“Splendid!” he exclaimed, as she dropped lightly to the ground.
They led their horses beneath the spreading tree and sat down with their backs to the huge bole.
“How cool it is here!” remarked the girl. “I can feel a breeze, though I hadn’t noticed one before.”
“There always is a breeze beneath the oaks. I think they make their own. I read somewhere that an oak evaporates about one hundred and eighty gallons of water every day. That ought to make a considerable change of temperature beneath the tree on a hot day like this, and in that way it must start a circulation of air about it.”
“How interesting! How much there is to know in the world, and how little of it most of us know! A tree is a tree, a flower is a flower, and the hills are the hills—that much knowledge of them satisfies nearly all of us. The how and the why of them we never consider; but I should like to know more. We should know all about things that are so beautiful—don’t you think so?”
“Yes,” he said. “In ranching we do learn a lot that city people don’t need to know—about how things grow, and what some plants take out of the soil, and what others put into it. It’s part of our business to know these things, not only that we may judge the food value of certain crops, but also to keep our soil in condition to grow good crops every year.”
He told her how the tree beneath which they sat drew water and various salts from the soil, and how the leaves extracted carbon dioxide from the air, taking it in through myriads of minute mouths on the under sides of the leaves, and how the leaves manufactured starch and the sap carried it to every growing part of the tree, from deepest root to the tip of loftiest twig.
The girl listened, absorbed. As she listened she watched the man’s face, earnest and intelligent, and mentally she could not but compare him and his conversation with the men she had known in the city, and their conversation. They had talked to her as if she was a mental cipher, incapable of understanding or appreciating anything worth while—small talk, that subverter of the ancient art of conversation. In a brief half hour Custer Pennington had taught her things that would help to make the world a little more interesting and a little more beautiful; for she could never look upon a tree again as just a tree—it would be for her a living, breathing, almost a sentient creature.
She tried to recall what she had learned from two years’ association with Wilson Crumb, and the only thing she could think of was that Crumb had taught her to snuff cocaine.
After a while they started on again, and the girl surprised the man by mounting easily from the ground. She was very much pleased with her achievement, laughing happily at his word of approval.