The old man tried to get at him again.  “Look here, Paul, Americans that happen to be colored people ought to have every bit of the same chance to amount to their best that any Americans have, oughtn’t they?”

Paul saw this.  But he didn’t see what Mr. Welles could do about it, and said so.

“Well, I couldn’t do a great deal,” said the old man sadly, “but more than if I stayed here.  It looks as though they needed, as much as anything else, people to just have the same feeling towards them that you have for anybody who’s trying to make the best of himself.  And I could do that.”

Paul got the impression at last that Mr. Welles was in earnest about this.  It made him feel anxious.  “Oh dear!” he said, kicking the toe of his rubber boot against the rock.  He couldn’t think of anything to say, except that he hated the idea of Mr. Welles going.

But just then he was startled by a sharp cry of distress from the bird, who flew out wildly from the beech, poised herself in the air, beating her wings and calling in a loud scream.  The old man, unused to forests and their inhabitants, noticed this but vaguely, and was surprised by Paul’s instant response.  “There must be a snake after her eggs,” he said excitedly.  “I’ll go over and chase him off.”

He started across the pool, gave a cry, and stood still, petrified.  Before their eyes, without a breath of wind, the hugh beech solemnly bowed itself and with a great roar of branches, whipping and crushing the trees about, it fell, its full length thundering on the ground, a great mat of shaggy roots uptorn, leaving an open wound in the stony mountain soil.  Then, in a minute, it was all as still as before.

Paul was scared almost to death.  He scrambled back 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.