But Dick didn’t tell Tom anything, for when they got back to camp Tom had gone.  Dick scarcely tasted his supper and his sleep was restless and troubled.  He woke with a scream, from a terrible nightmare in which a wild beast had him by the throat and was crushing him to death under his tremendous weight.  He was happy when he woke to find that his dream was true.  For Tom had come home and showed his joy at the sight of Dick by leaping on the boy’s chest and licking his face and neck.  Even Ned rejoiced that Tom had returned and stroked his back, which for once the lynx graciously permitted.

“You are glad that Tom has come back, aren’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.