Page:The Keeper of the Bees.pdf/88

 keep everlastingly at it until you do it a little bit better than the other fellow.”

“That’s sound logic,” said Jamie. “If you start out with that kind of an idea in your head and keep ‘everlastingly at it,’ there isn’t any place you can land except at the top of the heap.”

“That’s the way I’ve got it figured,” said the small person, casually. “And I’ve learned while only just as wide and just as high as I am this minute, that I can’t be Scout Master and Chief of the Robbers’ Den and First Assistant to the Bee Master unless I hoe it down.”

Jamie decided that the little figure before him was surely a boy.

There was a slight drawing closer, a lowering of the voice, and the small person asked confidentially: “When did they take him to the hospital?”.

Jamie drew back and looked inquiringly at the child.

“I didn’t say any one was taken to the hospital,” he protested.

“No. You didn’t,” conceded the small person. “But if you had known the Bee Master as well as I’ve known him, in all the time we’ve been partners, which is ever since I’ve been big enough to climb the fence, you’d know that there wasn’t any place they could take him away from this garden except to the hospital, and you’d know there wasn’t any way they could take him except flat on his back.”

“I suspect that’s about the truth,” said Jamie.