as with binary search trees more broadly, deletion operations on an internal node that has at least one external-node child may be performed directly, by removing from the tree and reconnecting the other child of to the parent of . if, however, both children of a node are internal nodes, then we may follow a path downward in the tree from to the leftmost descendant of its right child, a node that immediately follows in the sorted ordering of the tree nodes. then has an external-node child (its left child). we may delete by performing the same reconnection procedure at node (effectively, deleting instead of ) and then replacing the data item stored at with the one that had been stored at .