Almost immediately the pines began.  They were short and scrubby as yet, but beautiful in the velvet of their dark green needles.  Bob glanced at them critically.  They were perhaps eighty to a hundred feet high and from a foot 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 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.