This is all Forest Reserve stuff."
Bob glanced again down the aisles of what looked to him like a noble
forest, but said nothing. He was learning, in this land of surprises, to
keep his mouth shut.
At the end of two hours Welton drew up beside a new water trough to
water the ponies.
"There," he remarked casually, "is the first sugar pine."
Bob's eye followed the indication of his whip to the spreading, graceful
arms of a free so far up the bed of the stream that he could make out
only its top. The ponies, refreshed, resumed their methodical plodding.
Insensibly, as they mounted, the season had changed. The oaks that, at
the level of Sycamore Flats, had been in full leaf, here showed but the
tender pinks and russets of the first foliage. The dogwoods were quite
dormant. Rivulets of seepage and surface water trickled in the most
unexpected places as though from snow recently melted.
Of climbing there seemed no end. False skylines recurrently deceived Bob
into a belief that the buckboard was about to surmount the top. Always
the rise proved to be preliminary to another. The road dipped behind
little spurs, climbed ravines, lost itself between deep cuts.
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