"They would be powerful mad when they were let out," said Alvin to himself, as he lay in the lee of the schoolhouse fence. "The people would get their money's worth."
Alvin saw suddenly all the old people in the world stiff and sore and all the young people afflicted like Ollie and his friends. He did not wish for any of them such a fate. He had various weaknesses, but a vindictive spirit was not one of them. He saw only the possibilities of a great business. Hearing the schoolhouse bell, and knowing that all were safely within doors, he started across the fields and up the mountain-side.
The bargain was consummated in the woodshed, a little frame building leaning against the blank wall of the schoolhouse. Alvin, hurrying back from his house, scrambling over fences, weary from his long run, thought that he was too early with the wares in the basket on his arm. Or could it be, alas! that he was late and recess was over? That would be too cruel! With relief he heard the sound of voices in the woodshed where his patients awaited him.
The truants had endured an hour and a half of torture. They anticipated punishment for yesterday's misdemeanor, and they had a deadly fear that that punishment would be physical. Anxiously now from the woodshed, where they could lie at their ease, they listened for Alvin.
"Perhaps he won't come back," suggested Billy Knerr. "Perhaps he cannot catch the bees."
Recess was all over but five minutes, and the disheartened sufferers were expecting the bell, when Alvin appeared. David Hartman had collected the money against such necessity for haste, and, indeed, had advanced most of it from his well-lined pocket. Only in such dire trouble would he have treated with Alvin Koehler; only in this agony would he have bought from any one such a pig in a poke. If he had been himself, he would have made Alvin open the basket and would have examined the contents to be sure that Alvin was playing fair. But now, with only two minutes to cure himself and his friends of their agony, there was no time for the ordinary inspection of the articles of trade.
The commodities exchanged hands; twenty-one pennies into Alvin's outstretched palm, the basket into David's. It took David not much more than one of his hundred and twenty seconds to open the basket lid, even though it fitted closely and needed prying. A low, angry murmur, which the boys had not heard in their pain, changed at once to a loud buzz, and suddenly the hearts of the most suffering failed them. But the basket lid was off, and with it came the lid of a fruit jar which stood within. The bees were not in separate bottles--Alvin maintained stoutly that separate bottles had not been stipulated--so that one sting could be applied at a time, like a drop of medicine from a pipette; they were, or, rather, they had been, in a broad-mouthed jar, whose lid, as I have said, came off with the basket lid.