Clawing with his hands, digging with his feet, Doyle crawled up the hillside to get around one end of the obstruction.
He reached the clump of trees against which one end of it rested and hauled himself among them, bracing himself with aching arms and legs. The mosquitoes came at him in howling squadrons and he broke off a small branch, heavy with leaves, from one of the trees, and used it as a switch to discourage them.
He perched there, panting and sobbing, drawing deep breaths into his tongs. And wondered, momentarily, how he'd ever managed to get himself into such a situation. It was not his dish, he was not cut out for roughing it. His ideas of nature never had extended any further than a well-kept city park.
And here he was, in the depths of nowhere, toiling up outlandish hills, heading for a place where there might be money trees — row on row of money trees.
'I wouldn't do it,' he told himself, 'for nothing less than money.'
He twisted around and examined the tangle of wood and vines and saw, with some astonishment, that it was two feet thick or more and that it carried its thickness uniformally. And the uphill side of it was smooth and slick, almost as if it had been planed and sanded, although there was not a tool mark on it.
He examined it more closely and it was plain to see that it was no haphazard collection of driftwood that had been built up through the years, but that it was woven and interlaced so intricately that it was a single piece — had been a single piece even before it had become wedged between the trees.
Who, he wondered, could have, or would have, done a job like that? Where would the patience have been mustered and the technique and the purpose? He shook his head in wonderment.
He had heard somewhere about Indians weaving brush together to make weirs for catching fish, but there were no fish in this dry stream bed and no Indians for several hundred miles.
He tried to figure out the pattern of the weaving and there was no pattern that he could detect. Everything was twisted and intergrown around everything else and the whole thing was one solid mass.
Somewhat rested and with his wind at least partially restored, he proceeded on his way, trailing a ravaging cloud of mosquitoes in his wake.
It seemed now that the trees were thinning and that he could see blue sky ahead. The terrain leveled out a bit and he tried to hurry, but racked leg muscles screamed at him and he contented himself with jogging along as best he could.
He reached more level ground and finally broke free into a clearing that climbed gently to the top of a grassy knoll. Wind came out of the west, no longer held back by the trees, and the mosquitoes fell away, except for a small swarm of diehards that went part way up the knoll with him.
He reached the top of the knoll and threw himself in the grass, lying flat, panting like a tuckered dog.
And there, not more than a hundred yards away, was the fence that closed in Metcalfe's farm.
It marched across the rolling, broken hills, a snake of shining metal. And extending out from it was a broad swath of weeds, waist-high, silver-green in the blasting sunlight — as if the ground had been plowed around the fence for a distance of a hundred feet or so and the weeds sown in the ground as one might sow a crop. Doyle squinted his eyes to try to make out what kind of weeds they were, but he was too far away.
Far on the distant ridge was the red gleam of a rooftop among many sheltering trees and to the west of the buildings lay an orchard, ordered row on row.
Was it, Doyle wondered, only his imagination that the shapes of those orchard trees were the remembered shape of the night-seen tree in the walled garden in the rear of Metcalfe's town-house? And was it once more only his imagination that the green of them was slightly different than the green of other leaves — the green, perhaps of mint-new currency?
He lay in the grass, with the fingers of the wind picking at his sweat-soaked shirt, and wondered about the legal aspects of money that was grown on trees. It could not be counterfeit, for it was not made but grown. And if it were identical with perfectly legal, government-printed money, could anyone prove in any court of law that it was bogus money? He didn't know much law, but he wondered if there could be any statute upon the books that would cover a point of law like this? Probably not, he concluded, since it was so fantastic that it could not be anticipated and thus would require no rule to legislate against it.
And now, for the first time, he began really to wonder how money could be grown on trees. He had told Mabel, off-handedly and casual, so she wouldn't argue, that a botanist could do anything. But that wasn't entirely right, of course, because a botanist only studied plants and learned what he could about them. But there were those other fellows — these bio-something or other — who fooled around with changing plants. They bred grasses that would grow on land that would grow no more than thistles, they cross-pollinated corn to grow more and bigger ears, they developed grains that were disease-resistant, and they did a lot of other things. But developing a tree that would grow letter-perfect money in lieu of leaves seemed just a bit far-fetched.
The sun beat against his back and he felt the heat of it through his drying shirt. He looked at his watch and it was almost three o'clock.
He turned his attention back to the orchard and this time he saw that many little figures moved among the trees. He strained his eyes to see them better, but he could not be sure — although they looked for all the world like a gang of ralias.
He crawled down the knoll and across the strip of grass toward the weeds. He kept low and inched along and was very careful. His only hope of making a deal, any kind of deal, with Metcalfe, was to come upon him unawares and let him know immediately what kind of hand he held.
He started worrying about how Mabel might be getting along, but he wiped the worry out. He had enough to worry about without adding to it. And, anyhow, Mabel was quite a gal and could take care of herself.
He began running through his mind alternate courses of action if he should fail to locate Metcalfe, and the most obvious, of course, was to attempt a raid upon the orchard. As he thought it over, he wasn't even sure but what a raid upon the orchard might be the thing to do. He wished he'd brought along the sugar sack Mabel had fixed up for him.
The fence worried him a little, but he also thrust that worry to one side. It would be time enough to worry about the fence once he got to it.
He slithered through the grass and he was doing swell. He was almost to the strip of weeds and no one apparently had seen him. Once he got to the weeds, it would be easier, for they would give him cover. He could sneak right up to the fence and no one would ever notice.
He reached the weeds and wilted at what he saw.
The weeds were the healthiest and thickest patch of nettles that had ever grown outdoors!
He put out a tentative hand and the nettles stung. They were the real McCoy. Ruefully, he rubbed at the dead-white welts rising on his fingers.
He raised himself cautiously to peer above the nettles. One of the rollas was coming down the slope toward the fence and there was no doubt now that the things he'd seen up in the orchard was a gang of rollas.
He ducked behind the nettles, hoping that the rolla had not seen him. He lay flat upon the ground and the sun was hot and the place upon his hand that had touched the nettles blazed with fire, although it was hard to decide which was the worst — the nettle sting or all the mosquito lumps that had blossomed out on him.
He noticed that the nettles were beginning to wave and toss as if they were blowing in the wind and that was a funny deal, for there wasn't that much wind.