put his cans down, and he leaned his pole against a tree, and he
stood the ladder against the tree.

David looked in the cans. There wasn't anything in the little can, but
the big can was full of something that was about as thick as molasses
and almost as black as ink, only it was brownish black.

"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.

"You want to see me do it right off, do you?" he asked.

So he took a stubby paint brush from his belt, and he dipped it into
the big can, and he wiped it over as many of the spots as he could
reach. The spots looked as if they had been painted with tar.

"Now," he said, "I am going to walk right up that tree."

He pointed to his legs, and David saw that a long iron thing was
strapped to each leg, and the iron thing had a sharp point which stuck
down about as far as the soles of his shoes.

"Those are climbers, or spurs. We can walk right up any tree that
isn't too large around, and you see that those points are bent in a
little so that they will stick into the trunk of the tree on each
side. You watch."

So the man poured some of the stuff from the big can into t