In the interim Bryce had not been idle. From his woods-crew he picked an old, experienced hand—one Jabez Curtis—to take the place of the vanished McTavish. Colonel Pennington, having repaired in three days the gap in his railroad, wrote a letter to the Cardigan Redwood Lumber Company, informing Bryce that until more equipment could be purchased and delivered to take the place of the rolling-stock destroyed in the wreck, the latter would have to be content with half-deliveries; whereupon Bryce irritated the Colonel profoundly by purchasing a lot of second-hand trucks from a bankrupt sugar-pine mill in Lassen County and delivering them to the Colonel's road via the deck of a steam schooner.
“That will insure delivery of sufficient logs to get out our orders on file,” Bryce informed his father. “While we are morally certain our mill will run but one year longer, I intend that it shall run full capacity for that year. In fact, I'm going to saw in that one year remaining to us as much lumber as we would ordinarily saw in two years. To be exact, I'm going to run a night-shift.”
The sightless old man raised both hands in deprecation. “The market won't absorb it,” he protested.
“Then we'll stack it in piles to air-dry and wait until the market is brisk enough to absorb it,” Bryce replied.
“Our finances won't stand the overhead of that night-shift, I tell you,” his father warned.
“I know we haven't sufficient cash on hand to attempt it, Dad, but—I'm going to borrow some.”
“From whom? No bank in Sequoia will lend us a penny, and long before you came home I had sounded every possible source of a private loan.”
“Did you sound the Sequoia Bank of Commerce?”
“Certainly not. Pennington owns the controlling interest in that bank, and I was never a man to waste my time.”
Bryce chuckled. “I don't care where the money comes from so long as I get it, partner. Pennington's money may be tainted; in fact, I'd risk a bet that it is; but our employees will accept it for wages nevertheless. Desperate circumstances require desperate measures you know, and the day before yesterday, when I was quite ignorant of the fact that Colonel Pennington controls the Sequoia Bank of Commerce, I drifted in on the president and casually struck him for a loan of one hundred thousand dollars.”