Page:The Keeper of the Bees.pdf/426

 “Turn that hose on me!” she shrieked. “Cover me with water! Beat ’em off with it!”

Then the little Scout stepped out in full view on tiptoes and kept the hose precisely where it was.

“Turn that hose on our bees, nice innocent bees, tending to their own business, making sweets to feed the world? Them bees is friends of mine! I’m the Bee Master’s partner. Half of this place he gave to me. You think you are going to steal it! You think you are going to burn his papers! Come clean now, or the bees will get you, and it will not be five minutes until you'll be deader, you'll be deader than any liar or anything ever was before! Look out! They are in front of yout Come cleanl Say you ain’t the Bee Master’s daughter!”

Clinging to the incinerator, the girl cast a terrified glance around her. She was in a circle of bees and she had heard of Black Germans. She knew them when she saw them. There had been bee gardens in her childhood when she had been an inmate of the home of the Bee Master. She screamed at the top of her voice.

“Stop your noise,” said the Scout Master. “Come clean, I say, come clean! Say ‘Michael Worthington was not my father.’”

At that instant the first Black German hit its victim on the head not far from the right ear and went into execution.

“No! No!” shrieked the girl. “He wasn’t my father!”

“Say you are trying to steal this place and you've got no right to it,” said the little Scout.