Page:The Keeper of the Bees.pdf/442

 breathless exchanges, exclamations mostly. What a listener would have heard, ran like this:

“Can you beat it! That little Scout tackled her single-handed and made her come clean! I’d give a fifty-dollar bill to have seen the whole show!”

This from John Carey.

“Wager it would have been worth more,” from Jamie.

“Chances are you’ve been saved a lawsuit that might have dragged for months and cost a lot of money and made a lot of rotten publicity.”

“When we get these bees up, I’ll go over to Margaret Cameron’s and straighten everything up and bring home my stuff. I was going to camp there until Margaret got back.”

“You were a fool ever to have allowed that creature inside the house, to have walked out and turned things over to her!”

Jamie smiled, a slow Scot smile.

“You know,” he said, “we are no so verra well acquainted with ourselves in this world. I thought I had not earned this property; I thought I had no right to it; I thought it belonged to someone of blood kin; I thought I had not set my heart on it, and when I had walked out and started trying to give it up, I found it was almost going to kill me to do it. You can trust me, there’ll not be any more walking out for anybody, and that’s that!”

So they hived the bees that had swarmed, and went over the other hives to clip old queens and destroy queen