as he rounded the corner of the house, John Carey came walking up the back steps trailing ashes in his wake, and set the incinerator on the back porch.
“I thought I’d better get this and start the stuff to drying out. I didn’t want the job of taking anything out for fear something might be lost or missing. I want you to do that yourself.”
So Jamie stepped to the living-room door and called in: “John Carey has gotten the incinerator for us. He’s a right real bee immune!”
“I’ll tell the world he is,” came the voice of the little Scout, but it sounded muffled as if it were coming from fairly deep in a pillow.
The two men gathered up some soft towels and, working swiftly, dried the documents, the bank books, the valuable papers, the letters and the pictures that they found, and spread them on the kitchen table. Then they hurried to the shed to arrange new hives for the swarming bees. By the time they reached them, the two swarms that had gone out were weighting down the branches around their queens and only needed a slight smoking to numb them so that their transference to the hives could be easily managed. As for the Black Germans, they were still nervous, but they were a distance away, the hot sun was rapidly drying the water around their hives, the roar of the hose had ceased, the scent they disliked had been removed, and so they were calming down as speedily as might have been expected of bees of their irritable temperament.
As they worked, the two men talked to each other,
