't you, Ned?" said Dick as
he laid his face against the soft fur of the wild-cat whose purring
sounded so like a low growl.

"Oh, yes. I'm glad. 'Course I am. Only wish all of 'em would come
back, the two alligators, the crocodile and the dead otter. Then
we'd start a menagerie and I'd tell fearful stories of man-eaters
while you went into their cages with a big whip in one hand and a
small cannon in the other."

When the boys started for the bee-tree they carried a bundle of dry
palmetto fans, an axe, and a bucket for the honey.

"Shall we tote the guns?" asked Ned.

"What's the use? Don't either of us know how to use 'em. Better
leave 'em with Tom."

But the guns did not stay with Tom, or rather Tom did not stay with
the guns, but quietly followed the boys as a pet dog might have
done. He stepped daintily from root to root and walked along fallen
logs and the branches of trees which he climbed, easily keeping up
with the bee hunters, without muddying his paws, while they wallowed
in mud which was usually knee-deep and occasionally a foot more.
Before tackling the tree they built a fire some fifty yards away,
which they made smoke by putting on rotten wood and wet moss. They
intended to hide in this smoke if the bees attacked them while they
were chopping down the tree. The palmetto leaves were to be kept
until the tree had fallen and were then to be made into smoky
torches, under cover of which the boys hoped to secure the honey.
They took turns in slinging the axe and resting, yet the exercise
and the bees together kept them pretty well warmed up. For, after a
while the bees began to take notice of the knocking at their door
and occasionally a few of them dropped down and stung the chopper
and the looker on, quite impartially. The art of wood-chopping has
to be learned before one is born. The children of back-woodsmen can
sling an axe as soon as they can stand. Boys born as near New York
City as Dick and Ned were, never can learn. They think when they go
up in the Adirondacks and chew down some trees with an axe, that
they are chopping wood, but their guides who lie around smoking
their pipes while the sportsmen sweat over the task, know better and
slyly wink at each other while they praise aloud the skill of their
employers.

When the boys stopped work and went back to their smudge to give the
bees a chance to rest, and to find out if mud really drew the poison
out of the little lumps that covered them, the