Chapter 3 SUGARING OFF

The next morning, incredible as it seemed, Bob and Van were none the worse for their mountain trip, and Mr. Carlton, who had worried no little about them, and who was still feeling the effects of his hours of anxiety, remarked somewhat wrathfully:

"You two fellows come to the surface like a pair of corks! Any one would think that being lost on a mountain was an every-day occurrence with you. That is the difference between sixteen and forty-six, I suppose. My poor old nerves rebel at being jolted in such casual fashion."

Bob smiled.

"We're fit as two fighting cocks to-day, Father," he declared. "In fact, this very minute we're going out to help David collect sap. They are going to boil a lot of it down to-day."

"I imagined as much when I saw the smoke rising from the sugar-house chimney. Well, you seem to have your morning's work mapped out. Just don't get lost again, for I have no mind to go scouring the country a second time to find you."

"We'll take good care, Mr. Carlton," Van replied, giving a final tug at his long rubber boots.

"You may not lose yourself, Van," Bob chuckled, "but I am morally certain you'll lose your boots. You will just walk off and leave them in some snow-drift or mud puddle and never miss them. They are big enough for an elephant. Where did you get them, anyway?"

"They're an old pair David lent me; your father said I'd better wear them."

"He's dead right, too. The snow is still deep in spots, and it is thawing everywhere. It is not the boots I'm quarreling with; it's their size. I guess, though, you can get on somehow. We want to cut across the road and make for that hill over to the right. That's where the sugar-house is; it stands in the middle of an orchard of maples which were planted by my grandfather. Of course we have other maple trees scattered about the farm and David taps those, too; but most of our sugar comes from this orchard."

"Did your grandfather make maple-sugar to sell?"

"Goodness, no! He made it to use. White sugar, you must understand, was not so common in the olden days as it is now. Very little of it was grown in our country; and so, as it had to be brought from the East Indies, Spain, and South America, it was pretty expensive. Grandfather told me once that when he was a boy people used brown sugar or maple-sugar to sweeten their food, and sometimes they even used cheap molasses. White sugar was looked upon as a great luxury."

"I don't think I ever realized that before," said Van thoughtfully.

"Why, even my father remembers when, as a little shaver, he used to have white sugar spread on his bread for a treat."

"Seems queer, doesn't it?" Van mused.

"Yes. But it isn't so queer when you consider that all the sugar-cane now growing in America first had to be brought to the West Indies from Spain, the Canary Islands, or Madeira and then transplanted along the Mississippi delta. Dad says that originally sugar-cane came from Africa or India and that doubtless it was the Crusaders who introduced it into Europe."

"Do you mean to tell me that people never knew about sugar until then?" inquired Van incredulously, halting in the middle of the road.

"The Chinese were practically the only people who did, and they did not use it at all as we do; they just sweetened things with the thin sap."

Van regarded his chum steadily for a moment.

"Say," he demanded at last, "how did you come to know so much, Bobbie?"

"What? Oh, about sugar? I don't know much. I just happen to remember a few scraps Father has told me from time to time. He's in the sugar business, you know."

"Really? No, I didn't know. You never said anything about it. Cane-sugar?"

"Yes." Bob watched Van curiously.

"That's odd."

"Why?"

"Oh, because my father is in the sugar business too. Don't you recall my telling your father so? Yes, my dad makes beet sugar."

"Then that's how my father happened to know your father!" exclaimed Bob quickly. "I suppose they're business friends. I've been wondering why Father kept watching you. Probably he sees in you some resemblance to your father. Do you look like him?"

"I hardly know. Some people think I do. My mother says so," was Van's indifferent response. "But say, tell me more about sugar. You'd think with my father right in the business I'd know something about it; but I don't. Do they get sugar from anything beside beets, and sugar-cane, and maple sap?"

"Oh, my, yes. There's sugar in ever so many other things: in grapes, and milk, and the date palm, and in maize; but it is from the beet and cane that the most sugar can be extracted."

Van nodded.

"You're quite a lecturer, Bobbie," he said. "Wait until I get back home and astonish my father with all this knowledge. I'll make his eyes stick out."

Van broke into hearty laughter at the thought. Then, as he started to walk on he gave a shout of dismay.

"Hold onto me, Bob," he cried. "I can't move. While I've been standing here listening to your words of wisdom I've been sinking deeper and deeper into your old yellow mud until now I can't stir. I can't-upon my word. My feet are in perfectly solid. You can laugh if you want to, but you've just got to pull me out, that's all. Help! Help! To the rescue. I shall disappear in another minute. David will never see his rubber boots again."

"Of course you can get your feet out," was Bob's scornful retort.

"Cross my heart I can't. Honest, Bobbie," protested Van. "I've got into a quicksand or a quagmire or something. Look at me. I'm up to my knees now, and if you don't hurry you'll see nothing of me but my collar. I saved your life yesterday; you might do the same for me to-day."

But Bob was too convulsed with amusement to offer aid; instead he stood on a large rock at the roadside and laughed immoderately.

"Pull! Pull!" he cried to Van. "Why don't you pull?"

"I am pulling," Van answered. "But it does no good. I can't budge my feet. I never saw such mud in all my life. It must be yards deep. It sucks my boots right off. You'll have to help me."

"Not I! I know too well what would happen. It would be like Kipling's story of the Elephant's Child. Don't you remember, when the crocodile let go the nose of the little elephant how he suddenly sat down plop. I've no notion of being pulled into this mud hole when your rubber boots come to the surface. You'll have to get yourself out."

"You old heathen! It is not a straight game to fit me out with a pair of hip rubber boots miles too large for me and then sit and howl when you see me losing my life in them. Well, you needn't come into the mire if you don't want to, but you can at least be gentleman enough to pass me the end of that pole that is lying beside you," said Van.

"I'll do that."

Bob picked up a long branch from the ground.

"Here!" he cried. "Catch hold of this and pull."

The two boys tugged at opposite ends of the stick.

Then suddenly and quite without warning something happened.

The dead wood parted and Bob hurtled backward off the rock where he had been standing and landed in a snow-drift; while Van, much to his astonishment, sat down with abruptness in the wettest of the mud.

Two more chagrined boys could nowhere have been found.

Bob was the first to get to his feet. Shaking the snow out of his hair and collar he called:

"Get up, you-unless you want to be swallowed up for life. My eye, but you're a sight! If your mother could only see you now. Well, your feet are out, if you did have to get in all over to do it. Now step lively if you don't want to get stuck again. You are a peach, I must say!"

Van took the banter good-naturedly.

"That's what one might call being buried alive," he answered. "Lucky it wasn't you! I'm tall and could keep my head out; but the mire would long since have closed over an abbreviated person like yourself and you would have been seen no more."

Bob winced. He was sensitive about his height.

Clambering up on the rock beside his chum Van scooped up a handful of clean snow and with it washed his hands and face.

"There!" he said at length. "I'm just as tidy as if it had not happened."

"I can't exactly agree with you," replied Bob, "but I guess you'll have to do. Come on now. Goodness only knows where David and the sledge have got to by this time."

They hurried up the hill.

"There's David!" Van said, as they reached the crest of the rise.

It was David sure enough; and standing beside him in his customary motionless attitude was the Admiral harnessed into a great sledge surmounted by a barrel into which David was pouring the sap as fast as he gathered it. At the moment the man was busy detaching one of the sap buckets from the trunk of a giant maple.

The boys joined him.

"What are you doing, Dave?" asked Van curiously.

"Doing! Ain't you got eyes, young man? I certainly ain't writing a book or taking a wireless message," he answered without turning his head.

"But straight, I mean it. What are you doing? You know this business is new to me," explained Van.

"Haven't you ever seen maple-sugar made?" David's tone was full of surprise.

"Never."

"Well, bless my soul! Where was you raised?"

"In Colorado."

"Humph! That accounts for it. If you'd been brought up in the East you'd have known."

"But I was raised in the East, David, and I've never seen maple-sugar made," piped Bob, instantly overthrowing the old farmer's philosophy.

"You ain't never-you ain't seen maple-syrup or maple-sugar made, Mr. Bob?" queried David aghast.

"No."

"Well, what are we coming to?"

The farmhand surveyed the boys disdainfully.

"What you been doing with yourself all your days?" he gasped at last.

"I've been going to school."

"And they ain't taught you to make maple-sugar? That's about all schooling is worth nowadays," he affirmed. "Now I warn't never inside a schoolhouse in my life, but I've known from the time I was knee-high to a grasshopper how to make maple-sugar. I made pounds of it before I was half the age of you two. The boys of this generation don't know nothin'!"

He sniffed contemptuously.

"Well, you may as well learn before you're a minute older," he continued. "Listen, now. Do you see the little hole in this maple?" He pointed up at the gray trunk above his head. "We make a little hole like that in every tree as soon as the sap begins to run in the early spring. Then we drive into the hole this small piece of hollow wood-it is like a trough, you see; and the sap runs through it into the buckets we hang beneath. All day and all night it drips in and each morning we go round and empty every pail into the cask we carry on the sledge. The sap, as you see, is thin, because only part of it is sugar; the rest is water. What we have to do is to boil down the liquid until the part that is water goes off in vapor and only the syrup is left. If we're after maple-syrup we let it cool when it gets thick and later bottle it; but if we want sugar we must boil the syrup still more until little crystals form in it."

"How can you tell when it has been boiled enough?" questioned Van.

"Oh, we've made it enough times to know," David replied. "Some folks stick a thermometer into it and figger how hot it will have to be; they say that's the best way. Others try the syrup in cold water or on snow like you would candy. Generally speaking, I can tell by the feel of it, and by the way it drips from the spoon. Sometimes, though, when I'm in doubt I try it on snow myself. If it gets kinder soft and waxy you can be sure it is getting done. If I was you instead of tracking round emptying buckets I'd go in the sugar-house and see 'em boiling the syrup. They started yesterday, and as I calculate it the mess ought to be pretty well along by now."

"Bully idea, David! What do you say, Van?" asked Bob. "Shall we trail David or shall we go in and see the sugar made?"

"Sugar! Sugar! Me for the sugar!" Van cried.

"Sugar it is then!"

Into the sugar-house they went.

The small room was hot and steamy, and in the middle of it in a zinc-lined tank the foaming sap was boiling furiously. Beside it stood McMasters, Mr. Carlton's foreman, a thermometer in his hand.

"Good-morning, Mr. Bob," he said. "So you are coming to cast an eye on the maple-sugar! Last week we made syrup and bottled it. Not a bad day's work, eh?"

With no little pride he pointed to a row of neat bottles symmetrically arranged on a shelf. "We'll seal them to-morrow or next day and get the labels on, and then they will be ready to sell. But to-day it's sugar, so we have to keep the sap at a higher temperature."

As he spoke he paused to test the bubbling liquid in the kettle.

"If you lads want a treat take one of those wooden plates over there and fill it with snow; I'll spoon some of this hot sap over it, and you will have a feast for a king."

The boys needed no urging. They took the plates, hurried out, and soon returned with them; over the heap of snow the foreman poured several heaping spoonfuls of hot syrup which, to their surprise, cooled in an incredibly short time and stiffened into a sticky mass that looked like candy.

"Now get one of those wooden skewers from the shelf and use it as a fork," McMasters said.

The boys caught the idea at once.

They gathered the candied syrup up on the end of the sticks and thrust it into their mouths.

"Why, it is just like toffy!" Van exclaimed.

"It is a sight fresher than anything you could buy at the store," observed the foreman.

"I believe I've got to have some more, Mac," Bob said. "Somehow it melts away before you know you're eating it."

He refilled his plate with fresh snow and held it out for a second helping of syrup.

McMasters filled it good-naturedly.

But when the plates were extended the fourth and fifth time the Scotchman demurred.

"It is no stuff to make a meal of, Mr. Bob," protested he. "And at ten o'clock in the morning, too. I'll give you no more. It is too sweet. Next you know the two of you will be spending your vacation in bed and wondering what's the matter with you. Why, we'd have no sugar at all if you should stay here eating at this rate. If it's candy you're wantin', ask the cook to boil some maple-syrup until it is thick like molasses candy; then turn it out of the pan and when it is almost cool pull it until it turns white. You'll find it better than any candy you can buy. Try it."

"We certainly will, Mac, and thanks for the suggestion," Bob replied.

"And while you're at it you might hunt up some butternuts and stir them in; I'll recommend the result and will wager you'll think it as good as anything you ever ate."

Once more he took the temperature of the steaming sap.

"We're going to put some of the sugar in those tin pails and sell it," he continued. "Each pail holds ten pounds. And some we shall pour into those small tin moulds and make little scalloped cakes for our own use. I reckon you can have some of them to take back to college when you go. We'll certainly have a plenty to spare you some, for your father will make a handsome thing out of his sugar this year. I wouldn't wonder but you're being educated on maple-sugar money. You better make your bow of thanks to the trees as you go through the orchard," he added whimsically.