“That is exactly why I am going to San Francisco, Mr. Peasley. There are on this Coast two ships such as you describe—sister ships and just what the doctor ordered.”
“What are their names?”
“The Lion and the Unicorn.”
Matt Peasley paused, with a forkful of provender halfway to his mouth. The S.S. Lion, eh? Why, that was one of Cappy Ricks' vessels! He remembered passing her off Cape Flattery once and seeing the Blue Star house flag fluttering at the fore.
“Were they Lake boats originally?” he queried.
Mr. Hayes nodded.
“What are they doing out here?”
“Right after the San Francisco fire, when fir lumber jumped from a twelve-dollar base to twenty-five, lumber freights soared accordingly,” Hayes explained. “Vessels that had been making a little money at four dollars a thousand feet, from Oregon and Washington ports to San Francisco, were enabled to get ten dollars; and anything that would float was hauled out of the bone yard and put to work. Old Man Ricks, of the Blue Star Navigation Company, was the first to see the handwriting on the wall; so he sneaked East and bought the Lion and the Unicorn. It was just the old cuss's luck to have a lot of cash on hand; and he bought them cheap, loaded them with general cargo in New York, and paid a nice dividend on them on their very first voyage under the Blue Star flag. When he got them on the Coast he put them into the lumber trade and they paid for themselves within a year.
“Then, just before the panic of 1907, old Ricks unloaded the Unicorn on the Black Butte Company for ten thousand dollars more than he paid for her—the old scamp! He's the shrewdest trader on the whole Pacific Coast. He had no sooner sawed the Unicorn off on the Black Butte people than the freight market collapsed in the general crash, and ever since then the owners of the Lion and the Unicorn have been stuck with their vessels. They're so big it's next to impossible to keep them running coastwise in the lumber trade during a dull period, and they're not big enough for the foreign trade. About the only thing they could do profitably was to freight coal, coal freights have dropped until the margin of profit is very meager; competition is keen and for the last six months the Lion and the Unicorn have been laid up.”
Matt Peasley smiled.