The Bee-Man of Orn and Other Fanciful Tales Part 13

"Not until to-night, your Highness," answered the course-marker, "when I can set my instrument by the stars."

The Prince's party was now in a doleful plight. Every one was very hungry; they were in an open plain, no house was visible, and they knew not which way to go. They wandered about for some time, looking for a brook or a spring where they might quench their thirst; and then a rabbit sprang out from some bushes. The whole party immediately started off in pursuit of the rabbit. They chased it here, there, backward and forward, through hollows and over hills, until it ran quite away and disappeared. Then they were more tired, thirsty, and hungry than before; and, to add to their miseries, when night came on the sky was cloudy, and the course-marker could not set his instrument by the stars. It would be difficult to find sixteen more miserable people than the Prince and his companions when they awoke the next morning from their troubled sleep on the hard ground.

Nearly starved, they gazed at one another with feelings of despair.

"I feel," said the Prince, in a weak voice, "that there is nothing I would not do to obtain food. I would willingly become a slave if my master would give me a good breakfast."

"So would I," e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed each of the others.

About an hour after this, as they were all sitting disconsolately upon the ground, they saw, slowly approaching, a large cart drawn by a pair of oxen. On the front of the cart, which seemed to be heavily loaded, sat a man, with a red beard, reading a book. The boys, when they saw the cart, set up a feeble shout, and the man, lifting his eyes from his book, drove directly toward the group on the ground.

Dismounting, he approached Prince Ha.s.sak, who immediately told him his troubles and implored relief. "We will do any thing," said the Prince, "to obtain food."

Standing for a minute in a reflective mood, the man with the red beard addressed the Prince in a slow, meditative manner: "How would you like," he said, "to form a nucleus?"

"Can we get any thing to eat by it?" eagerly asked the Prince.

"Yes," replied the man, "you can."

"We'll do it!" immediately cried the whole sixteen, without waiting for further information.

"Which will you do first," said the man, "listen to my explanations, or eat?"

"Eat!" cried the entire sixteen in chorus.

The man now produced from his cart a quant.i.ty of bread, meat, wine, and other provisions, which he distributed generously, but judiciously, to the hungry Prince and his followers. Every one had enough, but no one too much. And soon, revived and strengthened, they felt like new beings.

"Now," said the Prince, "we are ready to form a nucleus, as we promised. How is it done?"

"I will explain the matter to you in a few words," said the man with the red beard. "For a long time I have been desirous to found a city.

In order to do this one must begin by forming a nucleus. Every great city is started from a nucleus. A few persons settle down in some particular spot, and live there. Then they are a nucleus. Then other people come there, and gather around this nucleus, and then more people come and more, until in course of time there is a great city.

I have loaded this cart with provisions, tools, and other things that are necessary for my purpose, and have set out to find some people who would be willing to form a nucleus. I am very glad to have found you and that you are willing to enter into my plan; and this seems a good spot for us to settle upon."

"What is the first thing to be done?" said the Prince.

"We must all go to work," said the man with the red beard, "to build dwellings, and also a school-house for these young people. Then we must till some ground in the suburbs, and lay the foundations, at least, of a few public buildings."

"All this will take a good while, will it not?" said the Prince.

"Yes," said the man, "it will take a good while; and the sooner we set about it, the better."

Thereupon tools were distributed among the party, and Prince, courtiers, boys, girls, and all went to work to build houses and form the nucleus of a city.

When the jailer looked into his cells in the morning, and found that all but one of his prisoners had escaped, he was utterly astounded, and his face, when the Jolly-c.u.m-pop saw him, made that individual roar with laughter. The jailer, however, was a man accustomed to deal with emergencies. "You need not laugh," he said, "every thing shall go on as before, and I shall take no notice of the absence of your companions. You are now numbered One to Seventeen inclusive, and you stand charged with highway robbery, forgery, treason, smuggling, barn-burning, bribery, poaching, usury, piracy, witchcraft, a.s.sault and battery, using false weights and measures, burglary, counterfeiting, robbing hen-roosts, conspiracy, and poisoning your grandmother by proxy. I intended to-day to dress the convicts in prison garb, and you shall immediately be so clothed."

"I shall require seventeen suits," said the Jolly-c.u.m-pop.

"Yes," said the jailer, "they shall be furnished."

"And seventeen rations a day," said the Jolly-c.u.m-pop.

"Certainly," replied the jailer.

"This is luxury," roared the Jolly-c.u.m-pop. "I shall spend my whole time in eating and putting on clean clothes."

Seventeen large prison suits were now brought to the Jolly-c.u.m-pop.

He put one on, and hung up the rest in his cell. These suits were half bright yellow and half bright green, with spots of bright red, as big as saucers.

The jailer now had doors cut from one cell to another. "If the Potentate comes here and wants to look at the prisoners," he said to the Jolly-c.u.m-pop, "you must appear in cell number One, so that he can look through the hole in the door, and see you; then, as he walks along the corridor, you must walk through the cells, and whenever he looks into a cell, you must be there."

"He will think," merrily replied the Jolly-c.u.m-pop, "that all your prisoners are very fat, and that the little girls have grown up into big men."

"I will endeavor to explain that," said the jailer.

For several days the Jolly-c.u.m-pop was highly amused at the idea of his being seventeen criminals, and he would sit first in one cell and then in another, trying to look like a ferocious pirate, a hard-hearted usurer, or a mean-spirited chicken thief, and laughing heartily at his failures. But, after a time, he began to tire of this, and to have a strong desire to see what sort of a tunnel the Prince's miners and rock-splitters were making under his house. "I had hoped," he said to himself, "that I should pine away in confinement, and so be able to get through the window-bars; but with nothing to do, and seventeen rations a day, I see no chance of that.

But I must get out of this jail, and, as there seems no other way, I will revolt." Thereupon he shouted to the jailer through the hole in the door of his cell: "We have revolted! We have risen in a body, and have determined to resist your authority, and break jail!"

When the jailer heard this, he was greatly troubled. "Do not proceed to violence," he said; "let us parley."

"Very well," replied the Jolly-c.u.m-pop, "but you must open the cell door. We cannot parley through a hole."

The jailer thereupon opened the cell door, and the Jolly-c.u.m-pop, having wrapped sixteen suits of clothes around his left arm as a shield, and holding in his right hand the iron bar which had been cut from his window, stepped boldly into the corridor, and confronted the jailer and his myrmidons.

"It will be useless for you to resist," he said. "You are but four, and we are seventeen. If you had been wise you would have made us all cheating shop-keepers, chicken thieves, or usurers. Then you might have been able to control us; but when you see before you a desperate highwayman, a daring smuggler, a blood-thirsty pirate, a wily poacher, a powerful ruffian, a reckless burglar, a bold conspirator, and a murderer by proxy, you well may tremble!"

The jailer and his myrmidons looked at each other in dismay.

"We sigh for no blood," continued the Jolly-c.u.m-pop, "and will readily agree to terms. We will give you your choice: Will you allow us to honorably surrender, and peacefully disperse to our homes, or shall we rush upon you in a body, and, after overpowering you by numbers, set fire to the jail, and escape through the crackling timbers of the burning pile?"

The jailer reflected for a minute. "It would be better, perhaps," he said, "that you should surrender and disperse to your homes."

The Jolly-c.u.m-pop agreed to these terms, and the great gate being opened, he marched out in good order. "Now," said he to himself, "the thing for me to do is to get home as fast as I can, or that jailer may change his mind." But, being in a great hurry, he turned the wrong way, and walked rapidly into a country unknown to him. His walk was a very merry one. "By this time," he said to himself, "the Prince and his followers have returned to my house, and are tired of watching the rock-splitters and miners. How amused they will be when they see me come back in this gay suit of green and yellow, with red spots, and with sixteen similar suits upon my arm! How my own dogs will bark at me! And how my own servants will not know me! It is the funniest thing I ever knew of!" And his gay laugh echoed far and wide. But when he had gone several miles without seeing any signs of his habitation, his gayety abated. "It would have been much better,"

he said, as he sat down to rest under the shade of a tree, "if I had brought with me sixteen rations instead of these sixteen suits of clothes."

The Jolly-c.u.m-pop soon set out again, but he walked a long distance without seeing any person or any house. Toward the close of the afternoon he stopped, and, looking back, he saw coming toward him a large party of foot travellers. In a few moments, he perceived that the person in advance was the jailer. At this the Jolly-c.u.m-pop could not restrain his merriment. "How comically it has all turned out!" he exclaimed. "Here I've taken all this trouble, and tired myself out, and have nearly starved myself, and the jailer comes now, with a crowd of people, and takes me back. I might as well have staid where I was. Ha! ha!"

The jailer now left his party and came running toward the Jolly-c.u.m-pop. "I pray you, sir," he said, bowing very low, "do not cast us off."

"Who are you all?" asked the Jolly-c.u.m-pop, looking with much surprise at the jailer's companions, who were now quite near.

"We are myself, my three myrmidons, and our wives and children. Our situations were such good ones that we married long ago, and our families lived in the upper stories of the prison. But when all the convicts had left we were afraid to remain, for, should the Potentate again visit the prison, he would be disappointed and enraged at finding no prisoners, and would, probably, punish us grievously. So we determined to follow you, and to ask you to let us go with you, wherever you are going. I wrote a report, which I fastened to the great gate, and in it I stated that sixteen of the convicts escaped by the aid of outside confederates, and that seventeen of them mutinied in a body and broke jail."

"That report," laughed the Jolly-c.u.m-pop, "your Potentate will not readily understand."

"If I were there," said the jailer, "I could explain it to him; but, as it is, he must work it out for himself."

"Have you any thing to eat with you?" asked the Jolly-c.u.m-pop.

"Oh, yes," said the jailer, "we brought provisions."

"Well, then, I gladly take you under my protection. Let us have supper. I have had nothing to eat since morning, and the weight of sixteen extra suits of clothes does not help to refresh one."