“Wouch!” Wampus cried, and Skippy yelled, “Ow-wow! Bumblebees! Owp!” And they went for the brick house in big jumps. I did not have to look at them to learn how to lope, either. I was already on my way, and the thing I said when the first bumblebee jabbed his stinger into the back of my neck was not “I beg your pardon!” I don’t know what it was. I was too busy to notice. I said what I had to say and I did what I thought was the best thing to do, and I did not bother to put on any trimmings. Along in May you can’t pick up a bumblebee and kiss it, because affection of that sort is one thing a bumblebee does not understand much about, but a May bumblebee is a gentle violet alongside of a September bumblebee. By September a bumblebee is as grouchy as a snake with a sore tail, and is just aching to stick his stinger into somebody. I suppose a bumblebee spends the whole summer sharpening its stinger and getting ready for battle, and by September it wants war. And this was the meanest day of September for hostile bumblebees. There were about ten million of them in the nest under that old pine tree, and every bumblebee was fully ripe and as big as a plum, and it seemed as if they had let their stingers lie out in the sun until they were red-hot. It was the meanest lot of bees I ever got acquainted with. Bees that would have flown aside to get out of your way in May were now so eager to jab a boy that, if one of them had been on its way from New York to Boston to attend its grandmother’s funeral, it would have swerved aside to Los Angeles, California, to sting a brass Cupid on a fountain. When we gathered our scattered forces together in the old brick farmhouse, I had five stings in me, and Skippy had eight lumps that were like young mountains and still growing, and Tad had seven honorable wounds and one bee still skirmishing in the thick growth on his head, and Wampus--well, Wampus would not stand still long enough to let us count him. A couple of bees had gone down inside of his shirt and Wampus was disrobing by jerks. He yanked at the collar of his shirt so hard that a pearl button flew eight feet and hit Tad on the neck and Tad jumped and yelled. He thought it was another bee come to bury a red-hot bayonet in him. Three bees--some of the cavalry, I suppose--had followed us to turn our retreat into a rout, and they came right into the old brick house without knocking, and for three minutes Tad and Skippy and I had all we needed to do whacking at those bees with our caps. Then one of them stung Tad and was satisfied, and the other two took Wampus’s bare back as an insult, and Wampus yipped twice more. Then there was silence, except for low moans and loud “Ow-wow-wows!” Wampus began to cry. I suppose he felt like one of the devastated regions after the Germans had shot it full of shell-holes. Skippy was the first to show any sense.