to the rock, his
knees shaking, his stomach sick, and clung to Mr. Welles with all his
might. "What made it fall? There's no wind! What made it fall?" he
cried, burying his face in the old man's coat. "It might just as easy
have fallen this way, on us, and killed us! What made it fall?"

Mr. Welles patted Paul's shoulder, and said, "There, there," till Paul's
teeth stopped chattering and he began to be a little ashamed of showing
how it had startled him. He was also a little put out that Mr. Welles
had remained so unmoved. "You don't know how dangerous a big tree _is_,
when it falls!" he said, accusingly, to defend himself. "If you'd lived
here more, and heard some of the stories . . . ! Nate Hewitt had his back
broken with a tree falling on him. But he was cutting that one down, and
it fell too soon. Nobody had touched this one! And there isn't any wind.
What _made_ it fall? Most every winter, some man in the lumber camp on
the mountain gets killed or smashed up, and lots of horses too."

He felt much better now, and he did want to find out whatever had made
that tree fall. He sat up, and looked back at it, just a mess of broken
branches and upset leaves, where a minute before there had been a tall
living tree! "I'm going over to see what made it fall," he said.

He splashed across the pool and poked around with a stick in the hole
in the ground, and almost right away he saw what the reason was. He ran
back to tell Mr. Welles. "I see now. The brook had kept sidling over
that way, and washed the earth from under the rocks. It just didn't have
enough ground left to hold on to."

He felt all right now he knew some simple reason for what had looked so
crazy. He looked up confidently at the old man, and was struck into awed
silence by the expression of Mr. Welles' face.

"Paul," said Mr. Welles, and his voice wasn't steady, "I guess what I
ought to try to be is one more drop of water in the brook."

Paul stared hard. He did not understand this either, but he understood
the expression in that tired, old face. Mr. Welles went on, "That wrong
feeling about colored people, not wanting them to be respected as much
as any American, is . . . that's a tree that's got to come down. I'm too
old to take an axe to it. And, anyhow, if you cut that sort of thing
down with an axe, the roots generally live and start all over again. If
we can just wash the ground out from under it, with enough people
thinking differently, maybe it'll f