pepper-box. in the end, they had three huge packing-cases, and several small packages. alice had cherished a dim hope of being able to take a crate of her favorite white leghorn hens to supply them with fresh eggs, but she was forced to give that plan up.
they took the tools from the home apiary, but the dozen hives of bees they left where they stood. on the last day alice equalized them in strength and put top stories of empty combs on all of them, so that they could be left to themselves in comparative safety.
carl then left for morton, taking with him a small trunk containing a supply of cooked food, an ax, a hammer, his shot-gun and his fishing rod. alice and bob gave him forty-eight hours’ start, and then shipped their freight and took the train for the north.
at leaving, they both felt a flood of homesick regret and misgiving. harman’s corners was the only home they had ever known, and alice’s lips quivered, when she looked back from the buggy as they drove to the station. bob himself felt a sudden doubt as to whether he had been right in proposing and urging the speculation. a bad season, a little hard luck, and they would be utterly stranded and penniless.
but these forebodings gradually evaporated as the train went northward, skirting lake simcoe, crossing the muskoka country, running hourly deeper into the rocky wilds. it was a slow local train and took more than half a day to make the journey, so that it was late in the afternoon when they at last stepped out upon the board platform of the little morton station.
a sharp chill in the air reminded them that they had come a hundred miles due north. morton had once been a flourishing lumber town, operating four sawmills, but the pine had long since been cut away, and the place had greatly declined, like harman’s corners. it seemed to consist of only a couple of dozen houses, two or three stores, and a frame hotel. the dark evergreen forest apparently came close up to the town in every direction, but bob informed his sister that a few determined farmers tried to get a living out of the rocky soil, and several french half-breed families lived near the village, contriving to support existence on a little lumbering, a little trapping, and a little guiding. in november the district woke to temporary life, with the influx of deer hunters from farther south.
it was much too late in the day for bob and alice to think of driving to the apiary, so they went to the little hotel, where, at this season, they were the only guests. after engaging their rooms, they proceeded to look up mr. david farr, who held the mortgage on the bees.
they found him in the post-office and store which he owned. he was postmaster, and also, as they learned later, justice of the peace, clerk of the township, and road inspector. besides being the leading merchant of the town, he bought furs and ginseng, dealt in local mortgages, occasionally traded in timber, and had an interest in a mica mine that was trying to succeed near the village. this last speculation seemed to indicate a sort of sporting spirit, which was perhaps what had induced him to lend money on so risky a security as a yard of bees, even at ten per cent. interest. he was a little, withered man, more than sixty years of age, with white hair, a straggly beard, gimlet eyes, and a not unkindly mouth.
“well, here’s the young people that’s bought the bees,” he said, wrinkling up his face into a dry smile. “you expect to make a fortune outer ’em, hey, young lady? well, i don’t say as you won’t. but you won’t get what you expect to get. folks never does, not in anything.”
“oh, we don’t expect much, mr. farr,” said alice, laughing.
“now, don’t tell me that. you know you do. but it’s always best to expect nothing and then be surprised and thankful. now whenever you’re in town, just come and see me, and i’ll do what i can to see you fixed right.”
“i’m sure you’re very kind—” bob began.
“no, i ain’t, neither. don’t you look for no kindness from me. i want to help you to get along, so’s you can pay me my money. kindness and business is separate things, and i always keep ’em separate. as i told you, young man, if you don’t live up to the terms of the mortgage i’ll seize you up the minute the law allows me. now you both come along home with me and have supper.”
they had supper with mr. farr and his wife and slept at the hotel. next morning they found their freight boxes awaiting them at the station, and hired a team to haul them to the apiary. it was the same driver who had taken carl out two days before, and he mentioned the fact that carl had borrowed his dog to keep him company till the others came. as they were having their boxes and bales loaded on the wagon, mr. farr strolled up to see them start, and he again impressed upon them his intention of being absolutely relentless in case they failed to keep to the strict terms of the sale.
“and the old fellow means it, too,” said bob, when they were off. “he’ll sell us up in a minute if we don’t produce the cash on the first of august. i fancy we needn’t fear him, but what a wretched old skinflint he is!”
“i don’t know,” said alice, laughing. “i rather like him.”
it was fourteen miles to the bee farm, and after the first mile from the village the road grew terrible. in some places it was of corduroy logs. it went up and down steep hills, and for long stretches it was strewn with large, loose rocks, which made alice’s tinware clash and jangle in the boxes as the wagon lurched along. it was impossible to go faster than a slow walk, and even then the riding was so rough that bob and alice got down and walked for much of the way.
the may morning was sunny and warm, and the highland air sparkling. the road ran between dense, tangled masses of second-growth spruce and hemlock, now and then broken by a wide burned slash, thick with raspberry canes. these were just beginning to grow green, and the young beekeepers looked at them with great interest, for their fortunes depended on these prickly jungles.
now and then they caught a glimpse of a small lake. several times ruffed grouse rose with a roar and thunder behind the screen of evergreens, and once their driver stopped to point out the slender, delicate hoof-mark of a deer on a bit of sandy road.
they had left morton at eight in the morning. it was after noon, and they were hungry, and tired with walking, and sore with riding, when the driver pointed with his whip across the hemlocks.
the trail curved suddenly. there was a desolate, stump-filled clearing, with the squat forms of several log buildings at the other end. all about them stood rows and rows of large, rude-looking boxes painted dark red, and above the creaking of the wagon they caught a deep, distant roar of insect wings.
“oh!” cried alice, “the bees!”
