showed his face aboard her.

Joe had seen many such houseboats before. There is a migratory population using them upon all the large rivers of the South; but the somber appearance of this one caught his attention. It looked vaguely sinister to him.

 CHAPTER IIOLD DICK’S BEES 

CHAPTER II

OLD DICK’S BEES

The white bulk of the steamboat came majestically around the bend, puffing pine smoke from her tall double chimneys, and hauled in to the landing. Joe was well known on the boat; Burnam was a heavy shipper of freight, and none of the turpentine men ever paid anything for passage. As he was not going far, there was no difficulty about Snowball’s transportation either, and the horse was led aboard and tied among the piles of wood for the furnaces on the lower deck.

There was an hour’s wait at the landing, and it was another hour down the winding river to Magnolia, which was the landing for Joe’s destination. He went ashore, mounted Snowball again, and rode up the road through swamps and pine woods, till the forests gave place to more and more continuous cultivated fields, and at last he sighted his uncle’s plantation.

The great, white, rambling ante-bellum house stood far back from the road, in a grove of oaks and chinaberry-trees. Beyond it were the scattered barns and stables, and farther still the remains of a dozen cabins that had been the slave quarters fifty years ago. As Joe rode in the gate he heard a shot and a shout of laughter. A pretty, brown-haired, bare-headed girl was standing in front of the house, her extended arm still holding a smoking pistol, while two boys were applauding her shot at a paper target pinned to an oak. They all glanced up at the trample of the hoofs, and Joe took off his hat and waved it. He knew at once that these must be his cousins from the far North.

The three young Harmans had arrived in Alabama in February, on a trip of combined business and pleasure. But for the business they would not have come; for it was a long way from their old home at Harman’s Corners, Ontario, to these Alabama forests, and they had to plan carefully to stand the expenses of the journey.

Three years before they had been left orphans, inheriting little but 

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