Broke, with a bad knee, and no place to pasture a few cows, Bill Robeiro joins two struggling friends, Jim Delahunt and Hrubel Kwasnik, in a scheme to develop, produce, and sell Trunk Wax, a tree-trunk paint that imparts wondrous properties to fruit trees and might put some needed dollars in their pockets besides being a boon to natural and organic orchardists. Bill travels to France to locate a source of microbe-rich, bovine manure, a key ingredient in their Trunk Wax recipe. Along the way, he thwarts a hotel burglary in Clermont-Ferrand, collects a reward, plays professional rugby in the Cantal, cowboys in the Camargue, and rescues a kidnapped Welsh cattleman from Canadian separatists.
