to thirty inches in diameter.

"Fair timber," he commented to his companion.

Welton snorted. "Timber!" he cried. "That isn't timber; it's weeds.
There's no _timber_ on this slope of the mountain."

Slowly the ponies toiled up the steep grade, pausing often for breath.
Among the pines grew many oaks, buckthorns, tall manzanitas and the
like. As the valley dropped beneath, they came upon an occasional
budding dogwood. Over the slopes of some of the hills spread a mantle of
velvety vivid green, fair as the grass of a lawn, but indescribably soft
and mobile. It lent those declivities on which it grew a spacious,
well-kept, park appearance, on which Bob exclaimed with delight.

But Welton would have none of it.

"Bear clover," said he, "full of pitch as an old jack-pine. Burns like
coal oil, and you can't hardly cut it with a hoe. Worst stuff to carry
fire and to fight fire in you ever saw. Pick a piece and smell it."

Bob broke off one of the tough, woody stems. A pungent odour exactly
like that of extract of hamamelis met his nostrils. Then he realized
that all the time he had been aware of this perfume faintly disengaging
itself from the hills. In spite of Mr. Welton's disgust, Bob liked its
clean, pungent suggestion.

The road mounted always, following the contour of the mountains. Thus it
alternately emerged and crept on around bold points, and bent back into
the recesses of ravines. Clear, beautiful streams dashed and sang down
the latter; from the former, often, Bob could look out over the valley
from which they had mounted, across the foothills, to the distant,
yellowing plains far on the horizon, lost finally in brown heat waves.
Sycamore Flats lay almost directly below. Always it became smaller, and
more and more like a coloured relief-map with tiny, Noah's-ark houses.
The forest grew sturdily on the steep mountain. Bob's eyes were on a
level with the tops of trees growing but a few hundred feet away. The
horizon line was almost at eleven o'clock above him.

"How'd you handle this kind of a proposition?" he inquired. "Looks to me
like hard sledding."

"This stuff is no good," said Welton. "These little, yellow pines ain't
worth cutting. 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