"What is it?" he asked. "Is it molasses? It smells horrid."
The man laughed.
"No," he answered, "it isn't molasses or anything good to eat. It's creosote. That's a poisonous kind of stuff. We put it on these things."
He pointed to a place on a tree. It looked as if somebody had daubed dirt on the trunk, and the place was about the size of David's thumb, and it was rounded out a little at the middle.
"I guess you never noticed those places," the man said. "Inside of that are the eggs of a moth that eats things up and does a great deal of harm. Those eggs would hatch when it gets warm enough, and little worms would come out, and they would begin to eat, and the worms would change into moths later on, and the moths would lay more eggs. We are trying to get rid of them, so we paint some creosote on every bunch of eggs we can find, and that kills them.
"If you look carefully you can see a good many places just like this, all over the trunks of the trees and on the under sides of branches. Some trees have a good many on them, and some don't have any. There's a lot on this tree."
David looked and saw the little mud spots farther up the trunk, and then he looked higher and he saw some of the spots on the under sides of the branches, as the man had said.
He nodded.
"You paint some now," he said, going nearer, "with that stuff."
The man laughed.