THE VALLEY OF THE GIANTS

In the summer of 1850 a topsail schooner slipped into the cove under Trinidad Head and dropped anchor at the edge of the kelp-fields. Fifteen minutes later her small-boat deposited on the beach a man armed with long squirrel-rifle and an axe, and carrying food and clothing in a brown canvas pack. From the beach he watched the boat return and saw the schooner weigh anchor and stand out to sea before the northwest trades. When she had disappeared from his ken, he swung his pack to his broad and powerful back and strode resolutely into the timber at the mouth of a little river.

The man was John Cardigan; in that lonely, hostile land he was the first pioneer. This is the tale of Cardigan and Cardigan's son, for in his chosen land the pioneer leader in the gigantic task of hewing a path for civilization was to know the bliss of woman's love and of parenthood, and the sorrow that comes of the loss of a perfect mate; he was to know the tremendous joy of accomplishment and worldly success after infinite labour; and in the sunset of life he was to know the dull despair of failure and ruin. Because of these things there is a tale to be told, the tale of Cardigan's son, who, when his sire fell in the fray, took up the fight to save his heritage—a tale of life with its love and hate, its battle, victory, defeat, labour, joy, and sorrow, a tale of that unconquerable spirit of youth which spurred Bryce Cardigan to lead a forlorn hope for the sake not of wealth but of an ideal. Hark, then, to this tale of Cardigan's redwoods:

Along the coast of California, through the secret valleys and over the tumbled foothills of the Coast Range, extends a belt of timber of an average width of thirty miles. In approaching it from the Oregon line the first tree looms suddenly against the horizon—an outpost, as it were, of the host of giants whose column stretches south nearly four hundred miles to where the last of the rear-guard maintains eternal sentry go on the crest of the mountains overlooking Monterey Bay. Far in the interior of the State, beyond the fertile San Joaquin Valley, the allies of this vast army hold a small sector on the west slope of the Sierras.

These are the redwood forests of California, the only trees of their kind in the world and indigenous only to these two areas within the State. The coast timber is known botanically as sequoia sempervirens, that in the interior as sequoia gigantea. As the name indicates, the latter is the larger species of the two, although the fibre of the timber is coarser and the wood softer and consequently less valuable commercially than the sequoia sempervirens—which in Santa Cruz, San Mateo, Marin, and Sonoma counties has been almost wholly logged off, because of its accessibility. In northern Mendocino, Humboldt, and Del Norte counties, however, sixty years of logging seems scarcely to have left a scar upon this vast body of timber. Notwithstanding sixty years of attrition, there remain in this section of the redwood belt thousands upon thousands of acres of virgin timber that had already attained a vigorous growth when Christ was crucified. In their vast, sombre recesses, with the sunlight filtering through their branches two hundred and fifty feet above, one hears no sound save the tremendous diapason of the silence of the ages; here, more forcibly than elsewhere in the universe, is one reminded of the littleness of man and the glory of his creator.

In sizes ranging from five to twenty feet in diameter, the brown trunks rise perpendicularly to a height of from ninety to a hundred and fifty feet before putting forth a single limb, which frequently is more massive than the growth which men call a tree in the forests of Michigan. Scattered between the giants, like subjects around their king, one finds noble fir, spruce, or pines, with some Valparaiso live oak, black oak, pepper-wood, madrone, yew, and cedar.

In May and June, when the twisted and cowering madrone trees are putting forth their clusters of creamy buds, when the white blossoms of the dogwoods line the banks of little streams, when the azaleas and rhododendrons, lovely and delicate as orchids, blaze a bed of glory, and the modest little oxalis has thrust itself up through the brown carpet of pine-needles and redwood-twigs, these wonderful forests cast upon one a potent spell. To have seen them once thus in gala dress is to yearn thereafter to see them again and still again and grieve always in the knowledge of their inevitable death at the hands of the woodsman.

John Cardigan settled in Humboldt County, where the sequoia sempervirens attains the pinnacle of its glory, and with the lust for conquest hot in his blood, he filed upon a quarter-section of the timber almost on the shore of Humboldt Bay—land upon which a city subsequently was to be built. With his double-bitted axe and crosscut saw John Cardigan brought the first of the redwood giants crashing to the earth above which it had towered for twenty centuries, and in the form of split posts, railroad ties, pickets, and shakes, the fallen giant was hauled to tidewater in ox-drawn wagons and shipped to San Francisco in the little two-masted coasting schooners of the period. Here, by the abominable magic of barter and trade, the dismembered tree was transmuted into dollars and cents and returned to Humboldt County to assist John Cardigan in his task of hewing an empire out of a wilderness.

At a period in the history of California when the treasures of the centuries were to be had for the asking or the taking, John Cardigan chose that which others elected to cast away. For him the fertile wheat and fruit-lands of California's smiling valleys, the dull placer gold in her foot-hill streams, and the free grass, knee deep, on her cattle and sheep-ranges held no lure; for he had been first among the Humboldt redwoods and had come under the spell of the vastness and antiquity, the majesty and promise of these epics of a planet. He was a big man with a great heart and the soul of a dreamer, and in such a land as this it was fitting he should take his stand.

In that wasteful day a timber-claim was not looked upon as valuable. The price of a quarter-section was a pittance in cash and a brief residence in a cabin constructed on the claim as evidence of good faith to a government none too exacting in the restrictions with which it hedged about its careless dissipation of the heritage of posterity. Hence, because redwood timber-claims were easy to acquire, many men acquired them; but when the lure of greener pastures gripped these men and the necessity for ready money oppressed, they were wont to sell their holdings for a few hundred dollars. Gradually it became the fashion in Humboldt to “unload” redwood timber-claims on thrifty, far-seeing, visionary John Cardigan who appeared to be always in the market for any claim worth while.

Cardigan was a shrewd judge of stumpage; with the calm certitude of a prophet he looked over township after township and cunningly checkerboarded it with his holdings. Notwithstanding the fact that hillside timber is the best, John Cardigan in those days preferred to buy valley timber, for he was looking forward to the day when the timber on the watersheds should become available. He knew that when such timber should be cut it would have to be hauled out through the valleys where his untouched holdings formed an impenetrable barrier to the exit! Before long the owners of timber on the watersheds would come to realize this and sell to John Cardigan at a reasonable price.

Time passed. John Cardigan no longer swung an axe or dragged a cross-cut saw through a fallen redwood. He was an employer of labour now, well known in San Francisco as a manufacturer of split-redwood products, the purchasers sending their own schooners for the cargo. And presently John Cardigan mortgaged all of his timber holdings with a San Francisco bank, made a heap of his winnings, and like a true adventurer staked his all on a new venture—the first sawmill in Humboldt County. The timbers for it were hewed out by hand; the boards and planking were whipsawed.

It was a tiny mill, judged by present-day standards, for in a fourteen-hour working day John Cardigan and his men could not cut more than twenty thousand feet of lumber. Nevertheless, when Cardigan looked at his mill, his great heart would swell with pride. Built on tidewater and at the mouth of a large slough in the waters of which he stored the logs his woods-crew cut and peeled for the bull-whackers to haul with ox-teams down a mile-long skid-road, vessels could come to Cardigan's mill dock to load and lie safely in twenty feet of water at low tide. Also this dock was sufficiently far up the bay to be sheltered from the heavy seas that rolled in from Humboldt Bar, while the level land that stretched inland to the timber-line constituted the only logical townsite on the bay.

“Here,” said John Cardigan to himself exultingly when a long-drawn wail told him his circular saw was biting into the first redwood log to be milled since the world began, “I shall build a city and call it Sequoia. By to-morrow I shall have cut sufficient timber to make a start. First I shall build for my employees better homes than the rude shacks and tent-houses they now occupy; then I shall build myself a fine residence with six rooms, and the room that faces on the bay shall be the parlour. When I can afford it, I shall build a larger mill, employ more men, and build more houses. I shall encourage tradesmen to set up in business in Sequoia, and to my city I shall present a church and a schoolhouse. We shall have a volunteer fire department, and if God is good, I shall, at a later date, get out some long-length fir-timber and build a schooner to freight my lumber to market. And she shall have three masts instead of two, and carry half a million feet of lumber instead of two hundred thousand. First, however, I must build a steam tugboat to tow my schooner in and out over Humboldt Bar. And after that—ah, well! That is sufficient for the present.”

CHAPTER II

Thus did John Cardigan dream, and as he dreamed he worked. The city of Sequoia was born with the Argonaut's six-room mansion of rough redwood boards and a dozen three-room cabins with lean-to kitchens; and the tradespeople came when John Cardigan, with something of the largeness of his own redwood trees, gave them ground and lumber in order to encourage the building of their enterprises. Also the dream of the schoolhouse and the church came true, as did the steam tugboat and the schooner with three masts. The mill was enlarged until it could cut forty thousand feet on a twelve-hour shift, and a planer and machines for making rustic siding and tongued-and-grooved flooring and ceiling were installed. More ox-teams appeared upon the skid-road, which was longer now; the cry of “Timber-r-r!” and the thunderous roar of a falling redwood grew fainter and fainter as the forest receded from the bay shore, and at last the whine of the saws silenced these sounds forever in Sequoia.

At forty John Cardigan was younger than most men at thirty, albeit he worked fourteen hours a day, slept eight, and consumed the remaining two at his meals. But through all those fruitful years of toil he had still found time to dream, and the spell of the redwoods had lost none of its potency. He was still checker-boarding the forested townships with his adverse holdings—the key-positions to the timber in back of beyond which some day should come to his hand. Also he had competition now: other sawmills dotted the bay shore; other three-masted schooners carried Humboldt redwood to the world beyond the bar, over which they were escorted by other and more powerful steam-tugs. This competition John Cardigan welcomed and enjoyed, however, for he had been first in Humboldt, and the townsite and a mile of tidelands fronting on deep water were his; hence each incoming adventurer merely helped his dream of a city to come true.

At forty-two Cardigan was the first mayor of Sequoia. At forty-four he was standing on his dock one day, watching his tug kick into her berth the first square-rigged ship that had ever come to Humboldt Bay to load a cargo of clear redwood for foreign delivery. She was a big Bath-built clipper, and her master a lusty down-Easter, a widower with one daughter who had come with him around the Horn. John Cardigan saw this girl come up on the quarter-deck and stand by with a heaving-line in her hand; calmly she fixed her glance upon him, and as the ship was shunted in closer to the dock, she made the cast to Cardigan. He caught the light heaving-line, hauled in the heavy Manila stern-line to which it was attached, and slipped the loop of the mooring-cable over the dolphin at the end of the dock.

“Some men wanted aft here to take up the slack of the stern-line on the windlass, sir,” he shouted to the skipper, who was walking around on top of the house. “That girl can't haul her in alone.”

“Can't. I'm short-handed,” the skipper replied. “Jump aboard and help her.”

Cardigan made a long leap from the dock to the ship's rail, balanced there lightly a moment, and sprang to the deck. He passed the bight of the stern-line in a triple loop around the drum of the windlass, and without awaiting his instructions, the girl grasped the slack of the line and prepared to walk away with it as the rope paid in on the windlass. Cardigan inserted a belaying-pin in the windlass, paused and looked at the girl. “Raise a chantey,” he suggested. Instantly she lifted a sweet contralto in that rollicking old ballad of the sea—“Blow the Men Down.”

For tinkers and tailors and lawyers and all,
Way! Aye! Blow the men down!
They ship for real sailors aboard the Black Ball,
Give me some time to blow the men down.

Round the windlass Cardigan walked, steadily and easily, and the girl's eyes widened in wonder as he did the work of three powerful men. When the ship had been warped in and the slack of the line made fast on the bitts, she said:

“Please run for'd and help my father with the bow-lines. You're worth three foremast hands. Indeed, I didn't expect to see a sailor on this dock.”

“I had to come around the Horn to get here, Miss,” he explained, “and when a man hasn't money to pay for his passage, he needs must work it.”

“I'm the second mate,” she explained. “We had a succession of gales from the Falklands to the Evangelistas, and there the mate got her in irons and she took three big ones over the taffrail and cost us eight men. Working short-handed, we couldn't get any canvas on her to speak of—long voyage, you know, and the rest of the crew got scurvy.”

“You're a brave girl,” he told her.

“And you're a first-class A. B.,” she replied. “If you're looking for a berth, my father will be glad to ship you.”

“Sorry, but I can't go,” he called as he turned toward the companion ladder. “I'm Cardigan, and I own this sawmill and must stay here and look after it.”

There was a light, exultant feeling in his middle-aged heart as he scampered along the deck. The girl had wonderful dark auburn hair and brown eyes, with a milk-white skin that sun and wind had sought in vain to blemish. And for all her girlhood she was a woman—bred from a race (his own people) to whom danger and despair merely furnished a tonic for their courage. What a mate for a man! And she had looked at him pridefully.

They were married before the ship was loaded, and on a knoll of the logged-over lands back of the town and commanding a view of the bay, with the dark-forested hills in back and the little second-growth redwoods flourishing in the front yard, he built her the finest home in Sequoia. He had reserved this building-site in a vague hope that some day he might utilize it for this very purpose, and here he spent with her three wonderfully happy years. Here his son Bryce was born, and here, two days later, the new-made mother made the supreme sacrifice of maternity.

For half a day following the destruction of his Eden John Cardigan sat dumbly beside his wife, his great, hard hand caressing the auburn head whose every thought for three years had been his happiness and comfort. Then the doctor came to him and mentioned the matter of funeral arrangements.

Cardigan looked up at him blankly. “Funeral arrangements?” he murmured. “Funeral arrangements?” He passed his gnarled hand over his leonine head. “Ah, yes, I suppose so. I shall attend to it.”

He rose and left the house, walking with bowed head out of Sequoia, up the abandoned and decaying skid-road through the second-growth redwoods to the dark green blur that marked the old timber. It was May, and Nature was renewing herself, for spring comes late in Humboldt County. From an alder thicket a pompous cock grouse boomed intermittently; the valley quail, in pairs, were busy about their household affairs; from a clump of manzanita a buck watched John Cardigan curiously. On past the landing where the big bull donkey-engine stood (for with the march of progress, the logging donkey-engine had replaced the ox-teams, while the logs were hauled out of the woods to the landing by means of a mile-long steel cable, and there loaded on the flat-cars of a logging railroad to be hauled to the mill and dumped in the log-boom) he went, up the skid-road recently swamped from the landing to the down timber where the crosscut men and barkpeelers were at work, on into the green timber where the woods-boss and his men were chopping.

“Come with me, McTavish,” he said to his woods-boss. They passed through a narrow gap between two low hills and emerged in a long narrow valley where the redwood grew thickly and where the smallest tree was not less than fifteen feet in diameter and two hundred and fifty feet tall. McTavish followed at the master's heels as they penetrated this grove, making their way with difficulty through the underbrush until they came at length to a little amphitheatre, a clearing perhaps a hundred feet in diameter, oval-shaped and surrounded by a wall of redwoods of such dimensions that even McTavish, who was no stranger to these natural marvels, was struck with wonder. The ground in this little amphitheatre was covered to a depth of a foot with brown, withered little redwood twigs to which the dead leaves still clung, while up through this aromatic covering delicate maidenhair ferns and oxalis had thrust themselves. Between the huge brown boles of the redwoods woodwardia grew riotously, while through the great branches of these sentinels of the ages the sunlight filtered. Against the prevailing twilight of the surrounding forest it descended like a halo, and where it struck the ground John Cardigan paused.

“McTavish,” he said, “she died this morning.”

“I'm sore distressed for you, sir,” the woods-boss answered. “We'd a whisper in the camp yesterday that the lass was like to be in a bad way.”

Cardigan scuffed with his foot a clear space in the brown litter. “Take two men from the section-gang, McTavish,” he ordered, “and have them dig her grave here; then swamp a trail through the underbrush and out to the donkey-landing, so we can carry her in. The funeral will be private.”

McTavish nodded. “Any further orders, sir?”

“Yes. When you come to that little gap in the hills, cease your logging and bear off yonder.” He waved his hand. “I'm not going to cut the timber in this valley. You see, McTavish, what it is. The trees here—ah, man, I haven't the heart to destroy God's most wonderful handiwork. Besides, she loved this spot, McTavish, and she called the valley her Valley of the Giants. I—I gave it to her for a wedding present because she had a bit of a dream that some day the town I started would grow up to yonder gap, and when that time came and we could afford it, 'twas in her mind to give her Valley of the Giants to Sequoia for a city park, all hidden away here and unsuspected.

“She loved it, McTavish. It pleased her to come here with me; she'd make up a lunch of her own cooking and I would catch trout in the stream by the dogwoods yonder and fry the fish for her. Sometimes I'd barbecue a venison steak and—well, 'twas our playhouse, McTavish, and I who am no longer young—I who never played until I met her—I—I'm a bit foolish, I fear, but I found rest and comfort here, McTavish, even before I met her, and I'm thinking I'll have to come here often for the same. She—she was a very superior woman, McTavish—very superior. Ah, man, the soul of her! I cannot bear that her body should rest in Sequoia cemetery, along with the rag tag and bobtail o' the town. She was like this sunbeam, McTavish. She—she—”

“Aye,” murmured McTavish huskily. “I ken. Ye wouldna gie her a common or a public spot in which to wait for ye. An' ye'll be shuttin' down the mill an' loggin'-camps an' layin' off the hands in her honour for a bit?”

“Until after the funeral, McTavish. And tell your men they'll be paid for the lost time. That will be all, lad.”

When McTavish was gone, John Cardigan sat down on a small sugar-pine windfall, his head held slightly to one side while he listened to that which in the redwoods is not sound but rather the absence of it. And as he listened, he absorbed a subtle comfort from those huge brown trees, so emblematic of immortality; in the thought he grew closer to his Maker, and presently found that peace which he sought. Love such as theirs could never die... The tears came at last.

At sundown he walked home bearing an armful of rhododendrons and dogwood blossoms, which he arranged in the room where she lay. Then he sought the nurse who had attended her.

“I'd like to hold my son,” he said gently. “May I?”

She brought him the baby and placed it in his great arms that trembled so; he sat down and gazed long and earnestly at this flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood. “You'll have her hair and skin and eyes,” he murmured. “My son, my son, I shall love you so, for now I must love for two. Sorrow I shall keep from you, please God, and happiness and worldly comfort shall I leave you when I go to her.” He nuzzled his grizzled cheek against the baby's face. “Just you and my trees,” he whispered, “just you and my trees to help me hang on to a plucky finish.”

For love and paternity had come to him late in life, and so had his first great sorrow; wherefore, since he was not accustomed to these heritages of all flesh, he would have to adjust himself to the change. But his son and his trees—ah, yes, they would help. And he would gather more redwoods now!

CHAPTER III

A young half-breed Digger woman, who had suffered the loss of the latest of her numerous progeny two days prior to Mrs. Cardigan's death, was installed in the house on the knoll as nurse to John Cardigan's son whom he called Bryce, the family name of his mother's people. A Mrs. Tully, widow of Cardigan's first engineer in the mill, was engaged as housekeeper and cook; and with his domestic establishment reorganized along these simple lines, John Cardigan turned with added eagerness to his business affairs, hoping between them and his boy to salvage as much as possible from what seemed to him, in the first pangs of his loneliness and desolation, the wreckage of his life.

While Bryce was in swaddling clothes, he was known only to those females of Sequoia to whom his half-breed foster mother proudly exhibited him when taking him abroad for an airing in his perambulator. With his advent into rompers, however, and the assumption of his American prerogative of free speech, his father developed the habit of bringing the child down to the mill office, to which he added a playroom that connected with his private office. Hence, prior to his second birthday, Bryce divined that his father was closer to him than motherly Mrs. Tully or the half-breed girl, albeit the housekeeper sang to him the lullabys that mothers know while the Digger girl, improvising blank verse paeans of praise and prophecy, crooned them to her charge in the unmusical monotone of her tribal tongue. His father, on the contrary, wasted no time in singing, but would toss him to the ceiling or set him astride his foot and swing him until he screamed in ecstasy. Moreover, his father took him on wonderful journeys which no other member of the household had even suggested. Together they were wont to ride to and from the woods in the cab of the logging locomotive, and once they both got on the log carriage in the mill with Dan Keyes, the head sawyer, and had a jolly ride up to the saw and back again, up and back again until the log had been completely sawed; and because he had refrained from crying aloud when the greedy saw bit into the log with a shrill whine, Dan Keyes had given him a nickel to put in his tin bank.

Of all their adventures together, however, those which occurred on their frequent excursions up to the Valley of the Giants impressed themselves imperishably upon Bryce's memory. How well he remembered their first trip, when, seated astride his father's shoulders with his sturdy little legs around Cardigan's neck and his chubby little hands clasping the old man's ears, they had gone up the abandoned skid-road and into the semi-darkness of the forest, terminating suddenly in a shower of sunshine that fell in an open space where a boy could roll and play and never get dirty. Also there were several dozen gray squirrels there waiting to climb on his shoulder and search his pockets for pine-nuts, a supply of which his father always furnished.

Bryce always looked forward with eagerness to those frequent trips with his father “to the place where Mother dear went to heaven.” From his perch on his father's shoulders he could look vast distances into the underbrush and catch glimpses of the wild life therein; when the last nut had been distributed to the squirrels in the clearing, he would follow a flash of blue that was a jay high up among the evergreen branches, or a flash of red that was a woodpecker hammering a home in the bark of a sugar-pine. Eventually, however, the spell of the forest would creep over the child; intuitively he would become one with the all-pervading silence, climb into his father's arms as the latter sat dreaming on the old sugar-pine windfall, and presently drop off to sleep.

When Bryce was six years old, his father sent him to the public school in Sequoia with the children of his loggers and mill-hands, thus laying the foundation for a democratic education all too infrequent with the sons of men rated as millionaires. At night old Cardigan (for so men had now commenced to designate him!) would hear his boy's lessons, taking the while an immeasurable delight in watching the lad's mind develop. As a pupil Bryce was not meteoric; he had his father's patient, unexcitable nature; and, like the old man, he possessed the glorious gift of imagination. Never mediocre, he was never especially brilliant, but was seemingly content to maintain a steady, dependable average in all things. He had his mother's dark auburn hair, brown eyes, and fair white skin, and quite early in life he gave promise of being as large and powerful a man as his father.

Bryce's boyhood was much the same as that of other lads in Sequoia, save that in the matter of toys and, later guns, fishing-rods, dogs, and ponies he was a source of envy to his fellows. After his tenth year his father placed him on the mill pay-roll, and on payday he was wont to line up with the mill-crew to receive his modest stipend of ten dollars for carrying in kindling to the cook in the mill kitchen each day after school.

This otherwise needless arrangement was old Cardigan's way of teaching his boy financial responsibility. All that he possessed he had worked for, and he wanted his son to grow up with the business to realize that he was a part of it with definite duties connected with it developing upon him—duties which he must never shirk if he was to retain the rich redwood heritage his father had been so eagerly storing up for him.

When Bryce Cardigan was about fourteen years old there occurred an important event in his life. In a commendable effort to increase his income he had laid out a small vegetable garden in the rear of his father's house, and here on a Saturday morning, while down on his knees weeding carrots, he chanced to look up and discovered a young lady gazing at him through the picket fence. She was a few years his junior, and a stranger in Sequoia. Ensued the following conversation: “Hello, little boy.”

“Hello yourself! I ain't a little boy.”

She ignored the correction. “What are you doing?”

“Weedin' carrots. Can't you see?”

“What for?”

Bryce, highly incensed at having been designated a little boy by this superior damsel, saw his opportunity to silence her. “Cat's fur for kitten breeches,” he retorted—without any evidence of originality, we must confess. Whereat she stung him to the heart with a sweet smile and promptly sang for him this ancient ballad of childhood:

“What are little boys made of?
What are little boys made of?
Snakes and snails,
And puppy dog's tails,
And that's what little boys are made of.”

Bryce knew the second verse and shrivelled inwardly in anticipation of being informed that little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice. Realizing that he had begun something which might not terminate with credit to himself, he hung his head and for the space of several minutes gave all his attention to his crop. And presently the visitor spoke again.

“I like your hair, little boy. It's a pretty red.”

That settled the issue between them. To be hailed as little boy was bad enough, but to be reminded of his crowning misfortune was adding insult to injury. He rose and cautiously approached the fence with the intention of pinching the impudent stranger, suddenly and surreptitiously, and sending her away weeping. As his hand crept between the palings on its wicked mission, the little miss looked at him in friendly fashion and queried:

“What's your name?”

Bryce's hand hesitated. “Bryce Cardigan,” he answered gruffly.

“I'm Shirley Sumner,” she ventured, “Let's be friends.”

“When did you come to live in Sequoia?” he demanded.

“I don't live here. I'm just visiting here with my aunt and uncle. We're staying at the hotel, and there's nobody to play with. My uncle's name is Pennington. So's my aunt's. He's out here buying timber, and we live in Michigan. Do you know the capital of Michigan?”

“Of course I do,” he answered. “The capital of Michigan is Chicago.”

“Oh, you big stupid! It isn't. It's Detroit.”

“'Tain't neither. It's Chicago.”

“I live there—so I guess I ought to know. So there!”

Bryce was vanquished, and an acute sense of his imperfections in matters geographical inclined him to end the argument. “Well, maybe you're right,” he admitted grudgingly. “Anyhow, what difference does it make?”

She did not answer. Evidently she was desirous of avoiding an argument if possible. Her gaze wandered past Bryce to where his Indian pony stood with her head out the window of her box-stall contemplating her master.

“Oh, what a dear little horse!” Shirley Sumner exclaimed. “Whose is he?”

“'Tain't a he. It's a she. And she belongs to me.”

“Do you ride her?”

“Not very often now. I'm getting too heavy for her, so Dad's bought me a horse that weighs nine hundred pounds. Midget only weighs five hundred.” He considered her a moment while she gazed in awe upon this man with two horses. “Can you ride a pony?” he asked, for no reason that he was aware of.

She sighed, shaking her head resignedly. “We haven't any room to keep a pony at our house in Detroit,” she explained, and added hopefully: “But I'd love to ride on Midget. I suppose I could learn to ride if somebody taught me how.”

He looked at her again. At that period of his existence he was inclined to regard girls as a necessary evil. For some immutable reason they existed, and perforce must be borne with, and it was his hope that he would get through life and see as little as possible of the exasperating sex. Nevertheless, as Bryce surveyed this winsome miss through the palings, he was sensible of a sneaking desire to find favour in her eyes—also equally sensible of the fact that the path to that desirable end lay between himself and Midget. He swelled with the importance of one who knows he controls a delicate situation. “Well, I suppose if you want a ride I'll have to give it to you,” he grumbled, “although I'm mighty busy this morning.”

“Oh, I think you're so nice,” she declared.

A thrill shot through him that was akin to pain; with difficulty did he restrain an impulse to dash wildly into the stable and saddle Midget in furious haste. Instead he walked to the barn slowly and with extreme dignity. When he reappeared, he was leading Midget, a little silverpoint runt of a Klamath Indian pony, and Moses, a sturdy pinto cayuse from the cattle ranges over in Trinity County. “I'll have to ride with you,” he announced. “Can't let a tenderfoot like you go out alone on Midget.”

All aflutter with delightful anticipation, the young lady climbed up on the gate and scrambled into the saddle when Bryce swung the pony broadside to the gate. Then he adjusted the stirrups to fit her, passed a hair rope from Midget's little hackamore to the pommel of Moses' saddle, mounted the pinto, and proceeded with his first adventure as a riding-master. Two hours of his valuable time did he give that morning before the call of duty brought him back to the house and his neglected crop of carrots. When he suggested tactfully, however, that it was now necessary that his guest and Midget separate, a difficulty arose. Shirley Sumner refused point blank to leave the premises. She liked Bryce for his hair and because he had been so kind to her; she was a stranger in Sequoia, and now that she had found an agreeable companion, it was far from her intention to desert him.

So Miss Sumner stayed and helped Bryce weed his carrots, and since as a voluntary labourer she was at least worth her board, at noon Bryce brought her in to Mrs. Tully with a request for luncheon. When he went to the mill to carry in the kindling for the cook, the young lady returned rather sorrowfully to the Hotel Sequoia, with a fervent promise to see him the next day. She did, and Bryce took her for a long ride up into the Valley of the Giants and showed her his mother's grave. The gray squirrels were there, and Bryce gave Shirley a bag of pine-nuts to feed them. Then they put some flowers on the grave, and when they returned to town and Bryce was unsaddling the ponies, Shirley drew Midget's nose down to her and kissed it. Then she commenced to weep rather violently.

“What are you crying about?” Bryce demanded. Girls were so hard to understand.

“I'm go-going h-h-h-home to-morrow,” she howled.

He was stricken with dismay and bade her desist from her vain repinings. But her heart was broken, and somehow—Bryce appeared to act automatically—he had his arm around her. “Don't cry, Shirley,” he pleaded. “It breaks my heart to see you cry. Do you want Midget? I'll give her to you.”

Between sobs Shirley confessed that the prospect of parting with him and not Midget was provocative of her woe. This staggered Bryce and pleased him immensely. And at parting she kissed him good-bye, reiterating her opinion that he was the nicest, kindest boy she had ever met or hoped to meet.

When Shirley and her uncle and aunt boarded the steamer for San Francisco, Bryce stood disconsolate on the dock and waved to Shirley until he could no longer discern her on the deck. Then he went home, crawled up into the haymow and wept, for he had something in his heart and it hurt. He thought of his elfin companion very frequently for a week, and he lost his appetite, very much to Mrs. Tully's concern. Then the steelhead trout began to run in Eel River, and the sweetest event that can occur in any boy's existence—the sudden awakening to the wonder and beauty of life so poignantly realized in his first love-affair—was lost sight of by Bryce. In a month he had forgotten the incident; in six months he had forgotten Shirley Sumner.

CHAPTER IV

The succeeding years of Bryce Cardigan's life, until he completed his high-school studies and went East to Princeton, were those of the ordinary youth in a small and somewhat primitive country town. He made frequent trips to San Francisco with his father, taking passage on the steamer that made bi-weekly trips between Sequoia and the metropolis—as The Sequoia Sentinel always referred to San Francisco. He was an expert fisherman, and the best shot with rifle or shot-gun in the county; he delighted in sports and, greatly to the secret delight of his father showed a profound interest in the latter's business.

Throughout the happy years of Bryce's boyhood his father continued to enlarge and improve his sawmill, to build more schooners, and to acquire more redwood timber. Lands, the purchase of which by Cardigan a decade before had caused his neighbours to impugn his judgment, now developed strategical importance. As a result those lands necessary to consolidate his own holdings came to him at his own price, while his adverse holdings that blocked the logging operations of his competitors went from him—also at his own price. In fact, all well-laid plans matured satisfactorily with the exception of one, and since it has a very definite bearing on the story, the necessity for explaining it is paramount.

Contiguous to Cardigan's logging operations to the east and north of Sequoia, and comparatively close in, lay a block of two thousand acres of splendid timber, the natural, feasible, and inexpensive outlet for which, when it should be logged, was the Valley of the Giants. For thirty years John Cardigan had played a waiting game with the owner of that timber, for the latter was as fully obsessed with the belief that he was going to sell it to John Cardigan at a dollar and a half per thousand feet stumpage as Cardigan was certain he was going to buy it for a dollar a thousand—when he should be ready to do so and not one second sooner. He calculated, as did the owner of the timber, that the time to do business would be a year or two before the last of Cardigan's timber in that section should be gone.

Eventually the time for acquiring more timber arrived. John Cardigan, meeting his neighbour on the street, accosted him thus:

“Look here, Bill: isn't it time we got together on that timber of yours? You know you've been holding it to block me and force me to buy at your figure.”

“That's why I bought it,” the other admitted smilingly. “Then, before I realized my position, you checkmated me with that quarter-section in the valley, and we've been deadlocked ever since.”

“I'll give you a dollar a thousand stumpage for your timber, Bill.”

“I want a dollar and a half.”

“A dollar is my absolute limit.”

“Then I'll keep my timber.”

“And I'll keep my money. When I finish logging in my present holdings, I'm going to pull out of that country and log twenty miles south of Sequoia. I have ten thousand acres in the San Hedrin watershed. Remember, Bill, the man who buys your timber will have to log it through my land—and I'm not going to log that quarter-section in the valley. Hence there will be no outlet for your timber in back.”

“Not going to log it? Why, what are you going to do with it?”

“I'm just going to let it stay there until I die. When my will is filed for probate, your curiosity will be satisfied—but not until then.”

The other laughed. “John,” he declared, “you just haven't got the courage to pull out when your timber adjoining mine is gone, and move twenty miles south to the San Hedrin watershed. That will be too expensive a move, and you'll only be biting off your nose to spite your face. Come through with a dollar and a half, John.”

“I never bluff, Bill. Remember, if I pull out for the San Hedrin, I'll not abandon my logging-camps there to come back and log your timber. One expensive move is enough for me. Better take a dollar, Bill. It's a good, fair price, as the market on redwood timber is now, and you'll be making an even hundred per cent, on your investment. Remember, Bill, if I don't buy your timber, you'll never log it yourself and neither will anybody else. You'll be stuck with it for the next forty years—and taxes aren't getting any lower. Besides, there's a good deal of pine and fir in there, and you know what a forest fire will do to that.”

“I'll hang on a little longer, I think.”

“I think so, too,” John Cardigan replied. And that night, as was his wont, even though he realized that it was not possible for Bryce to gain a profound understanding of the business problems to which he was heir, John Cardigan discussed the Squaw Creek timber with his son, relating to him the details of his conversation with the owner.

“I suppose he thinks you're bluffing,” Bryce commented.

“I'm not, Bryce. I never bluff—that is, I never permit a bluff of mine to be called, and don't you ever do it, either. Remember that, boy. Any time you deliver a verdict, be sure you're in such a position you won't have to reverse yourself. I'm going to finish logging in that district this fall, so if I'm to keep the mill running, I'll have to establish my camps on the San Hedrin watershed right away.”

Bryce pondered. “But isn't it cheaper to give him his price on Squaw Creek timber than go logging in the San Hedrin and have to build twenty miles of logging railroad to get your logs to the mill?”

“It would be, son, if I HAD to build the railroad. Fortunately, I do not. I'll just shoot the logs down the hillside to the San Hedrin River and drive them down the stream to a log-boom on tidewater.”

“But there isn't enough water in the San Hedrin to float a redwood log, Dad. I've fished there, and I know.”

“Quite true—in the summer and fall. But when the winter freshets come on and the snow begins to melt in the spring up in the Yola Bolas, where the San Hedrin has its source, we'll have plenty of water for driving the river. Once we get the logs down to tide-water, we'll raft them and tow them up to the mill. So you see, Bryce, we won't be bothered with the expense of maintaining a logging railroad, as at present.”

Bryce looked at his father admiringly. “I guess Dan Keyes is right, Dad,” he said. “Dan says you're crazy—like a fox. Now I know why you've been picking up claims in the San Hedrin watershed.”

“No, you don't, Bryce. I've never told you, but I'll tell you now the real reason. Humboldt County has no rail connection with the outside world, so we are forced to ship our lumber by water. But some day a railroad will be built in from the south—from San Francisco; and when it comes, the only route for it to travel is through our timber in the San Hedrin Valley. I've accumulated that ten thousand acres for you, my son, for the railroad will never be built in my day. It may come in yours, but I have grown weary waiting for it, and now that my hand is forced, I'm going to start logging there. It doesn't matter, son. You will still be logging there fifty years from now. And when the railroad people come to you for a right of way, my boy, give it to them. Don't charge them a cent. It has always been my policy to encourage the development of this county, and I want you to be a forward-looking, public-spirited citizen. That's why I'm sending you East to college. You've been born and raised in this town, and you must see more of the world. You mustn't be narrow or provincial, because I'm saving up for you, my son, a great many responsibilities, and I want to educate you to meet them bravely and sensibly.”

He paused, regarding the boy gravely and tenderly. “Bryce, lad,” he said presently, “do you ever wonder why I work so hard and barely manage to spare the time to go camping with you in vacation time?”

“Why don't you take it easy, Dad? You do work awfully hard, and I have wondered about it.”

“I have to work hard, my son, because I started something a long time ago, when work was fun. And now I can't let go. I employ too many people who are dependent on me for their bread and butter. When they plan a marriage or the building of a home or the purchase of a cottage organ, they have to figure me in on the proposition. I didn't have a name for the part I played in these people's lives until the other night when I was helping you with your algebra. I'm the unknown quantity.”

“Oh, no,” Bryce protested. “You're the known quantity.”

Cardigan smiled. “Well, maybe I am,” he admitted. “I've always tried to be. And if I have succeeded, then you're the unknown quantity, Bryce, because some day you'll have to take my place; they will have to depend upon you when I am gone. Listen to me, son. You're only a boy, and you can't understand everything I tell you now, but I want you to remember what I tell you, and some day understanding will come to you. You mustn't fail the people who work for you—who are dependent upon your strength and brains and enterprises to furnish them with an opportunity for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When you are the boss of Cardigan's mill, you must keep the wheels turning; you must never shut down the mill or the logging-camps in dull times just to avoid a loss you can stand better than your employees.”

His hard, trembling old hand closed over the boy's. “I want you to be a brave and honourable man,” he concluded.

True to his word, when John Cardigan finished his logging in his old, original holdings adjacent to Sequoia and Bill Henderson's Squaw Creek timber, he quietly moved south with his Squaw Creek woods-gang and joined the crew already getting out logs in the San Hedrin watershed. Not until then did Bill Henderson realize that John Cardigan had called his bluff—whereat he cursed himself for a fool and a poor judge of human nature. He had tried a hold-up game and had failed; a dollar a thousand feet stumpage was a fair price; for years he had needed the money; and now, when it was too late, he realized his error. Luck was with Henderson, however; for shortly thereafter there came again to Sequoia one Colonel Seth Pennington, a millionaire white-pine operator from Michigan. The Colonel's Michigan lands had been logged off, and since he had had one taste of cheap timber, having seen fifty-cent stumpage go to five dollars, the Colonel, like Oliver Twist, desired some more of the same. On his previous visit to Sequoia he had seen his chance awaiting him in the gradually decreasing market for redwood lumber and the corresponding increase of melancholia in the redwood operators; hence he had returned to Michigan, closed out his business interests there, and returned to Sequoia on the alert for an investment in redwood timber. From a chair-warmer on the porch of the Hotel Sequoia, the Colonel had heard the tale of how stiff-necked old John Cardigan had called the bluff of equally stiff-necked old Bill Henderson; so for the next few weeks the Colonel, under pretense of going hunting or fishing on Squaw Creek, managed to make a fairly accurate cursory cruise of the Henderson timber—following which he purchased it from the delighted Bill for a dollar and a quarter per thousand feet stumpage and paid for it with a certified check. With his check in his hand, Henderson queried:

“Colonel, how do you purpose logging that timber?”

The Colonel smiled. “Oh, I don't intend to log it. When I log timber, it has to be more accessible. I'm just going to hold on and outgame your former prospect, John Cardigan. He needs that timber; he has to have it—and one of these days he'll pay me two dollars for it.”

Bill Henderson raised an admonitory finger and shook it under the Colonel's nose. “Hear me, stranger,” he warned. “When you know John Cardigan as well as I do, you'll change your tune. He doesn't bluff.”

“He doesn't?” The Colonel laughed derisively. “Why, that move of his over to the San Hedrin was the most monumental bluff ever pulled off in this country.”

“All right, sir. You wait and see.”

“I've seen already. I know.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, for one thing, Henderson, I noticed Cardigan has carefully housed his rolling-stock—and he hasn't scrapped his five miles of logging railroad and three miles of spurs.”

Old Bill Henderson chewed his quid of tobacco reflectively and spat at a crack in the sidewalk. “No,” he replied, “I'll admit he ain't started scrappin' it yet, but I happen to know he's sold the rollin'-stock an' rails to the Freshwater Lumber Company, so I reckon they'll be scrappin' that railroad for him before long.”

The Colonel was visibly moved. “If your information is authentic,” he said slowly, “I suppose I'll have to build a mill on tidewater and log the timber.”

“'Twon't pay you to do that at the present price of redwood lumber.”

“I'm in no hurry. I can wait for better times.”

“Well, when better times arrive, you'll find that John Cardigan owns the only water-front property on this side of the bay where the water's deep enough to let a ship lie at low tide and load in safety.”

“There is deep water across the bay and plenty of water-front property for sale. I'll find a mill-site there and tow my logs across.”

“But you've got to dump 'em in the water on this side. Everything north of Cardigan's mill is tide-flat; he owns all the deep-water frontage for a mile south of Sequoia, and after that come more tide-flats. If you dump your logs on these tide-flats, they'll bog down in the mud, and there isn't water enough at high tide to float 'em off or let a tug go in an' snake 'em off.”

“You're a discouraging sort of person,” the Colonel declared irritably. “I suppose you'll tell me now that I can't log my timber without permission from Cardigan.”

Old Bill spat at another crack; his faded blue eyes twinkled mischievously. “No, that's where you've got the bulge on John, Colonel. You can build a logging railroad from the southern fringe of your timber north and up a ten per cent. grade on the far side of the Squaw Creek watershed, then west three miles around a spur of low hills, and then south eleven miles through the level country along the bay shore. If you want to reduce your Squaw Creek grade to say two per cent., figure on ten additional miles of railroad and a couple extra locomotives. You understand, of course, Colonel, that no Locomotive can haul a long trainload of redwood logs up a long, crooked, two per cent. grade. You have to have an extry in back to push.”

“Nonsense! I'll build my road from Squaw Creek gulch south through that valley where those whopping big trees grow. That's the natural outlet for the timber. See here:” [graphic]

Colonel Pennington took from his pocket the rough sketch-map of the region which we have reproduced herewith and pointed to the spot numbered “11.”

“But that valley ain't logged yet,” explained Henderson.

“Don't worry. Cardigan will sell that valley to me—also a right of way down his old railroad grade and through his logged-over lands to tidewater.”

“Bet you a chaw o' tobacco he won't. Those big trees in that valley ain't goin' to be cut for no railroad right o' way. That valley's John Cardigan's private park; his wife's buried up there. Why, Colonel, that's the biggest grove of the biggest sequoia sempervirens in the world, an' many's the time I've heard John say he'd almost as lief cut off his right hand as fell one o' his giants, as he calls 'em. I tell you, Colonel, John Cardigan's mighty peculiar about them big trees. Any time he can get a day off he goes up an' looks 'em over.”

“But, my very dear sir,” the Colonel protested, “if the man will not listen to reason, the courts will make him. I can condemn a right of way, you know.”

“We-ll,” said old Bill, wagging his head sagely, “mebbe you can, an' then again mebbe you can't. It took me a long time to figger out just where I stood, but mebbe you're quicker at figgers than I am. Anyhow, Colonel, good luck to you, whichever way the cat jumps.”

This illuminating conversation had one effect on Colonel Seth Pennington. It decided him to make haste slowly; so without taking the trouble to make the acquaintance of John Cardigan, he returned to Detroit, there to await the next move in this gigantic game of chess.

CHAPTER V

No man is infallible, and in planning his logging operations in the San Hedrin watershed, John Cardigan presently made the discovery that he had erred in judgment. That season, from May to November, his woods-crew put thirty million feet of logs into the San Hedrin River, while the mill sawed on a reserve supply of logs taken from the last of the old choppings adjacent to Squaw Creek. That year, however, the rainfall in the San Hedrin country was fifty per cent. less than normal, and by the first of May of the following year Cardigan's woods-crew had succeeded in driving slightly less than half of the cut of the preceding year to the boom on tidewater at the mouth of the river.

“Unless the Lord'll gi' us a lot more water in the river,” the woods-boss McTavish complained, “I dinna see how I'm to keep the mill runnin'.” He was taking John Cardigan up the riverbank and explaining the situation. “The heavy butt-logs hae sunk to the bottom,” he continued. “Wie a normal head o' water, the lads'll move them, but wi' the wee drappie we have the noo—” He threw up his hamlike hands despairingly.

Three days later a cloud-burst filled the river to the brim; it came at night and swept the river clean of Cardigan's clear logs, An army of Juggernauts, they swept down on the boiling torrent to tidewater, reaching the bay shortly after the tide had commenced to ebb.

Now, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and a log-boom is a chaplet of a small logs, linked end to end by means of short chains; hence when the vanguard of logs on the lip of that flood reached the log-boom, the impetus of the charge was too great to be resisted. Straight through the weakest link in this boom the huge saw-logs crashed and out over Humboldt Bar to the broad Pacific. With the ebb tide some of them came back, while others, caught in cross-currents, bobbed about the Bay all night and finally beached at widely scattered points. Out of the fifteen million feet of logs less than three million feet were salvaged, and this task in itself was an expensive operation.

John Cardigan received the news calmly. “Thank God we don't have a cloud-burst more than once in ten years,” he remarked to his manager. “However, that is often enough, considering the high cost of this one. Those logs were worth eight dollars a thousand feet, board measure, in the millpond, and I suppose we've lost a hundred thousand dollars' worth.”

He turned from the manager and walked away through the drying yard, up the main street of Sequoia, and on into the second-growth timber at the edge of the town. Presently he emerged on the old, decaying skid-road and continued on through his logged-over lands, across the little divide and down into the quarter-section of green timber he had told McTavish not to cut. Once in the Valley of the Giants, he followed a well-worn foot-path to the little amphitheatre, and where the sunlight filtered through like a halo and fell on a plain little white marble monument, he paused and sat down on the now almost decayed sugar-pine windfall.

“I've come for a little comfort, sweetheart,” he murmured to her who slept beneath the stone. Then he leaned back against a redwood tree, removed his hat, and closed his eyes, holding his great gray head the while a little to one side in a listening attitude. Long he sat there, a great, time-bitten devotee at the shrine of his comfort; and presently the harried look left his strong, kind face and was replaced by a little prescient smile—the sort of smile worn by one who through bitter years has sought something very, very precious and has at length discovered it.

CHAPTER VI

It was on the day that John Cardigan received the telegram from Bryce saying that, following four years at Princeton and two years of travel abroad, he was returning to Sequoia to take over his redwood heritage—that he discovered that a stranger and not the flesh of his flesh and the blood of his blood was to reap the reward of his fifty years of endeavour. Small wonder, then, that he laid his leonine head upon his desk and wept, silently, as the aged and helpless weep.

For a long time he sat there lethargic with misery. Eventually he roused himself, reached for the desk telephone, and pressed a button on the office exchange-station. His manager, one Thomas Sinclair, answered. “Thomas,” he said calmly, “you know, of course, that Bryce is coming home. Tell George to take the big car and go over to Red Bluff for him.”

“I'll attend to it, Mr Cardigan. Anything else?”

“Yes, but I'll wait until Bryce gets home.”

George Sea Otter, son of Bryce Cardigan's old half-breed nurse, was a person in whose nature struggled the white man's predilection for advertisement and civic pride and the red man's instinct for adornment. For three years he had been old man Cardigan's chauffeur and man-of-all-work about the latter's old-fashioned home, and in the former capacity he drove John Cardigan's single evidence of extravagance—a Napier car, which was very justly regarded by George Sea Otter as the king of automobiles, since it was the only imported car in the county. Upon receipt of orders, therefore, from Sinclair, to drive the Napier over to Red Bluff and meet his future boss and one-time playfellow, George Sea Otter arrayed himself in a pair of new black corduroy trousers, yellow button shoes, a blue woollen shirt with a large scarlet silk handkerchief tied around the neck, a pair of beaded buckskin gloves with fringe dependent from the gauntlet, and a broad white beaver hat with a rattlesnake-skin band. Across the windshield of the Napier he fastened an orange-coloured pennant bearing in bright green letters the legend: MY CITY—SEQUOIA. As a safety-first precaution against man and beast en route, he buckled a gun-scabbard to the spare tires on the running-board and slipped a rifle into the scabbard within quick and easy reach of his hand; and arrayed thus, George descended upon Red Bluff at the helm of the king of automobiles.

When the overland train coasted into Red Bluff and slid to a grinding halt, Bryce Cardigan saw that the Highest Living Authority had descended from the train also. He had elected to designate her thus in the absence of any information anent her Christian and family names, and for the further reason that quite obviously she was a very superior person. He had a vague suspicion that she was the kind of girl in whose presence a man always feels that he must appear on parade—one of those alert, highly intelligent young women so extremely apt to reduce an ordinarily intelligent young man to a state of gibbering idiocy or stupid immobility.

Bryce had travelled in the same car with the Highest Living Authority from Chicago and had made up his mind by observation that with a little encouragement she could be induced to mount a soap-box and make a speech about Women's Rights; that when her native State should be granted equal suffrage she would run for office or manage somebody's political campaign; that she could drive an automobile and had probably been arrested for speeding; that she could go around any golf links in the country in ninety and had read Maeterlinck and enjoyed it.

Bryce could see that she was the little daughter of some large rich man. The sparsity of jewellery and the rich simplicity of her attire proved that, and moreover she was accompanied by a French maid to whom she spoke French in a manner which testified that before acquiring the French maid she had been in the custody of a French nurse. She possessed poise. For the rest, she had wonderful jet-black hair, violet eyes, and milk-white skin, a correct nose but a somewhat generous mouth, Bryce guessed she was twenty or twenty-one years old and that she had a temper susceptible of being aroused. On the whole, she was rather wonderful but not dazzling—at least, not to Bryce Cardigan. He told himself she merely interested him as a type—whatever he meant by that.

The fact that this remarkable young woman had also left the train at Red Bluff further interested him, for he knew Red Bluff and while giving due credit to the many lovely damsels of that ambitious little city, Bryce had a suspicion that no former Red Bluff girl would dare to invade the old home town with a French maid. He noted, as further evidence of the correctness of his assumption, that the youthful baggage-smasher at the station failed to recognize her and was evidently dazzled when, followed by the maid struggling with two suit-cases, she approached him and in pure though alien English (the Italian A predominated) inquired the name and location of the best hotel and the hour and point of departure of the automobile stage for San Hedrin. The youth had answered her first question and was about to answer the second when George Sea Otter, in all his barbaric splendour, came pussy-footing around the corner of the station in old man Cardigan's regal touring-car.

The Highest Living Authority, following the gaze of the baggage-smasher, turned and beheld George Sea Otter. Beyond a doubt he was of the West westward. She had heard that California stage-drivers were picturesque fellows, and in all probability the displacing of the old Concord coach of the movie-thriller in favour of the motor-stage had not disturbed the idiosyncrasies of the drivers in their choice of raiment. She noted the rifle-stock projecting from the scabbard, and a vision of a stage hold-up flashed across her mind. Ah, yes, of course—the express messenger's weapon, no doubt! And further to clinch her instant assumption that here was the Sequoia motor-stage, there was the pennant adorning the wind-shield!

Dismissing the baggage-smasher with a gracious smile, the Highest Living Authority approached George Sea Otter, noting, the while, further evidence that this car was a public conveyance, for the young man who had been her fellow-passenger was heading toward the automobile also. She heard him say:

“Hello, George, you radiant red rascal! I'm mighty glad to see you, boy. Shake!”

They shook, George Sea Otter's dark eyes and white teeth flashing pleasurably. Bryce tossed his bag into the tonneau; the half-breed opened the front door; and the young master had his foot on the running-board and was about to enter the car when a soft voice spoke at his elbow:

“Driver, this is the stage for Sequoia, is it not?”

George Sea Otter could scarcely credit his auditory nerves. “This car?” he demanded bluntly, “this—the Sequoia stage! Take a look, lady. This here's a Napier imported English automobile. It's a private car and belongs to my boss here.”

“I'm so sorry I slandered your car,” she replied demurely. “I observed the pennant on the wind-shield, and I thought—”

Bryce Cardigan turned and lifted his hat.

“Quite naturally, you thought it was the Sequoia stage,” he said to her. He turned a smoldering glance upon George Sea Otter. “George,” he declared ominously, but with a sly wink that drew the sting from his words, “if you're anxious to hold down your job the next time a lady speaks to you and asks you a simple question, you answer yes or no and refrain from sarcastic remarks. Don't let your enthusiasm for this car run away with you.” He faced the girl again. “Was it your intention to go out to Sequoia on the next trip of the stage?”

She nodded.

“That means you will have to wait here three days until the stage returns from Sequoia,” Bryce replied.

“I realized, of course, that we would arrive here too late to connect with the stage if it maintained the customary schedule for its departure,” she explained, “but it didn't occur to me that the stage-driver wouldn't wait until our train arrived. I had an idea his schedule was rather elastic.”

“Stage-drivers have no imagination, to speak of,” Bryce assured her. To himself he remarked: “She's used to having people wait on her.”

A shade of annoyance passed over the classic features of the Highest Living Authority. “Oh, dear,” she complained, “how fearfully awkward! Now I shall have to take the next train to San Francisco and book passage on the steamer to Sequoia—and Marcelle is such a poor sailor. Oh, dear!”

Bryce had an inspiration and hastened to reveal it.

“We are about to start for Sequoia now, although the lateness of our start will compel us to put up tonight at the rest-house on the south fork of Trinity River and continue the journey in the morning. However, this rest-house is eminently respectable and the food and accommodations are extraordinarily good for mountains; so, if an invitation to occupy the tonneau of my car will not be construed as an impertinence, coming as it does from a total stranger, you are at liberty to regard this car as to all intents and purposes the public conveyance which so scandalously declined to wait for you this morning.”

She looked at him searchingly for a brief instant: then with a peculiarly winning smile and a graceful inclination of her head she thanked him and accepted his hospitality—thus:

“Why, certainly not! You are very kind, and I shall be eternally grateful.”

“Thank you for that vote of confidence. It makes me feel that I have your permission to introduce myself. My name is Bryce Cardigan, and I live in Sequoia when I'm at home.”

“Of Cardigan's Redwoods?” she questioned. He nodded. “I've heard of you, I think,” she continued. “I am Shirley Sumner.”

“You do not live in Sequoia.”

“No, but I'm going to hereafter. I was there about ten years ago.”

He grinned and thrust out a great hand which she surveyed gravely for a minute before inserting hers in it. “I wonder,” he said, “if it is to be my duty to give you a ride every time you come to Sequoia? The last time you were there you wheedled me into giving you a ride on my pony, an animal known as Midget. Do you, by any chance, recall that incident?”

She looked up at him wonderingly. “Why—why you're the boy with the beautiful auburn hair,” she declared. He lifted his hat and revealed his thick thatch in all its glory. “I'm not so sensitive about it now,” he explained. “When we first met, reference to my hair was apt to rile me.” He shook her little hand with cordial good-nature. “What a pity it wasn't possible for us to renew acquaintance on the train, Miss Sumner!”

“Better late than never, Mr. Cardigan, considering the predicament in which you found me. What became of Midget?”

“Midget, I regret to state, made a little pig of herself one day and died of acute indigestion. She ate half a sack of carrots, and knowing full well that she was eating forbidden fruit, she bolted them, and for her failure to Fletcherize—but speaking of Fletcherizing, did you dine aboard the train?”

She nodded. “So did I, Miss Sumner; hence I take it that you are quite ready to start.”

“Quite, Mr. Cardigan.”

“Then we'll drift. George, suppose you pile Miss Sumner's hand-baggage in the tonneau and then pile in there yourself and keep Marcelle company. I'll drive; and you can sit up in front with me, Miss Sumner, snug behind the wind-shield where you'll not be blown about.”

“I'm sure this is going to be a far pleasanter journey than the stage could possibly have afforded,” she said graciously as Bryce slipped in beside her and took the wheel.

“You are very kind to share the pleasure with me, Miss Sumner.” He went through his gears, and the car glided away on its journey. “By the way,” he said suddenly as he turned west toward the distant blue mountains of Trinity County, “how did you happen to connect me with Cardigan's redwoods?”

“I've heard my uncle, Colonel Seth Pennington, speak of them.”

“Colonel Seth Pennington means nothing in my young life. I never heard of him before; so I dare say he's a newcomer in our country. I've been away six years,” he added in explanation.

“We're from Michigan. Uncle was formerly in the lumber business there, but he's logged out now.”

“I see. So he came West, I suppose, and bought a lot of redwood timber cheap from some old croaker who never could see any future to the redwood lumber industry. Personally, I don't think he could have made a better investment. I hope I shall have the pleasure of making his acquaintance when I deliver you to him. Perhaps you may be a neighbour of mine. Hope so.”

At this juncture George Sea Otter, who had been an interested listener to the conversation, essayed a grunt from the rear seat. Instantly, to Shirley Sumner's vast surprise, her host grunted also; whereupon George Sea Otter broke into a series of grunts and guttural exclamations which evidently appeared quite intelligible to her host, for he slowed down to five miles an hour and cocked one ear to the rear; apparently he was profoundly interested in whatever information his henchman had to impart. When George Sea Otter finished his harangue, Bryce nodded and once more gave his attention to tossing the miles behind him.

“What language was that?” Shirley Sumner inquired, consumed with curiosity.

“Digger Indian,” he replied. “George's mother was my nurse, and he and I grew up together. So I can't very well help speaking the language of the tribe.”

They chattered volubly on many subjects for the first twenty miles; then the road narrowed and commenced to climb steadily, and thereafter Bryce gave all of his attention to the car, for a deviation of a foot from the wheel-rut on the outside of the road would have sent them hurtling over the grade into the deep-timbered canons below. Their course led through a rugged wilderness, widely diversified and transcendently beautiful, and the girl was rather glad of the opportunity to enjoy it in silence. Also by reason of the fact that Bryce's gaze never wavered from the road immediately in front of the car, she had a chance to appraise him critically while pretending to look past him to the tumbled, snow-covered ranges to their right.

She saw a big, supple, powerful man of twenty-five or six, with the bearing and general demeanour of one many years his elder. His rich, dark auburn hair was wavy, and a curling lock of it had escaped from the band of his cap at the temple; his eyes were brown to match his hair and were the striking feature of a strong, rugged countenance, for they were spaced at that eminently proper interval which proclaims an honest man. His nose was high, of medium thickness and just a trifle long—the nose of a thinker. His ears were large, with full lobes—the ears of a generous man. The mouth, full-lipped but firm, the heavy jaw and square chin, the great hands (most amazingly free from freckles) denoted the man who would not avoid a fight worth while. Indeed, while the girl was looking covertly at him, she saw his jaw set and a sudden, fierce light leap up in his eyes, which at first sight had seemed to her rather quizzical. Subconsciously he lifted one hand from the wheel and clenched it; he wagged his head a very little bit; consequently she knew his thoughts were far away, and for some reason, not quite clear to her, she would have preferred that they weren't. As a usual thing, young men did not go wool-gathering in her presence; so she sought to divert his thoughts to present company.

“What a perfectly glorious country!” she exclaimed. “Can't we stop for just a minute to appreciate it?”

“Yes,” he replied abstractedly as he descended from the car and sat at her feet while she drank in the beauty of the scene, “it's a he country; I love it, and I'm glad to get back to it.”

Upon their arrival at the rest-house, however, Bryce cheered up, and during dinner was very attentive and mildly amusing, although Shirley's keen wits assured her that this was merely a clever pose and sustained with difficulty. She was confirmed in this assumption when, after sitting with him a little on the porch after dinner, she complained of being weary and bade him good-night. She had scarcely left him when he called:

“George!”

The half-breed slid out of the darkness and sat down beside him. A moment later, through the open window of her room just above the porch where Bryce and George Sea Otter sat, Shirley heard the former say:

“George, when did you first notice that my father's sight was beginning to fail?”

“About two years ago, Bryce.”

“What made you notice it?”

“He began to walk with his hands held out in front of him, and sometimes he lifted his feet too high.”

“Can he see at all now, George?”

“Oh, yes, a little bit—enough to make his way to the office and back.”

“Poor old governor! George, until you told me this afternoon, I hadn't heard a word about it. If I had, I never would have taken that two-year jaunt around the world.”

George Sea Otter grunted. “That's what your father said, too. So he wouldn't tell you, and he ordered everybody else to keep quiet about it. Myself—well, I didn't want you to go home and not know it until you met him.”

“That was mighty kind and considerate of you, George. And you say this man Colonel Pennington and my father have been having trouble?”

“Yes—” Here George Sea Otter gracefully unburdened himself of a fervent curse directed at Shirley's avuncular relative; whereupon that young lady promptly left the window and heard no more.

They were on the road again by eight o'clock next morning, and just as Cardigan's mill was blowing the six o'clock whistle, Bryce stopped the car at the head of the street leading down to the water-front. “I'll let you drive now, George,” he informed the silent Sea Otter. He turned to Shirley Sumner. “I'm going to leave you now,” he said. “Thank you for riding over from Red Bluff with me. My father never leaves the office until the whistle blows, and so I'm going to hurry down to that little building you see at the end of the street and surprise him.”

He stepped out on the running-board, stood there a moment, and extended his hand. Shirley had commenced a due and formal expression of her gratitude for having been delivered safely in Sequoia, when George Sea Otter spoke:

“Here comes John Cardigan,” he said.

“Drive Miss Sumner around to Colonel Pennington's house,” Bryce ordered, and even while he held Shirley's hand, he turned to catch the first glimpse of his father. Shirley followed his glance and saw a tall, powerfully built old man coming down the street with his hands thrust a little in front of him, as if for protection from some invisible assailant.

“Oh, my poor old father!” she heard Bryce Cardigan murmur. “My dear old pal! And I've let him grope in the dark for two years!”

He released her hand and leaped from the car. “Dad!” he called. “It is I—Bryce. I've come home to you at last.”

The slightly bent figure of John Cardigan straightened with a jerk; he held out his arms, trembling with eagerness, and as the car continued on to the Pennington house Shirley looked back and saw Bryce folded in his father's embrace. She did not, however, hear the heart-cry with which the beaten old man welcomed his boy.

“Sonny, sonny—oh, I'm so glad you're back. I've missed you. Bryce, I'm whipped—I've lost your heritage. Oh, son! I'm old—I can't fight any more. I'm blind—I can't see my enemies. I've lost your redwood trees—even your mother's Valley of the Giants.”

And he commenced to weep for the third time in fifty years. And when the aged and helpless weep, nothing is more terrible. Bryce Cardigan said no word, but held his father close to his great heart and laid his cheek gently against the old man's, tenderly as a woman might. And presently, from that silent communion of spirit, each drew strength and comfort. As the shadows fell in John Cardigan's town, they went home to the house on the hill.

CHAPTER VII

Shirley Sumner's eyes were still moist when George Sea Otter, in obedience to the instructions of his youthful master, set her, the French maid, and their hand-baggage down on the sidewalk in front of Colonel Seth Pennington's house. The half-breed hesitated a moment, undecided whether he would carry the hand-baggage up to the door or leave that task for a Pennington retainer; then he noted the tear-stains on the cheeks of his fair passenger. Instantly he took up the hand-baggage, kicked open the iron gate, and preceded Shirley up the cement walk to the door.

“Just wait a moment, if you please, George,” Shirley said as he set the baggage down and started back for the car. He turned and beheld her extracting a five-dollar bill from her purse. “For you, George,” she continued. “Thank you so much.”

In all his life George Sea Otter had never had such an experience—he, happily, having been raised in a country where, with the exception of waiters, only a pronounced vagrant expects or accepts a gratuity from a woman. He took the bill and fingered it curiously; then his white blood asserted itself and he handed the bill back to Shirley.

“Thank you,” he said respectfully. “If you are a man—all right. But from a lady—no. I am like my boss. I work for you for nothing.”

Shirley did not understand his refusal, but her instinctive tact warned her not to insist. She returned the bill to her purse, thanked him again, and turned quickly to hide the slight flush of annoyance. George Sea Otter noted it.

“Lady,” he said with great dignity, “at first I did not want to carry your baggage. I did not want to walk on this land.” And with a sweeping gesture he indicated the Pennington grounds. “Then you cry a little because my boss is feeling bad about his old man. So I like you better. The old man—well, he has been like father to me and my mother—and we are Indians. My brothers, too—they work for him. So if you like my boss and his old man, George Sea Otter would go to hell for you pretty damn' quick. You bet you my life!”

“You're a very good boy, George,” she replied, with difficulty repressing a smile at his blunt but earnest avowal. “I am glad the Cardigans have such an honest, loyal servant.”

George Sea Otter's dark face lighted with a quick smile. “Now you pay me,” he replied and returned to the car.

The door opened, and a Swedish maid stood in the entrance regarding her stolidly. “I'm Miss Sumner,” Shirley informed her. “This is my maid Marcelle. Help her in with the hand-baggage.” She stepped into the hall and called: “Ooh-hooh! Nunky-dunk!”

“Ship ahoy!” An answering call came to her from the dining room, across the entrance-hall, and an instant later Colonel Seth Pennington stood in the doorway, “Bless my whiskers! Is that you, my dear?” he cried, and advanced to greet her. “Why, how did you get here, Shirley? I thought you'd missed the stage.”

She presented her cheek for his kiss. “So I did, Uncle, but a nice red-haired young man named Bryce Cardigan found me in distress at Red Bluff, picked me up in his car, and brought me here.” She sniffed adorably. “I'm so hungry,” she declared, “and here I am, just in time for dinner. Is my name in the pot?”

“It isn't, Shirley, but it soon will be. How perfectly bully to have you with me again, my dear! And what a charming young lady you've grown to be since I saw you last! You're—why, you've been crying! By Jove, I had no idea you'd be so glad to see me again.”

She could not forego a sly little smile at his egoism.

“You're looking perfectly splendid, Uncle Seth,” she parried.

“And I'm feeling perfectly splendid. This is a wonderful country, Shirley, and everything is going nicely with me here. By the way, who did you say picked you up in his car?”

“Bryce Cardigan. Do you know him?”

“No, we haven't met. Son of old John Cardigan, I dare say. I've heard of him. He's been away from Sequoia for quite a while, I believe.”

“Yes; he was abroad for two years after he was graduated from Princeton.”

“Hum-m-m! Well, it's about time he came home to take care of that stiff-necked old father of his.” He stepped to the bell and pressed it, and the butler answered. “Set a place at dinner for Miss Shirley, James,” he ordered. “Thelma will show you your rooms, Shirley. I was just about to sit down to dinner. I'll wait for you.”

While Shirley was in the living room Colonel Pennington's features wore an expression almost pontifical, but when she had gone, the atmosphere of paternalism and affection which he radiated faded instantly. The Colonel's face was in repose now—cold, calculating, vaguely repellent. He scowled slightly.

“Now, isn't that the devil's luck?” he soliloquized. “Young Cardigan is probably the only man in Sequoia—dashed awkward if they should become interested in each other—at this time. Everybody in town, from lumberjacks to bankers, has told me what a fine fellow Bryce Cardigan is. They say he's good-looking; certainly he is educated and has acquired some worldly polish—just the kind of young fellow Shirley will find interesting and welcome company in a town like this. Many things can happen in a year—and it will be a year before I can smash the Cardigans. Damn it!”

CHAPTER VII

Along the well-remembered streets of Sequoia Bryce Cardigan and his father walked arm in arm, their progress continuously interrupted by well-meaning but impulsive Sequoians who insisted upon halting the pair to shake hands with Bryce and bid him welcome home. In the presence of those third parties the old man quickly conquered the agitation he had felt at this long-deferred meeting with his son, and when presently they left the business section of the town and turned into a less-frequented street, his emotion assumed the character of a quiet joy, evidenced in a more erect bearing and a firmer tread, as if he strove, despite his seventy-six years, not to appear incongruous as he walked beside his splendid son.

“I wish I could see you more clearly,” he said presently. His voice as well as his words expressed profound regret, but there was no hint of despair or heartbreak now.

Bryce, who up to this moment had refrained from discussing his father's misfortunes, drew the old man a little closer to his side.

“What's wrong with your eyes, pal?” he queried. He did not often address his parent, after the fashion of most sons, as “Father,” “Dad” or “Pop.” They were closer to each other than that, and a rare sense of perfect comradeship found expression, on Bryce's part, in such salutations as “pal,” “partner” and, infrequently, “old sport.” When arguing with his father, protesting with him or affectionately scolding him, Bryce, with mock seriousness, sometimes called the old man John Cardigan.

“Cataracts, son,” his father answered. “Merely the penalty of old age.”

“But can't something be done about it?” demanded Bryce. “Can't they be cured somehow or other?”

“Certainly they can. But I shall have to wait until they are completely matured and I have become completely blind; then a specialist will perform an operation on my eyes, and in all probability my sight will be restored for a few years. However, I haven't given the matter a great deal of consideration. At my age one doesn't find very much difficulty in making the best of everything. And I am about ready to quit now. I'd like to, in fact; I'm tired.”

“Oh, but you can't quit until you've seen your redwoods again,” Bryce reminded him. “I suppose it's been a long time since you've visited the Valley of the Giants; your long exile from the wood-goblins has made you a trifle gloomy, I'm afraid.”

John Cardigan nodded. “I haven't seen them in a year and a half, Bryce. Last time I was up, I slipped between the logs on the old skid-road and like to broke my old fool neck. But even that wasn't warning enough for me. I cracked right on into the timber and got lost.”

“Lost? Poor old partner! And what did you do about it?”

“The sensible thing, my boy. I just sat down under a tree and waited for George Sea Otter to trail me and bring me home.”

“And did he find you? Or did you have to spend the night in the woods?”

John Cardigan smiled humorously. “I did not. Along about sunset George found me. Seems he'd been following me all the time, and when I sat down he waited to make certain whether I was lost or just taking a rest where I could be quiet and think.”

“I've been leaving to an Indian the fulfillment of my duty,” Bryce murmured bitterly.

“No, no, son. You have never been deficient in that,” the old man protested.

“Why didn't you have the old skid-road planked with refuse lumber so you wouldn't fall through? And you might have had the woods-boss swamp a new trail into the timber and fence it on both sides, in order that you might feel your way along.”

“Yes, quite true,” admitted the old man. “But then, I don't spend money quite as freely as I used to, Bryce. I consider carefully now before I part with a dollar.”

“Pal, it wasn't fair of you to make me stay away so long. If I had only known—if I had remotely suspected—”

“You'd have spoiled everything—of course. Don't scold me, son. You're all I have now, and I couldn't bear to send for you until you'd had your fling.” His trembling old hand crept over and closed upon his boy's hand, so firm but free from signs of toil. “It was my pleasure, Bryce,” he continued, “and you wouldn't deny me my choice of sport, would you? Remember, lad, I never had a boyhood; I never had a college education, and the only real travel I have ever had was when I worked my way around Cape Horn as a foremast hand, and all I saw then was water and hardships; all I've seen since is my little world here in Sequoia and in San Francisco.”

“You've sacrificed enough—too much—for me, Dad.”

“It pleased me to give you all the advantages I wanted and couldn't afford until I was too old and too busy to consider them. Besides, it was your mother's wish. We made plans for you before you were born, and I promised her—ah, well, why be a cry-baby? I knew I could manage until you were ready to settle down to business. And you HAVE enjoyed your little run, haven't you?” he concluded wistfully.

“I have, Dad.” Bryce's great hand closed over the back of his father's neck; he shook the old man with mock ferocity. “Stubborn old lumberjack!” he chided.

John Cardigan shook with an inward chuckle, for the loving abuse his boy had formed a habit of heaping on him never failed to thrill him. Instinctively Bryce had realized that to-night obvious sympathy copiously expressed was not the medicine for his father's bruised spirit; hence he elected to regard the latter's blindness as a mere temporary annoyance, something to be considered lightly, if at all; and it was typical of him now that the subject had been discussed briefly, to resolve never to refer to it again. He released his hold on the old man's neck and tapped the latter's gray head lightly, while with his tongue he made hollow-sounding noises against the roof of his mouth.

“Ha! I thought so,” he declared. “After your fifty-odd years in the lumber business your head has become packed with sawdust—”

“Be serious and talk to me, Bryce.”

“I ought to send you to bed without your supper. Talk to you? You bet I'll talk to you, John Cardigan; and I'll tell you things, too, you scandalous bunko-steerer. To-morrow morning I'm going to put a pair of overalls on you, arm you with a tin can and a swab, and set you to greasing the skidways. Partner, you've deceived me.”

“Oh, nonsense. If I had whimpered, that would only have spoiled everything.”

“Nevertheless, you were forced to cable me to hurry home.”

“I summoned you the instant I realized I was going to need you.”

“No, you didn't, John Cardigan. You summoned me because, for the first time in your life, you were panicky and let yourself get out of hand.”

His father nodded slowly. “And you aren't over it yet,” Bryee continued, his voice no longer bantering but lowered affectionately. “What's the trouble, Dad? Trot out your old panic and let me inspect it. Trouble must be very real when it gets my father on the run.”

“It is, Bryce, very real indeed. As I remarked before, I've lost your heritage for you.” He sighed. “I waited till you would be able to come home and settle down to business; now you're home, and there isn't any business to settle down to.”

Bryce chuckled, for he was indeed far from being worried over business matters, his consideration now being entirely for his father's peace of mind. “All right,” he retorted, “Father has lost his money and we'll have to let the servants go and give up the old home. That part of it is settled; and weak, anemic, tenderly nurtured little Bryce Cardigan must put his turkey on his back and go into the woods looking for a job as lumberjack ... Busted, eh? Did I or did I not hear the six o'clock whistle blow at the mill? Bet you a dollar I did.”

“Oh, I have title to everything—yet.”

“How I do have to dig for good news! Then it appears we still have a business; indeed, we may always have a business, for the very fact that it is going but not quite gone implies a doubt as to its ultimate departure, and perhaps we may yet scheme a way to retain it.”

“Oh, my boy, when I think of my years of toil and scheming, of the big dreams I dreamed—”

“Belay all! If we can save enough out of the wreck to insure you your customary home comforts, I shan't cry, partner. I have a profession to fall back on. Yes, sirree. I own a sheep-skin, and it says I'm an electrical and civil engineer.”

“What!”

“I said it. An electrical and civil engineer. Slipped one over on you at college, John Cardigan, when all the time you thought I was having a good time. Thought I'd come home and surprise you.”

“Bu-bu-but—”

“It drives me wild to have a man sputter at me. I'm an electrical and civil engineer, I tell you, and my two years of travel have been spent studying the installation and construction of big plants abroad.” He commenced to chuckle softly. “I've known for years that our sawmill was a debilitated old coffee-grinder and would have to be rebuilt, so I wanted to know how to rebuild it. And I've known for years that some day I might have to build a logging railroad—”

“My dear boy! And you've got your degree?”

“Partner, I have a string of letters after my name like the tail of a comet.”

“You comfort me,” the old man answered simply. “I have reproached myself with the thought that I reared you with the sole thought of making a lumberman out of you—and when I saw your lumber business slipping through my fingers—”

“You were sorry I didn't have a profession to fall back on, eh? Or were you fearful lest you had raised the usual rich man's son? If the latter, you did not compliment me, pal. I've never forgotten how hard you always strove to impress me with a sense of the exact weight of my responsibility as your successor.”

“How big are you now?” his father queried suddenly.

“Well, sir,” Bryce answered, for his father's pleasure putting aside his normal modesty, “I'm six feet two inches tall, and I weigh two hundred pounds in the pink of condition. I have a forty-eight-inch chest, with five and a half inches chest-expansion, and a reach as long as a gorilla's. My underpinning is good, too; I'm not one of these fellows with spidery legs and a barrel-chest. I can do a hundred yards in ten seconds; I'm no slouch of a swimmer; and at Princeton they say I made football history. And in spite of it all, I haven't an athletic heart.”

“That is very encouraging, my boy—very. Ever do any boxing?”

“Quite a little. I'm fairly up in the manly art of self-defence.”

“That's good. And I suppose you did some wrestling at your college gymnasium, did you not?”

“Naturally. I went in for everything my big carcass could stand.”

The old man wagged his head approvingly, and they had reached the gate of the Cardigan home before he spoke again. “There's a big buck woods-boss up in Pennington's camp,” he remarked irrelevantly. “He's a French Canadian imported from northern Michigan by Colonel Pennington. I dare say he's the only man in this country who measures up to you physically. He can fight with his fists and wrestle right cleverly, I'm told. His name is Jules Rondeau, and he's top dog among the lumberjacks. They say he's the strongest man in the county.” He unlatched the gate. “Folks used to say that about me once,” he continued wistfully. “Ah, if I could have my eyes to see you meet Jules Rondeau!”

The front portal of the quaint old Cardigan residence opened, and a silver-haired lady came out on the porch and hailed Bryce. She was Mrs. Tully, John Cardigan's old housekeeper, and almost a mother to Bryce. “Oh, here's my boy!” she cried, and a moment later found herself encircled by Bryce's arms and saluted with a hearty kiss.

As he stepped into the familiar entrance-hall, Bryce paused, raised his head and sniffed suspiciously, like a bird-dog. Mrs. Tully, arms akimbo, watched him pleasurably. “I smell something,” he declared, and advanced a step down the hall for another sniff; then, in exact imitation of a foxhound, he gave tongue and started for the kitchen. Mrs. Tully, waddling after, found him “pointing” two hot blackberry pies which had but a few minutes previous been taken from the oven. He was baying lugubriously.

“They're wild blackberries, too,” Mrs. Tully announced pridefully. “I remembered how fond you used to be of wild-blackberry pie—so I phoned up to the logging-camp and had the woods-boss send a man out to pick them.”

“I'm still a pie-hound, Mrs. Tully, and you're still the same dear, thoughtful soul. I'm so glad now that I had sense enough to think of you before I turned my footsteps toward the setting sun.” He patted her gray head. “Mrs. T.,” he declared, “I've brought you a nice big collar of Irish lace—bought it in Belfast, b'gosh. It comes down around your neck and buckles right here with an old ivory cameo I picked up in Burma and which formerly was the property of a Hindu queen.”

Mrs. Tully simpered with pleasure and protested that her boy was too kind. “You haven't changed a single speck,” she concluded proudly.

“Has the pie?”

“I should say not.”

“How many did you make?”

“Two.”

“May I have one all for myself, Mrs. Tully?”

“Indeed you may, my dear.”

“Thank you, but I do not want it for myself. Mrs. Tully, will you please wrap one of those wonderful pies in a napkin and the instant George Sea Otter comes in with the car, tell him to take the pie over to Colonel Pennington's house and deliver it to Miss Sumner? There's a girl who doubtless thinks she has tasted pie in her day, and I want to prove to her that she hasn't.” He selected a card from his card-case, sat down, and wrote:

Dear Miss Sumner:

Here is a priceless hot wild-blackberry pie, especially manufactured in my honour. It is so good I wanted you to have some. In all your life you have never tasted anything like it.

Sincerely, BRYCE CARDIGAN.

He handed the card to Mrs. Tully and repaired to his old room to remove the stains of travel before joining his father at dinner.

Some twenty minutes later his unusual votive offering was delivered by George Sea Otter to Colonel Pennington's Swedish maid, who promptly brought it in to the Colonel and Shirley Sumner, who were even then at dinner in the Colonel's fine burl-redwood-panelled dining room. Miss Sumner's amazement was so profound that for fully a minute she was mute, contenting herself with scrutinizing alternately the pie and the card that accompanied it. Presently she handed the card to her uncle, who affixed his pince-nez and read the epistle with deliberation.

“Isn't this young Cardigan a truly remarkable young man, Shirley?” he declared. “Why, I have never heard of anything like his astounding action. If he had sent you over an armful of American Beauty roses from his father's old-fashioned garden, I could understand it, but an infernal blackberry pie! Good heavens!”

“I told you he was different,” she replied. To the Colonel's amazement she did not appear at all amused.

Colonel Pennington poked a fork through the delicate brown crust. “I wonder if it is really as good as he says it is, Shirley.”

“Of course. If it wasn't, he wouldn't have sent it.”

“How do you know?”

“By intuition,” she replied. And she cut into the pie and helped the Colonel to a quadrant of it.

“That was a genuine hayseed faux-pas,” announced the Colonel a few moments later as Shirley was pouring coffee from a samovar-shaped percolator in the library. “The idea of anybody who has enjoyed the advantages that fellow has, sending a hot blackberry pie to a girl he has just met!”

“Yes, the idea!” she echoed. “I find it rather charming.”

“You mean amusing.”

“I said 'charming.' Bryce Cardigan is a man with the heart and soul of a boy, and I think it was mighty sweet of him to share his pie with me. If he had sent roses, I should have suspected him of trying to 'rush' me, but the fact that he sent a blackberry pie proves that he's just a natural, simple, sane, original citizen—just the kind of person a girl can have for a dear friend without incurring the risk of having to marry him.”

“I repeat that this is most extraordinary.”

“Only because it is an unusual thing for a young man to do, although, after all, why shouldn't he send me a blackberry pie if he thought a blackberry pie would please me more than an armful of roses? Besides, he may send the roses to-morrow.”

“Most extraordinary!” the Colonel reiterated.

“What should one expect from such an extraordinary creature? He's an extraordinary fine-looking young man, with an extraordinary scowl and an extraordinary crinkly smile that is friendly and generous and free from masculine guile. Why, I think he's just the kind of man who WOULD send a girl a blackberry pie.”

The Colonel noticed a calm little smile fringing her generous mouth. He wished he could tell, by intuition, what she was thinking about—and what effect a hot wild-blackberry pie was ultimately to have upon the value of his minority holding in the Laguna Grande Lumber Company.

CHAPTER IX

Not until dinner was finished and father and son had repaired to the library for their coffee and cigars did Bryce Cardigan advert to the subject of his father's business affairs.

“Well, John Cardigan,” he declared comfortably, “to-day is Friday. I'll spend Saturday and Sunday in sinful sloth and the renewal of old acquaintance, and on Monday I'll sit in at your desk and give you a long-deferred vacation. How about that programme, pard?”

“Our affairs are in such shape that they could not possibly be hurt or bettered, no matter who takes charge of them now,” Cardigan replied bitterly. “We're about through. I waited too long and trusted too far; and now—well, in a year we'll be out of business.”

“Suppose you start at the beginning and tell me everything right to the end. George Sea Otter informed me that you've been having trouble with this Johnny-come-lately, Colonel Pennington. Is he the man who has us where the hair is short?”

The old man nodded.

“The Squaw Creek timber deal, eh?” Bryce suggested.

Again the old man nodded. “You wrote me all about that,” Bryce continued. “You had him blocked whichever way he turned—so effectually blocked, in fact, that the only pleasure he has derived from his investment since is the knowledge that he owns two thousand acres of timber with the exclusive right to pay taxes on it, walk in it, look at it and admire it—in fact, do everything except log it, mill it, and realize on his investment. It must make him feel like a bally jackass.”

“On the other hand,” his father reminded him, “no matter what the Colonel's feeling on that score may be, misery loves company, and not until I had pulled out of the Squaw Creek country and started logging in the San Hedrin watershed, did I realize that I had been considerable of a jackass myself.”

“Yes,” Bryce admitted, “there can be no doubt but that you cut off your nose to spite your face.”

There was silence between them for several minutes. Bryce's thoughts harked back to that first season of logging in the San Hedrin, when the cloud-burst had caught the river filled with Cardigan logs and whirled them down to the bay, to crash through the log-boom at tidewater and continue out to the open sea. In his mind's eye he could still see the red-ink figures on the profit-and-loss statement Sinclair, his father's manager, had presented at the end of that year.

The old man appeared to divine the trend of his son's thoughts. “Yes, Bryce, that was a disastrous year,” he declared. “The mere loss of the logs was a severe blow, but in addition I had to pay out quite a little money to settle with my customers. I was loaded up with low-priced orders that year, although I didn't expect to make any money. The orders were merely taken to keep the men employed. You understand, Bryce! I had a good crew, the finest in the country; and if I had shut down, my men would have scattered and—well, you know how hard it is to get that kind of a crew together again. Besides, I had never failed my boys before, and I couldn't bear the thought of failing them then. Half the mills in the country were shut down at the time, and there was a lot of distress among the unemployed. I couldn't do it, Bryce.”

Bryce nodded. “And when you lost the logs, you couldn't fill those low-priced orders. Then the market commenced to jump and advanced three dollars in three months—”

“Exactly, my son. And my customers began to crowd me to fill those old orders. Praise be, my regular customers knew I wasn't the kind of lumberman who tries to crawl out of filling low-priced orders after the market has gone up. Nevertheless I couldn't expect them to suffer with me; my failure to perform my contracts, while unavoidable, nevertheless would have caused them a severe loss, and when they were forced to buy elsewhere, I paid them the difference between the price they paid my competitors and the price at which they originally placed their orders with me. And the delay in delivery caused them further loss.”

“How much?”

“Nearly a hundred thousand—to settle for losses to my local customers alone. Among my orders I had three million feet of clear lumber for shipment to the United Kingdom, and these foreign customers, thinking I was trying to crawfish on my contracts, sued me and got judgment for actual and exemplary damages for my failure to perform, while the demurrage on the ships they sent to freight the lumber sent me hustling to the bank to borrow money.”

He smoked meditatively for a minute. “I've always been land-poor,” he explained apologetically. “Never kept much of a reserve working-capital for emergencies, you know. Whenever I had idle money, I put it into timber in the San Hedrin watershed, because I realized that some day the railroad would build in from the south, tap that timber, and double its value. I've not as yet found reason to doubt the wisdom of my course; but”—he sighed—“the railroad is a long time coming!”

John Cardigan here spoke of a most important factor in the situation. The crying need of the country was a feeder to some transcontinental railroad. By reason of natural barriers, Humboldt County was not easily accessible to the outside world except from the sea, and even this avenue of ingress and egress would be closed for days at a stretch when the harbour bar was on a rampage. With the exception of a strip of level, fertile land, perhaps five miles wide and thirty miles long and contiguous to the seacoast, the heavily timbered mountains to the north, east, and south rendered the building of a railroad that would connect Humboldt County with the outside world a profoundly difficult and expensive task. The Northwestern Pacific, indeed, had been slowly building from San Francisco Bay up through Marin and Sonoma counties to Willits in Mendocino County. But there it had stuck to await that indefinite day when its finances and the courage of its board of directors should prove equal to the colossal task of continuing the road two hundred miles through the mountains to Sequoia on Humboldt Bay. For twenty years the Humboldt pioneers had lived in hope of this; but eventually they had died in despair or were in process of doing so.

“Don't worry, Dad. It will come,” Bryce assured his father. “It's bound to.”

“Yes, but not in my day. And when it comes, a stranger may own your San Hedrin timber and reap the reward of my lifetime of labour.”

Again a silence fell between them, broken presently by the old man. “That was a mistake—logging in the San Hedrin,” he observed. “I had my lesson that first year, but I didn't heed it. If I had abandoned my camps there, pocketed my pride, paid Colonel Pennington two dollars for his Squaw Creek timber, and rebuilt my old logging-road, I would have been safe to-day. But I was stubborn; I'd played the game so long, you know—I didn't want to let that man Pennington outgame me. So I tackled the San Hedrin again. We put thirty million feet of logs into the river that year, and when the freshet came, McTavish managed to make a fairly successful drive. But he was all winter on the job, and when spring came and the men went into the woods again, they had to leave nearly a million feet of heavy butt logs permanently stranded in the slack water along the banks, while perhaps another million feet of lighter logs had been lifted out of the channel by the overflow and left high and dry when the water receded. There they were, Bryce, scattered up and down the river, far from the cables and logging-donkeys, the only power we could use to get those monsters back into the river again, and I was forced to decide whether they should be abandoned or split during the summer into railroad ties, posts, pickets, and shakes—commodities for which there was very little call at the time and in which, even when sold, there could be no profit after deducting the cost of the twenty-mile wagon haul to Sequoia, and the water freight from Sequoia to market. So I abandoned them.”

“I remember that phase of it, partner.”

“To log it the third year only meant that more of those heavy logs would jam and spell more loss. Besides, there was always danger of another cloud-burst which would put me out of business completely, and I couldn't afford the risk.”

“That was the time you should have offered Colonel Pennington a handsome profit on his Squaw Creek timber, pal.”

“If my hindsight was as good as my foresight, and I had my eyesight, I wouldn't be in this dilemma at all,” the old man retorted briskly. “It's hard to teach an old dog new tricks, and besides, I was obsessed with the need of protecting your heritage from attack in any direction.”

John Cardigan straightened up in his chair and laid the tip of his right index finger in the centre of the palm of his left hand. “Here was the situation, Bryce: The centre of my palm represents Sequoia; the end of my fingers represents the San Hedrin timber twenty miles south. Now, if the railroad built in from the south, you would win. But if it built in from Grant's Pass, Oregon, on the north from the base of my hand, the terminus of the line would be Sequoia, twenty miles from your timber in the San Hedrin watershed!”

Bryce nodded. “In which event,” he replied, “we, would be in much the same position with our San Hedrin timber as Colonel Pennington is with his Squaw Creek timber. We would have the comforting knowledge that we owned it and paid taxes on it but couldn't do a dad-burned thing with it!”

“Right you are! The thing to do, then, as I viewed the situation, Bryce, was to acquire a body of timber NORTH of Sequoia and be prepared for either eventuality. And this I did.”

Silence again descended upon them; and Bryce, gazing into the open fireplace, recalled an event in that period of his father's activities: Old Bill Henderson had come up to their house to dinner one night, and quite suddenly, in the midst of his soup, the old fox had glared across at his host and bellowed:

“John, I hear you've bought six thousand acres up in Township Nine.”

John Cardigan had merely nodded, and Henderson had continued:

“Going to log it or hold it for investment?”

“It was a good buy,” Cardigan had replied enigmatically; “so I thought I'd better take it at the price. I suppose Bryce will log it some day.”

“Then I wish Bryce wasn't such a boy, John. See here, now, neighbour. I'll 'fess up. I took that money Pennington gave me for my Squaw Creek timber and put it back into redwood in Township Nine, slam-bang up against your holdings there. John, I'd build a mill on tidewater if you'd sell me a site, and I'd log my timber if—”

“I'll sell you a mill-site, Bill, and I won't stab you to the heart, either. Consider that settled.”

“That's bully, John; but still, you only dispose of part of my troubles. There's twelve miles of logging-road to build to get my logs to the mill, and I haven't enough ready money to make the grade. Better throw in with me, John, and we'll build the road and operate it for our joint interest.”

“I'll not throw in with you, Bill, at my time of life, I don't want to have the worry of building, maintaining, and operating twelve miles of private railroad. But I'll loan you, without security—”

“You'll have to take an unsecured note, John. Everything I've got is hocked.”

“—the money you need to build and equip the road,” finished Cardigan. “In return you are to shoulder all the grief and worry of the road and give me a ten-year contract at a dollar and a half per thousand feet, to haul my logs down to tidewater with your own. My minimum haul will be twenty-five million feet annually, and my maximum fifty million—”

“Sold!” cried Henderson. And it was even so.

Bryce came out of his reverie. “And now?” he queried of his father.

“I mortgaged the San Hedrin timber in the south to buy the timber in the north, my son; then after I commenced logging in my new holdings, came several long, lean years of famine. I stuck it out, hoping for a change for the better; I couldn't bear to close down my mill and logging-camps, for the reason that I could stand the loss far more readily than the men who worked for me and depended upon me. But the market dragged in the doldrums, and Bill Henderson died, and his boys got discouraged, and—”

A sudden flash of inspiration illumined Bryce Cardigan's brain. “And they sold out to Colonel Pennington,” he cried.

“Exactly. The Colonel took over my contract with Henderson's company, along with the other assets, and it was incumbent upon him, as assignee, to fulfill the contract. For the past two years the market for redwood has been most gratifying, and if I could only have gotten a maximum supply of logs over Pennington's road, I'd have worked out of the hole, but—”

“He manages to hold you to a minimum annual haul of twenty-five million feet, eh?”

John Cardigan nodded. “He claims he's short of rolling-stock—that wrecks and fires have embarrassed the road. He can always find excuses for failing to spot in logging-trucks for Cardigan's logs. Bill Henderson never played the game that way. He gave me what I wanted and never held me to the minimum haulage when I was prepared to give him the maximum.”

“What does Colonel Pennington want, pard?”

“He wants,” said John Cardigan slowly, “my Valley of the Giants and a right of way through my land from the valley to a log-dump on deep water.”

“And you refused him?”

“Naturally. You know my ideas on that big timber.” His old head sank low on his breast. “Folks call them Cardigan's Redwoods now,” he murmured. “Cardigan's Redwoods—and Pennington would cut them! Oh, Bryce, the man hasn't a soul!”

“But I fail to see what the loss of Cardigan's Redwoods has to do with the impending ruin of the Cardigan Redwood Lumber Company,” his son reminded him. “We have all the timber we want.”

“My ten-year contract has but one more year to run, and recently I tried to get Pennington to renew it. He was very nice and sociable, but—he named me a freight-rate, for a renewal of the contract for five years, of three dollars per thousand feet. That rate is prohibitive and puts us out of business.”

“Not necessarily,” Bryce returned evenly. “How about the State railroad commission? Hasn't it got something to say about rates?”

“Yes—on common carriers. But Pennington's load is a private logging-road; my contract will expire next year, and it is not incumbent upon Pennington to renew it. And one can't operate a sawmill without logs, you know.”

“Then,” said Bryce calmly, “we'll shut the mill down when the log-hauling contract expires, hold our timber as an investment, and live the simple life until we can sell it or a transcontinental road builds into Humboldt County and enables us to start up the mill again.”

John Cardigan shook his head. “I'm mortgaged to the last penny,” he confessed, “and Pennington has been buying Cardigan Redwood Lumber Company first-mortgage bonds until he is in control of the issue. He'll buy in the San Hedrin timber at the foreclosure sale, and in order to get it back and save something for you out of the wreckage, I'll have to make an unprofitable trade with him. I'll have to give him my timber adjoining his north of Sequoia, together with my Valley of the Giants, in return for the San Hedrin timber, to which he'll have a sheriff's deed. But the mill, all my old employees, with their numerous dependents—gone, with you left land-poor and without a dollar to pay your taxes. Smashed—like that!” And he drove his fist into the palm of his hand.

“Perhaps—but not without a fight,” Bryce answered, although he knew their plight was well-nigh hopeless. “I'll give that man Pennington a run for his money, or I'll know the reason.”

The telephone on the table beside him tinkled, and he took down the receiver and said “Hello!”

“Mercy!” came the clear, sweet voice of Shirley Sumner over the wire. “Do you feel as savage as all that, Mr. Cardigan?”

For the second time in his life the thrill that was akin to pain came to Bryce Cardigan. He laughed. “If I had known you were calling, Miss Sumner,” he said, “I shouldn't have growled so.”

“Well, you're forgiven—for several reasons, but principally for sending me that delicious blackberry pie. Of course, it discoloured my teeth temporarily, but I don't care. The pie was worth it, and you were awfully dear to think of sending it. Thank you so much.”

“Glad you liked it, Miss Sumner. I dare to hope that I may have the privilege of seeing you soon again.”

“Of course. One good pie deserves another. Some evening next week, when that dear old daddy of yours can spare his boy, you might be interested to see our burl-redwood-panelled dining room Uncle Seth is so proud of. I'm too recent an arrival to know the hour at which Uncle Seth dines, but I'll let you know later and name a definite date. Would Thursday night be convenient?”

“Perfectly. Thank you a thousand times.”

She bade him good-night. As he turned from the telephone, his father looked up. “What are you going to do to-morrow, lad?” he queried.

“I have to do some thinking to-morrow,” Bryce answered. “So I'm going up into Cardigan's Redwoods to do it. Up there a fellow can get set, as it were, to put over a thought with a punch in it.”

“The dogwoods and rhododendron are blooming now,” the old man murmured wistfully. Bryce knew what he was thinking of. “I'll attend to the flowers for Mother,” he assured Cardigan, and he added fiercely: “And I'll attend to the battle for Father. We may lose, but that man Pennington will know he's been in a fight before we fin—-”

He broke off abruptly, for he had just remembered that he was to dine at the Pennington house the following Thursday—and he was not the sort of man who smilingly breaks bread with his enemy.

CHAPTER X

For many years there had been installed in Cardigan's mill a clock set to United States observatory time and corrected hourly by the telegraph company. It was the only clock of its kind in Sequoia; hence folk set their watches by it, or rather by the whistle on Cardigan's mill. With a due appreciation of the important function of this clock toward his fellow-citizens, old Zeb Curry, the chief engineer and a stickler for being on time, was most meticulous in his whistle-blowing. With a sage and prophetic eye fixed upon the face of the clock, and a particularly greasy hand grasping the whistle-cord, Zeb would wait until the clock registered exactly six-fifty-nine and a half—whereupon the seven o'clock whistle would commence blowing, to cease instantly upon the stroke of the hour. It was old Zeb's pride and boast that with a single exception, during the sixteen years the clock had been in service, no man could say that Zeb had been more than a second late or early with his whistle-blowing. That exception occurred when Bryce Cardigan, invading the engine room while Zeb was at luncheon, looped the whistle-cord until the end dangled seven feet above ground. As a consequence Zeb, who was a short, fat little man, was forced to leap at it several times before success crowned his efforts and the whistle blew. Thereafter for the remainder of the day his reason tottered on its throne, due to the fact that Bryce induced every mill employee to call upon the engineer and remind him that he must be growing old, since he was no longer dependable!

On the morning following Bryce Cardigan's return to Sequoia, Zeb Curry, as per custom, started his engine at six-fifty-eight. That gave the huge bandsaws two minutes in which to attain their proper speed and afforded Dan Kenyon, the head sawyer, ample time to run his steam log-carriage out to the end of the track; for Daniel, too, was a reliable man in the matter of starting his daily uproar on time.

At precisely six fifty-nine and a half, therefore, the engineer's hand closed over the handle of the whistle-cord, and Dan Kenyon, standing on the steam-carriage with his hand on the lever, took a thirty-second squint through a rather grimy window that gave upon the drying-yard and the mill-office at the head of it.

The whistle ceased blowing, but still Dan Kenyon stood at his post, oblivious of the hungry saws. Ten seconds passed; then Zeb Curry, immeasurably scandalized at Daniel's tardiness, tooted the whistle sharply twice; whereupon Dan woke up, threw over the lever, and walked his log up to the saw.

For the next five hours Zeb Curry had no opportunity to discuss the matter with the head sawyer. After blowing the twelve o'clock whistle, however, he hurried over to the dining-hall, where the mill hands already lined the benches, shovelling food into their mouths as only a lumberman or a miner can. Dan Kenyon sat at the head of the table in the place of honour sacred to the head sawyer, and when his mouth would permit of some activity other than mastication, Zeb Curry caught his eye.

“Hey, you, Dan Kenyon,” he shouted across the table, “what happened to you this mornin'? It was sixteen seconds between the tail end o' my whistle an' the front end o' your whinin'. First thing you know, you'll be gettin' so slack an' careless-like some other man'll be ridin' that log-carriage o' yourn.”

“I was struck dumb,” Dan Kenyon replied. “I just stood there like one o' these here graven images. Last night on my way home from work I heerd the young feller was back—he got in just as we was knockin' off for the day; an' this mornin' just as you cut loose, Zeb, I'll be danged if he didn't show up in front o' the office door, fumblin' for the keyhole. Yes, sirree! That boy gets in at six o'clock last night an' turns to on his paw's job when the whistle blows this mornin' at seven.”

“You mean young Bryce Cardigan?” Zeb queried incredulously.

“I shore do.”

“'Tain't possible,” Zeb declared. “You seen a new bookkeeper, mebbe, but you didn't see Bryce. He aint no such hog for labour as his daddy before him, I'm tellin' you. Not that there's a lazy bone in his body, for there ain't, but because that there boy's got too much sense to come bollin' down to work at seven o'clock the very first mornin' he's back from Yurrup.”

“I'm layin' you ten to one I seen him,” Dan replied defiantly, “an' what's more, I'll bet a good cigar—a ten-center straight—the boy don't leave till six o'clock to-night.”

“You're on,” answered the chief engineer. “Them's lumberjack hours, man. From seven till six means work—an' only fools an' hosses keeps them hours.”

The head sawyer leaned across the table and pounded with the handle of his knife until he had the attention of all present. “I'm a-goin' to tell you young fellers somethin',” he announced. “Ever since the old boss got so he couldn't look after his business with his own eyes, things has been goin' to blazes round this sawmill, but they ain't a-goin' no more. How do I know? Well, I'll tell you. All this forenoon I kept my eye on the office door—I can see it through a mill winder; an' I'm tellin' you the old boss didn't show up till ten o'clock, which the old man ain't never been a ten o'clock business man at no time. Don't that prove the boy's took his place?”

Confused murmurs of affirmation and negation ran up and down the long table. Dan tapped with his knife again. “You hear me,” he warned. “Thirty year I've been ridin' John Cardigan's log-carriages; thirty year I've been gettin' everythin' out of a log it's possible to git out, which is more'n you fellers at the trimmers can git out of a board after I've sawed it off the cant. There's a lot o' you young fellers that've been takin' John Cardigan's money under false pretenses, so if I was you I'd keep both eyes on my job hereafter. For a year I've been claimin' that good No. 2 stock has been chucked into the slab-fire as refuge lumber.” (Dan meant refuse lumber.) “But it won't be done no more. The raftsman tells me he seen Bryce down at the end o' the conveyin' belt givin' that refuge the once-over—so step easy.”

“What does young Cardigan know about runnin' a sawmill?” a planer-man demanded bluntly. “They tell me he's been away to college an' travellin' the past six years.”

“Wa-ll,” drawled the head sawyer, “you git to talkin' with him some day an' see how much he knows about runnin' a sawmill. What he knows will surprise you. Yes, indeed, you'll find he knows considerable. He's picked up loose shingles around the yard an' bundled 'em in vacation times, an' I want to see the shingle-weaver that can teach him some tricks. Also, I've had him come up on the steam carriage more'n once an' saw up logs, while at times I've seen him put in a week or two on the sortin' table. In a pinch, with a lot o' vessels loadin' here at the dock an' the skippers raisin' Cain because they wasn't gettin' their cargo fast enough, I've seen him work nights an' Sundays tallyin' with the best o' them. Believe me that boy can grade lumber.”

“An' I'll tell you somethin' else,” Zeb Curry cut in. “If the new boss ever tells you to do a thing his way, you do it an' don't argue none as to whether he knows more about it than you do or not.”

“A whole lot o' dagos an' bohunks that's come into the woods since the blue-noses an' canucks an' wild Irish went out had better keep your eyes open,” Dan Kenyon warned sagely. “There ain't none o' you any better'n you ought to be, an' things have been pretty durned slack around Cardigan's mill since the old man went blind, but—you watch out. There's a change due. Bryce Cardigan is his father's son. He'll do things.”

“Which he's big enough to throw a bear uphill by the tail,” Zeb Curry added, “an' you fellers all know how much tail a bear has.”

“Every mornin' for thirty years, 'ceptin' when we was shut down for repairs,” Dan continued, “I've looked through that winder, when John Cardigan wasn't away from Sequoia, to watch him git to his office on time. He's there when the whistle blows, clear up to the time his eyes go back on him, an' then he arrives late once or twice on account o' havin' to go careful. This mornin', for the first time in fifty year, he stays in bed; but—his son has the key in the office door when the whistle blows, an'—”

Dan Kenyon paused abruptly; the hum of conversation ceased, and silence fell upon the room as Bryce Cardigan strolled in the door, nodded to the men, and slid in on the bench to a seat beside the head sawyer.

“Hello, Dan—hello, Zeb,” he said and shook hands with each. “I'm mighty glad to see you both again. Hello, everybody. I'm the new boss, so I suppose I'd better introduce myself—there are so many new faces here. I'm Bryce Cardigan.”

“Yes,” Zeb Curry volunteered, “an' he's like his daddy. He ain't ashamed to work with his men, an' he ain't ashamed to eat with his men, nuther. Glad you're back with us again, boy—mighty glad. Dan, here, he's gittin' slacker'n an old squaw with his work an' needs somebody to jerk him up, while the rest o' these here—”

“I noticed that about Dan,” Bryce interrupted craftily. “He's slowing up, Zeb. He must have been fifteen seconds late this morning—or perhaps,” he added “you were fifteen seconds earlier than the clock.”

Dan grinned, and Bryce went on seriously: “I'm afraid you're getting too old to ride the log-carriage, Dan. You've been at it a long time; so, with the utmost good will in the world toward you, you're fired. I might as well tell you now. You know me, Dan. I always did dislike beating about the bush.”

“Fired!” Dan Kenyon's eyes popped with amazement and horror. “Fired—after thirty years!” he croaked.

“Fired!” There was unmistakable finality in Bryce's tones. “You're hired again, however, at a higher salary, as mill-superintendent. You can get away with that job, can't you, Dan? In fact,” he added without waiting for the overjoyed Dan to answer him, “you've got to get away with it, because I discharged the mill-superintendent I found on the job when I got down here this morning. He's been letting too many profits go into the slab-fire. In fact, the entire plant has gone to glory. Fire-hose old and rotten—couldn't stand a hundred-pound pressure; fire-buckets and water-barrels empty, axes not in their proper places, fire-extinguishers filled with stale chemical—why, the smallest kind of a fire here would get beyond our control with that man on the job. Besides, he's changed the grading-rules. I found the men putting clear boards with hard-grained streaks in them in with the No. 1 clear. The customer may not kick at a small percentage of No. 2 in his No. 1 but it's only fair to give it to him at two dollars a thousand less.”

“Well,” purred Zeb Curry, “they don't grade lumber as strict nowadays as they used to before you went away. Colonel Pennington says we're a lot o' back numbers out this way an' too generous with our grades. First thing he did was to call a meetin' of all the Humboldt lumber manufacturers an' organize 'em into an association. Then he had the gradin'-rules changed. The retailers hollered for a while, but bimeby they got used to it.”

“Did my father join that association?” Bryce demanded quickly.

“Yes. He told Pennington he wasn't goin' to be no obstructionist in the trade, but he did kick like a bay steer on them new gradin'-rules an' refused to conform to 'em. Said he was too old an' had been too long in business to start gougin' his customers at his time o' life. So he got out o' the association.”

“Bully for John Cardigan!” Bryce declared. “I suppose we could make a little more money by cheapening our grade, but the quality of our lumber is so well known that it sells itself and saves us the expense of maintaining a corps of salesmen.”

“From what I hear tell o' the Colonel,” Dan observed sagely, “the least he ever wants is a hundred and fifty per cent. the best of it.”

“Yes,” old Zeb observed gravely, “an' so fur as I can see, he ain't none too perticular how he gets it.” He helped himself to a toothpick, and followed by the head sawyer, abruptly left the room—after the fashion of sawmill men and woodsmen, who eat as much as they can as quickly as they can and eventually die of old age rather than indigestion. Bryce ate his noonday meal in more leisurely fashion and at its conclusion stepped into the kitchen.

“Where do you live, cook?” he demanded of that functionary; and upon being informed, he retired to the office and called up the Sequoia meat-market.

“Bryce Cardigan speaking,” he informed the butcher. “Do you ever buy any pigs from our mill cook?”

“Not any more,” the butcher answered. “He stung me once with a dozen fine shoats. They looked great, but after I had slaughtered them and had them dressed, they turned out to be swill-fed hogs—swill and alfalfa.”

“Thank you.” Bryce hung up. “I knew that cook was wasteful,” he declared, turning to his father's old manager, one Thomas Sinclair. “He wastes food in order to take the swill home to his hogs—and nobody watches him. Things have certainly gone to the devil,” he continued.

“No fault of mine,” Sinclair protested. “I've never paid any attention to matters outside the office. Your father looked after everything else.”

Bryce looked at Sinclair. The latter was a thin, spare, nervous man in the late fifties, and though generally credited with being John Cardigan's manager, Bryce knew that Sinclair was in reality little more than a glorified bookkeeper—and a very excellent bookkeeper indeed. Bryce realized that in the colossal task that confronted him he could expect no real help from Sinclair.

“Yes,” he replied, “my father looked after everything else—while he could.”

“Oh, you'll soon get the business straightened out and running smoothly again,” Sinclair declared confidently.

“Well, I'm glad I started on the job to-day, rather than next Monday, as I planned to do last night.”

He stepped to the window and looked out. At the mill-dock a big steam schooner and a wind-jammer lay; in the lee of the piles of lumber, sailors and long-shoremen, tallymen and timekeeper lounged, enjoying the brief period of the noon hour still theirs before the driving mates of the lumber-vessels should turn them to on the job once more. To his right and left stretched the drying yard, gangway on gangway formed by the serried rows of lumber-piles, the hoop-horses placidly feeding from their nosebags while the strong-armed fellows who piled the lumber sat about in little groups conversing with the mill-hands.

As Bryce looked, a puff of white steam appeared over the roof of the old sawmill, and the one o'clock whistle blew. Instantly that scene of indolence and ease turned to one of activity. The mill-hands lounging in the gangways scurried for their stations in the mill; men climbed to the tops of the lumber-piles, while other men passed boards and scantlings up to them; the donkey-engines aboard the vessels rattled; the cargo-gaffs of the steam schooner swung outward, and a moment later two great sling-loads of newly sawed lumber rose in the air, swung inward, and descended to the steamer's decks.

All about Bryce were scenes of activity, of human endeavour; and to him in that moment came the thought: “My father brought all this to pass—and now the task of continuing it is mine! All those men who earn a living in Cardigan's mill and on Cardigan's dock—those sailors who sail the ships that carry Cardigan's lumber into the distant marts of men—are dependent upon me; and my father used to tell me not to fail them. Must my father have wrought all this in vain? And must I stand by and see all this go to satisfy the overwhelming ambition of a stranger?” His big hands clenched. “No!” he growled savagely.

“If I stick around this office a minute longer, I'll go crazy,” Bryce snarled then. “Give me your last five annual statements, Mr. Sinclair, please.”

The old servitor brought forth the documents in question. Bryce stuffed them into his pocket and left the office. Three quarters of an hour later he entered the little amphitheatre in the Valley of the Giants and paused with an expression of dismay. One of the giants had fallen and lay stretched across the little clearing. In its descent it had demolished the little white stone over his mother's grave and had driven the fragments of the stone deep into the earth.

The tremendous brown butt quite ruined the appearance of the amphitheatre by reason of the fact that it constituted a barrier some fifteen feet high and of equal thickness athwart the centre of the clearing, with fully three quarters of the length of the tree lost to sight where the fallen monarch had wedged between its more fortunate fellows. The fact that the tree was down, however, was secondary to the fact that neither wind nor lightning had brought it low, but rather the impious hand of man; for the great jagged stump showed all too plainly the marks of cross-cut saw and axe; a pile of chips four feet deep littered the ground.

For fully a minute Bryce stood dumbly gazing upon the sacrilege before his rage and horror found vent in words. “An enemy has done this thing,” he cried aloud to the wood-goblins. “And over her grave!”

Presently, smothering his emotion, he walked the length of the dead giant, and where the top tapered off to a size that would permit of his stepping across it, he retraced his steps on the other side of the tree until he had reached a point some fifty feet from the butt—when the vandal's reason for felling the monster became apparent.

It was a burl tree. At the point where Bryce paused a malignant growth had developed on the trunk of the tree, for all the world like a tremendous wart. This was the burl, so prized for table-tops and panelling because of the fact that the twisted, wavy, helter-skelter grain lends to the wood an extraordinary beauty when polished. Bryee noted that the work of removing this excrescence had been accomplished very neatly. With a cross-cut saw the growth, perhaps ten feet in diameter, had been neatly sliced off much as a housewife cuts slice after slice from a loaf of bread. He guessed that these slices, practically circular in shape, had been rolled out of the woods to some conveyance waiting to receive them.

What Bryce could not understand, however, was the stupid brutality of the raiders in felling the tree merely for that section of burl. By permitting the tree to stand and merely building a staging up to the burl, the latter could have been removed without vital injury to the tree—whereas by destroying the tree the wretches had evidenced all too clearly to Bryce a wanton desire to add insult to injury.

Bryce inspected the scars on the stump carefully. They were weather-stained to such an extent that to his experienced eye it was evident the outrage had been committed more than a year previously; and the winter rains, not to mention the spring growth of grasses and underbrush, had effectually destroyed all trace of the trail taken by the vandals with their booty.

“Poor old Dad!” he murmured. “I'm glad now he has been unable to get up here and see this. It would have broken his heart. I'll have this tree made into fence-posts and the stump dynamited and removed this summer. After he is operated on and gets back his sight, he will come up here—and he must never know. Perhaps he will have forgotten how many trees stood in this circle. And I'll fill in the hole left by the stump and plant some manzanita there to hide the—”

He paused. Peeping out from under a chip among the litter at his feet was the moldy corner of a white envelope. In an instant Bryce had it in his hand. The envelope was dirty and weather-beaten, but to a certain extent the redwood chips under which it had lain hidden had served to protect it, and the writing on the face was still legible. The envelope was empty and addressed to Jules Rondeau, care of the Laguna Grande Lumber Company, Sequoia, California.

Bryce read and reread that address. “Rondeau!” he muttered. “Jules Rondeau! I've heard that name before—ah, yes! Dad spoke of him last night. He's Pennington's woods-boss—”

He paused. An enemy had done this thing—and in all the world John Cardigan had but one enemy—Colonel Seth Pennington. Had Pennington sent his woods-boss to do this dirty work out of sheer spite? Hardly. The section of burl was gone, and this argued that the question of spite had been purely a matter of secondary consideration.

Evidently, Bryce reasoned, someone had desired that burl redwood greatly, and that someone had not been Jules Rondeau, since a woods-boss would not be likely to spend five minutes of his leisure time in consideration of the beauties of a burl table-top or panel. Hence, if Rondeau had superintended the task of felling the tree, it must have been at the behest of a superior; and since a woods-boss acknowledges no superior save the creator of the pay-roll, the recipient of that stolen burl must have been Colonel Pennington.

Suddenly he thrilled. If Jules Rondeau had stolen that burl to present it to Colonel Pennington, his employer, then the finished article must be in Pennington's home! And Bryce had been invited to that home for dinner the following Thursday by the Colonel's niece.

“I'll go, after all,” he told himself. “I'll go—and I'll see what I shall see.”

He was too wrought up now to sit calmly down in the peace and quietude of the giants, and digest the annual reports Sinclair had given him. He hastened back to the mill-office and sought Sinclair.

“At what hour does the logging-train leave the Laguna Grande Lumber Company's yard for our log-landing in Township Nine?” he demanded.

“Eight a.m. and one p.m. daily, Bryce.”

“Have you any maps of the holdings of Pennington and ourselves in that district?”

“Yes.”

“Let me have them, please. I know the topography of that district perfectly, but I am not familiar with the holdings in and around ours.”

Sinclair gave him the maps, and Bryce retired to his father's private office and gave himself up to a study of them.

CHAPTER XI

When Shirley Sumner descended to the breakfast room on the morning following her arrival in Sequoia, the first glance at her uncle's stately countenance informed her that during the night something had occurred to irritate Colonel Seth Pennington and startle him out of his customary bland composure. He greeted her politely but coldly, and without even the perfunctory formality of inquiring how she had passed the night, he came directly to the issue,

“Shirley,” he began, “did I hear you calling young Cardigan on the telephone after dinner last night or did my ears deceive me?”

“Your ears are all right, Uncle Seth. I called Mr. Cardigan up to thank him for the pie he sent over, and incidentally to invite him over here to dinner on Thursday night.”

“I thought I heard you asking somebody to dinner, and as you don't know a soul in Sequoia except young Cardigan, naturally I opined that he was to be the object of our hospitality.”

The Colonel coughed slightly. From the manner in which he approached the task of buttering his hot cakes Shirley knew he had something more to say and was merely formulating a polite set of phrases in which to express himself. She resolved to help him along.

“I dare say it's quite all right to have invited him; isn't it, Uncle Seth?”

“Certainly, certainly, my dear. Quite all right, but er—ah, slightly inconvenient.”

“Oh, I'm so sorry. If I had known—Perhaps some other night—”

“I am expecting other company Thursday night—unfortunately, Brayton, the president of the Bank of Sequoia, is coming up to dine and discuss some business affairs with me afterward; so if you don't mind, my dear, suppose you call young Cardigan up and ask him to defer his visit until some later date.”

“Certainly, Uncle. There is no particular reason why I should have Mr. Cardigan on Thursday if his presence would mean the slightest interference with your plans. What perfectly marvellous roses! How did you succeed in growing them, Uncle Seth?”

He smiled sourly. “I didn't raise them,” he replied. “That half-breed Indian that drives John Cardigan's car brought them around about an hour ago, along with a card. There it is, beside your plate.”

She blushed ever so slightly. “I suppose Bryce Cardigan is vindicating himself,” she murmured as she withdrew the card from the envelope. As she had surmised, it was Bryce Cardigan's. Colonel Pennington was the proprietor of a similar surmise.

“Fast work, Shirley,” he murmured banteringly. “I wonder what he'll send you for luncheon. Some dill pickles, probably.”

She pretended to be very busy with the roses, and not to have heard him. Her uncle's sneer was not lost on her, however; she resented it but chose to ignore it for the present; and when at length she had finished arranging the flowers, she changed the conversation adroitly by questioning her relative anent the opportunities for shopping in Sequoia. The Colonel, who could assimilate a hint quicker than most ordinary mortals, saw that he had annoyed her, and he promptly hastened to make amends by permitting himself to be led readily into this new conversational channel. As soon as he could do so, however, he excused himself on the plea of urgent business at the office, and left the room.

Shirley, left alone at the breakfast-table, picked idly at the preserved figs the owlish butler set before her. Vaguely she wondered at her uncle's apparent hostility to the Cardigans; she was as vaguely troubled in the knowledge that until she should succeed in eradicating this hostility, it must inevitably act as a bar to the further progress of her friendship with Bryce Cardigan. And she told herself she did not want to lose that friendship. She wasn't the least bit in love with him albeit she realized he was rather lovable. The delight which she had experienced in his society lay in the fact that he was absolutely different from any other man she had met. His simplicity, his utter lack of “swank,” his directness, his good nature, and dry sense of humour made him shine luminously in comparison with the worldly, rather artificial young men she had previously met—young men who said and did only those things which time, tradition, and hallowed memory assured them were done by the right sort of people. Shirley had a suspicion that Bryce Cardigan could—and would—swear like a pirate should his temper be aroused and the circumstances appear to warrant letting off steam. Also she liked him because he was imaginative—because he saw and sensed and properly understood without a diagram or a blueprint. And lastly, he was a good, devoted son and was susceptible of development into a congenial and wholly acceptable comrade to a young lady absolutely lacking in other means of amusement.

She finished her breakfast in thoughtful silence; then she went to the telephone and called up Bryce at his home. Mrs. Tully, all aflutter with curiosity, was quite insistent that Shirley should leave her name and telephone number, but failing to carry her point, consented to inform the latter that Mr. Bryce was at the office. She gave Shirley the telephone number.

When the girl called the Cardigan Redwood Lumber Company, Bryce answered. He recognized her voice instantly and called her name before she had opportunity to announce her identity.

“Thank you so much for the beautiful roses, Mr. Cardigan,” she began.

“I'm glad you liked them. Nobody picks flowers out of our garden, you know. I used to, but I'll be too busy hereafter to bother with the garden.”

“Very well. Then I am not to expect any more roses?”

“I'm a stupid clodhopper. Of course you may. By the way, Miss Sumner, does your uncle own a car?”

“I believe he does—a little old rattletrap which he drives himself.”

“Then I'll send George over with the Napier this afternoon. You might care to take a spin out into the surrounding country. By the way, Miss Sumner, you are to consider George and that car as your personal property. I fear you're going to find Sequoia a dull place; so whenever you wish to go for a ride, just call me up, and I'll have George report to you.”

“But think of all the expensive gasoline and tires!”

“Oh, but you mustn't look at things from that angle after you cross the Rocky Mountains on your way west. Moreover, mine is the only real car in the country, and I know you like it. What are you going to do this afternoon?”

“I don't know. I haven't thought that far ahead.”

“For some real sport I would suggest that you motor up to Laguna Grande. That's Spanish for Big Lagoon, you know. Take a rod with you. There are some land-locked salmon in the lagoon—that is, there used to be; and if you hook one you'll get a thrill.”

“But I haven't any rod.”

“I'll send you over a good one.”

“But I have nobody to teach me how to use it,” she hinted daringly.

“I appreciate that compliment,” he flashed back at her, “but unfortunately my holidays are over for a long, long time. I took my father's place in the business this morning.”

“So soon?”

“Yes. Things have been happening while I was away. However, speaking of fishing, George Sea Otter will prove an invaluable instructor. He is a good boy and you may trust him implicitly. On Thursday evening you can tell me what success you had with the salmon.”

“Oh, that reminds me, Mr. Cardigan. You can't come Thursday evening, after all.” And she explained the reason.

“By Jove,” he replied, “I'm mighty glad you tipped me off about that. I couldn't possibly remain at ease in the presence of a banker-particularly one who will not lend me money.”

“Suppose you come Wednesday night instead.”

“We'll call that a bet. Thank you.”

She chuckled at his frank good humour. “Thank YOU, Mr Cardigan, for all your kindness and thoughtfulness; and if you WILL persist in being nice to me, you might send George Sea Otter and the car at one-thirty. I'll be glad to avail myself of both until I can get a car of my own sent up from San Francisco. Till Wednesday night, then. Good-bye.”

As Bryce Cardigan hung up, he heaved a slight sigh, and a parody on a quatrain from “Lalla Rookh” ran through his mind:

I never loved a dear gazelle, To glad me with its limpid eye, But when I learned to love it well, The gol-darned thing was sure to die!

It was difficult to get out of the habit of playing; he found himself the possessor of a very great desire to close down the desk, call on Shirley Sumner, and spend the remainder of the day basking in the sunlight of her presence.

CHAPTER XII

The days passed swiftly, as they have a habit of passing after one has discovered one's allotted task in life and has proceeded to perform it. Following his discovery of the outrage committed on his father's sanctuary, Bryce wasted considerable valuable time and effort in a futile endeavour to gather some further hint of the identity of the vandals; but despairing at last, he dismissed the matter from his mind, resolving only that on Thursday he would go up into Pennington's woods and interview the redoubtable Jules Rondeau. Bryce's natural inclination was to wait upon M. Rondeau immediately, if not sooner, but the recollection of his dinner engagement at the Pennington home warned him to proceed cautiously; for while harbouring no apprehensions as to the outcome of a possible clash with Rondeau, Bryce was not so optimistic as to believe he would escape unscathed from an encounter. Experience had impressed upon him the fact that in a rough-and-tumble battle nobody is quite so thoroughly at home as a lumberjack; once in a clinch with such a man, even a champion gladiator of the prize ring may well feel apprehensive of the outcome.

Wednesday evening at five o'clock Mr. Sinclair, the manager, came into Bryce's office with a handful of folded papers. “I have here,” he announced in his clerky voice with a touch of solemnity to it, “a trial balance. I have not had time to make an exact inventory; but in order to give you some idea of the condition of your father's affairs, I have used approximate figures and prepared a profit-and-loss account.”

Bryce reached for the papers.

“You will note the amount charged off to profit and loss under the head of 'Pensions,'” Sinclair continued. “It amounts approximately to two thousand dollars a month, and this sum represents payments to crippled employees and the dependent families of men killed in the employ of the Company.”

“In addition to these payments, your father owns thirty-two thirty-acre farms which he has cleared from his logged-over lands. These little farms are equipped with bungalows and outbuildings built by your father and represent a considerable investment. As you know, these farms are wonderfully rich, and are planted in apples and berries. Other lands contiguous to them sell readily at two hundred dollars an acre, and so you will see that your father has approximately two hundred thousand dollars tied up in these little farms.”

“But he has given a life-lease at nothing a year for each farm to former employees who have been smashed beyond the possibility of doing the hard work of the mill and woods,” Bryce reminded the manager. “Hence you must not figure those farms among our assets.”

“Why not?” Sinclair replied evenly. “Formal leases have never been executed, and the tenants occupy the property at your father's pleasure.”

“I think that will be about as far as the discussion on that point need proceed,” Bryce replied smilingly. “My father's word has always been considered sufficient in this country; his verbal promise to pay has always been collateral enough for those who know him.”

“But my dear boy,” Sinclair protested, “while that sort of philanthropy is very delightful when one can afford the luxury, it is scarcely practical when one is teetering on the verge of financial ruin. After all, Bryce, self-preservation is the first law of human nature, and the sale of those farms would go a long way toward helping the Cardigan Redwood Lumber Company out of the hole it is in at present.”

“And we're really teetering on the edge of financial ruin, eh?” Bryce queried calmly.

“That is expressing your condition mildly. The semi-annual payment of interest on the bonded indebtedness falls due on July first—and we're going to default on it, sure as death and taxes. Colonel Pennington holds a majority of our bonds, and that means prompt suit for foreclosure.”

“Well, then, Sinclair,” Bryce retorted, carefully pigeon-holing the documents the manager had handed him, “I'll tell you what we'll do. For fifty years my father has played the game in this community like a sport and a gentleman, and I'll be damned if his son will dog it now, at the finish. I gather from your remarks that we could find ready sale for those thirty-two little farms?”

“I am continually receiving offers for them.”

“Then they were not included in the list of properties covered by our bonded indebtedness?”

“No, your father refused to include them. He said he would take a chance on the financial future of himself and his boy, but not on his helpless dependents.”

“Good old John Cardigan! Well, Sinclair, I'll not take a chance on them either; so to-morrow morning you will instruct our attorney to draw up formal life-leases on those farms, and to make certain they are absolutely unassailable. Colonel Pennington may have the lands sold to satisfy a deficiency judgment against us, but while those life-leases from the former owner are in force, my father's proteges cannot be dispossessed. After they are dead, of course, Pennington may take the farms—and be damned to him.”

Sinclair stared in frank amazement at his youthful superior. “You are throwing away two hundred thousand dollars,” he said distinctly.

“I haven't thrown it away—yet. You forget, Sinclair, that we're going to fight first—and fight like fiends; then if we lose—well, the tail goes with the hide, By the way, Sinclair, are any of those farms untenanted at the present time?”

“Yes. Old Bill Tarpey, who lost his three boys in a forest fire over on the San Hedrin, passed out last week. The Tarpey boys died in the Cardigan employ, and so your father gave Bill the use of a farm out near Freshwater.”

“Well, you'd better be his successor, Sinclair. You're no longer a young man, and you've been thirty years in this office. Play safe, Sinclair, and include yourself in one of those life-leases.”

“My dear boy—”

“Nonsense! United we stand, divided we fall, Sinclair; and let there be no moaning of the bar when a Cardigan puts out to sea.”

Smiling, he rose from his desk, patted the bewildered Sinclair on the latter's grizzled head, and then reached for his hat. “I'm dining out to-night, Sinclair, and I wouldn't be a kill-joy at the feast, for a ripe peach. Your confounded figures might make me gloomy; so we'll just reserve discussion of them till to-morrow morning. Be a sport, Sinclair, and for once in your life beat the six o'clock whistle. In other words, I suggest that you go home and rest for once.”

He left Sinclair staring at him rather stupidly.

CHAPTER XIII

Colonel Pennington's imported British butler showed Bryce into the Pennington living room at six-thirty, announcing him with due ceremony. Shirley rose from the piano where she had been idly fingering the keys and greeted him with every appearance of pleasure—following which, she turned to present her visitor to Colonel Pennington, who was standing in his favourite position with his back to the fireplace.

“Uncle Seth, this is Mr. Cardigan, who was so very nice to me the day I landed in Red Bluff.”

The Colonel bowed. “I have to thank you, sir, for your courtesy to my niece.” He had assumed an air of reserve, of distinct aloofness, despite his studied politeness. Bryce stepped forward with extended hand, which the Colonel grasped in a manner vaguely suggestive of that clammy-palmed creation of Charles Dickens—Uriah Heep. Bryce was tempted to squeeze the lax fingers until the Colonel should bellow with pain; but resisting the ungenerous impulse, he replied instead:

“Your niece, Colonel, is one of those fortunate beings the world will always clamour to serve.”

“Quite true, Mr. Cardigan. When she was quite a little girl I came under her spell myself.”

“So did I, Colonel. Miss Sumner has doubtless told you of our first meeting some twelve years ago?”

“Quite so. May I offer you a cocktail, Mr. Cardigan?”

“Thank you, certainly. Dad and I have been pinning one on about this time every night since my return.”

“Shirley belongs to the Band of Hope,” the Colonel explained. “She's ready at any time to break a lance with the Demon Rum. Back in Michigan, where we used to live, she saw too many woodsmen around after the spring drive. So we'll have to drink her share, Mr. Cardigan. Pray be seated.”

Bryce seated himself. “Well, we lumbermen are a low lot and naturally fond of dissipation,” he agreed. “I fear Miss Sumner's Prohibition tendencies will be still further strengthened after she has seen the mad-train.”

“What is that?” Shirley queried.

“The mad-train runs over your uncle's logging railroad up into Township Nine, where his timber and ours is located. It is the only train operated on Sunday, and it leaves Sequoia at five p.m. to carry the Pennington and Cardigan crews back to the woods after their Saturday-night celebration in town. As a usual thing, all hands, with the exception of the brakeman, engineers, and fireman, are singing, weeping or fighting drunk.”

“But why do you provide transportation for them to come to town Saturday nights?” Shirley protested.

“They ride in on the last trainload of logs, and if we didn't let them do it, they'd ask for their time. It's the way of the gentle lumberjack. And of course, once they get in, we have to round them up on Sunday afternoon and get them back on the job. Hence the mad-train.”

“Do they fight, Mr. Cardigan?”

“Frequently. I might say usually. It's quite an inspiring sight to see a couple of lumberjacks going to it on a flat-car travelling thirty miles an hour.”

“But aren't they liable to fall off and get killed?”

“No. You see, they're used to fighting that way. Moreover, the engineer looks back, and if he sees any signs of Donnybrook Fair, he slows down.”

“How horrible!”

“Yes, indeed. The right of way is lined with empty whiskey bottles.”

Colonel Pennington spoke up. “We don't have any fighting on the mad-train any more,” he said blandly.

“Indeed! How do you prevent it?” Bryce asked.

“My woods-boss, Jules Rondeau, makes them keep the peace,” Pennington replied with a small smile. “If there's any fighting to be done, he does it.”

“You mean among his own crew, of course,” Bryce suggested.

“No, he's in charge of the mad-train, and whether a fight starts among your men or ours, he takes a hand. He's had them all behaving mildly for quite a while, because he can whip any man in the country, and everybody realizes it. I don't know what I'd do without Rondeau. He certainly makes those bohunks of mine step lively.”

“Oh-h-h! Do you employ bohunks, Colonel?”

“Certainly. They cost less; they are far less independent than most men and more readily handled. And you don't have to pamper them—particularly in the matter of food. Why, Mr Cardigan, with all due respect to your father, the way he feeds his men is simply ridiculous! Cake and pie and doughnuts at the same meal!” The Colonel snorted virtuously.

“Well, Dad started in to feed his men the same food he fed himself, and I suppose the habits one forms in youth are not readily changed in old age, Colonel.”

“But that makes it hard for other manufacturers,” the Colonel protested. “I feed my men good plain food and plenty of it—quite better food than they were used to before they came to this country; but I cannot seem to satisfy them. I am continuously being reminded, when I do a thing thus and so, that John Cardigan does it otherwise. Your respected parent is the basis for comparison in this country, Cardigan, and I find it devilish inconvenient.” He laughed indulgently and passed his cigarette-case to Bryce.

“Uncle Seth always grows restless when some other man is the leader,” Shirley volunteered with a mischievous glance at Pennington. “He was the Great Pooh-Bah of the lumber-trade back in Michigan, but out here he has to play second fiddle. Don't you, Nunky-dunk?”

“I'm afraid I do, my dear,” the Colonel admitted with his best air of hearty expansiveness. “I'm afraid I do. However, Mr. Cardigan, now that you have—at least, I have been so informed—taken over your father's business, I am hoping we will be enabled to get together on many little details and work them out on a common basis to our mutual advantage. We lumbermen should stand together and not make it hard for each other. For instance, your scale of wages is totally disproportionate to the present high cost of manufacture and the mediocre market; yet just because you pay it, you set a precedent which we are all forced to follow. However,” he concluded, “let's not talk shop. I imagine we have enough of that during the day. Besides, here are the cocktails.”

With the disposal of the cocktails, the conversation drifted into a discussion of Shirley's adventures with a salmon in Big Lagoon. The Colonel discoursed learnedly on the superior sport of muskellunge-fishing, which prompted Bryce to enter into a description of going after swordfish among the islands of the Santa Barbara channel. “Trout-fishing when the fish gets into white water is good sport; salmon-fishing is fine, and the steel-head in Eel River are hard to beat; muskellunge are a delight, and tarpon are not so bad if you're looking for thrills; but for genuine inspiration give me a sixteen-foot swordfish that will leap out of the water from three to six feet, and do it three or four hundred times—all on a line and rod so light one dares not state the exact weight if he values his reputation for veracity. Once I was fishing at San—”

The butler appeared in the doorway and bowed to Shirley, at the time announcing that dinner was served. The girl rose and gave her arm to Bryce; with her other arm linked through her uncle's she turned toward the dining room.

Just inside the entrance Bryce paused. The soft glow of the candles in the old-fashioned silver candlesticks upon the table was reflected in the polished walls of the room-walls formed of panels of the most exquisitely patterned redwood burl Bryce Cardigan had ever seen. Also the panels were unusually large.

Shirley Sumner's alert glance followed Bryce's as it swept around the room. “This dining room is Uncle Seth's particular delight, Mr. Cardigan,” she explained.

“It is very beautiful, Miss Sumner. And your uncle has worked wonders in the matter of having it polished. Those panels are positively the largest and most beautiful specimens of redwood burl ever turned out in this country. The grain is not merely wavy; it is not merely curly; it is actually so contrary that you have here, Colonel Pennington, a room absolutely unique, in that it is formed of bird's-eye burl. Mark the deep shadows in it. And how it does reflect those candles!”

“It is beautiful,” the Colonel declared. “And I must confess to a pardonable pride in it, although the task of keeping these walls from being marred by the furniture knocking against them requires the utmost care.”

Bryce turned and his brown eyes blazed into the Colonel's. “Where DID you succeed in finding such a marvellous tree?” he queried pointedly. “I know of but one tree in Humboldt County that could have produced such beautiful burl.”

For about a second Colonel Pennington met Bryce's glance unwaveringly; then he read something in his guest's eyes, and his glance shifted, while over his benign countenance a flush spread quickly. Bryce noted it, and his quickly roused suspicions were as quickly kindled into certainty. “Where did you find that tree?” he repeated innocently.

“Rondeau, my woods-boss, knew I was on the lookout for something special—something nobody else could get; so he kept his eyes open.”

“Indeed!” There was just a trace of irony in Bryce's tones as he drew Shirley's chair and held it for her. “As you say, Colonel, it is difficult to keep such soft wood from being marred by contact with the furniture. And you are fortunate to have such a woods-boss in your employ. Such loyal fellows are usually too good to be true, and quite frequently they put their blankets on their backs and get out of the country when you least expect it. I dare say it would be a shock to you if Rondeau did that.”

There was no mistaking the veiled threat behind that apparently innocent observation, and the Colonel, being a man of more than ordinary astuteness, realized that at last he must place his cards on the table. His glance, as he rested it on Bryce now, was baleful, ophidian. “Yes,” he said, “I would be rather disappointed. However, I pay Rondeau rather more than it is customary to pay woods-bosses; so I imagine he'll stay—unless, of course, somebody takes a notion to run him out of the county. And when that happens, I want to be on hand to view the spectacle.”

Bryce sprinkled a modicum of salt in his soup. “I'm going up into Township Nine to-morrow afternoon,” he remarked casually. “I think I shall go over to your camp and pay the incomparable Jules a brief visit. Really, I have heard so much about that woods-boss of yours, Colonel, that I ache to take him apart and see what makes him go.”

Again the Colonel assimilated the hint, but preferred to dissemble. “Oh, you can't steal him from me, Cardigan,” he laughed. “I warn you in advance—so spare yourself the effort.”

“I'll try anything once,” Bryce retorted with equal good nature. “However, I don't want to steal him from you. I want to ascertain from him where he procured this burl. There may be more of the same in the neighbourhood where he got this.”

“He wouldn't tell you.”

“He might. I'm a persuasive little cuss when I choose to exert myself.”

“Rondeau is not communicative. He requires lots of persuading.”

“What delicious soup!” Bryce murmured blandly. “Miss Sumner, may I have a cracker?”

The dinner passed pleasantly; the challenge and defiance between guest and host had been so skillfully and gracefully exchanged that Shirley hadn't the slightest suspicion that these two well-groomed men had, under her very nose, as it were, agreed to be enemies and then, for the time being, turned their attention to other and more trifling matters. Coffee was served in the living room, and through the fragrant smoke of Pennington's fifty-cent perfectos a sprightly three-cornered conversation continued for an hour. Then the Colonel, secretly enraged at the calm, mocking, contemplative glances which Bryce ever and anon bestowed upon him, and unable longer to convince himself that he was too apprehensive—that this cool young man knew nothing and would do nothing even if he knew something—rose, pleaded the necessity for looking over some papers, and bade Bryce good-night. Foolishly he proffered Bryce a limp hand; and a demon of deviltry taking possession of the latter, this time he squeezed with a simple, hearty earnestness, the while he said:

“Colonel Pennington, I hope I do not have to assure you that my visit here this evening has not only been delightful but—er—instructive. Good-night, sir, and pleasant dreams.”

With difficulty the Colonel suppressed a groan. However, he was not the sort of man who suffers in silence; for a minute later the butler, leaning over the banisters as his master climbed the stairs to his library, heard the latter curse with an eloquence that was singularly appealing.

CHAPTER XIV

Colonel Seth Pennington looked up sourly as a clerk entered his private office. “Well?” he demanded brusquely. When addressing his employees, the Colonel seldom bothered to assume his pontifical manner.

“Mr. Bryce Cardigan is waiting to see you, sir.”

“Very well. Show him in.”

Bryce entered. “Good morning, Colonel,” he said pleasantly and brazenly thrust out his hand.

“Not for me, my boy,” the Colonel assured him. “I had enough of that last night. We'll just consider the hand-shaking all attended to, if you please. Have a chair; sit down and tell me what I can do to make you happy.”

“I'm delighted to find you in such a generous frame of mind, Colonel. You can make me genuinely happy by renewing, for ten years on the same terms as the original contract, your arrangement to freight the logs of the Cardigan Redwood Lumber Company from the woods to tidewater.”

Colonel Pennington cleared his throat with a propitiatory “Ahem-m-m!” Then he removed his gold spectacles and carefully wiped them with a silk handkerchief, as carefully replaced them upon his aristocratic nose, and then gazed curiously at Bryce.

“Upon my soul!” he breathed.

“I realized, of course, that this is reopening an issue which you have been pleased to regard as having been settled in the last letter my father had from you, and wherein you named terms that were absolutely prohibitive.”

“My dear young friend! My very dear young friend! I must protest at being asked to discuss this matter. Your father and I have been over it in detail; we failed to agree, and that settles it. As a matter of fact, I am not in position to handle your logs with my limited rolling-stock, and that old hauling contract which I took over when I bought the mills, timber-lands, and logging railroad from the late Mr. Henderson and incorporated into the Laguna Grande Lumber Company, has been an embarrassment I have longed to rid myself of. Under those circumstances you could scarcely expect me to saddle myself with it again, at your mere request and solely to oblige you.”

“I did not expect you to agree to my request. I am not quite that optimistic,” Bryce replied evenly.

“Then why did you ask me?”

“I thought that possibly, if I reopened negotiations, you might have a reasonable counter-proposition to suggest.”

“I haven't thought of any.”

“I suppose if I agreed to sell you that quarter-section of timber in the little valley over yonder” (he pointed to the east) “and the natural outlet for your Squaw Creek timber, you'd quickly think of one,” Bryce suggested pointedly.

“No, I am not in the market for that Valley of the Giants, as your idealistic father prefers to call it. Once I would have purchased it for double its value, but at present I am not interested.”

“Nevertheless it would be an advantage for you to possess it.”

“My dear boy, the possession of that big timber is an advantage I expect to enjoy before I acquire many more gray hairs. But I do not expect to pay for it.”

“Do you expect me to offer it to you as a bonus for renewing our hauling contract?”

The Colonel snapped his fingers. “By George,” he declared, “that's a bright idea, and a few months ago I would have been inclined to consider it very seriously. But now—”

“You figure you've got us winging, eh?” Bryce was smiling pleasantly.

“I am making no admissions,” Pennington responded enigmatically “—nor any hauling contracts for my neighbour's logs,” he added.

“You may change your mind.”

“Never.”

“I suppose I'll have to abandon logging in Township Nine and go back to the San Hedrin,” Bryce sighed resignedly.

“If you do, you'll go broke. You can't afford it. You're on the verge of insolvency this minute.”

“I suppose, since you decline to haul our logs, after the expiration of our present contract, and in view of the fact that we are not financially able to build our own logging railroad, that the wisest course my father and I could pursue would be to sell our timber in Township Nine to you. It adjoins your holdings in the same township”

“I had a notion the situation would begin to dawn upon you.” The Colonel was smiling now; his handsome face was gradually assuming the expression pontifical. “I'll give you a dollar a thousand feet stumpage for it.”

“On whose cruise?”

“Oh, my own cruisers will estimate it.”

“I'm afraid I can't accept that offer. We paid a dollar and a half for it, you know, and if we sold it to you at a dollar, the sale would not bring us sufficient money to take up our bonded indebtedness; we'd only have the San Hedrin timber and the Valley of the Giants left, and since we cannot log either of these at present, naturally we'd be out of business.”

“That's the way I figured it, my boy.”

“Well—we're not going out of business.”

“Pardon me for disagreeing with you. I think you are.”

“Not much! We can't afford it.”

The Colonel smiled benignantly. “My dear boy, my very dear young friend, listen to me. Your paternal ancestor is the only human being who has ever succeeded in making a perfect monkey of me. When I wanted to purchase from him a right of way through his absurd Valley of the Giants, in order that I might log my Squaw Creek timber, he refused me. And to add insult to injury, he spouted a lot of rot about his big trees, how much they meant to him, and the utter artistic horror of running a logging-train through the grove—particularly since he planned to bequeath it to Sequoia as a public park. He expects the city to grow up to it during the next twenty years.

“My boy, that was the first bad break your father made. His second break was his refusal to sell me a mill-site. He was the first man in this county, and he had been shrewd enough to hog all the water-front real estate and hold onto it. I remember he called himself a progressive citizen, and when I asked him why he was so assiduously blocking the wheels of progress, he replied that the railroad would build in from the south some day, but that when it did, its builders would have to be assured of terminal facilities on Humboldt Bay. 'By holding intact the spot where rail and water are bound to meet,' he told me, 'I insure the terminal on tidewater which the railroad must have before consenting to build. But if I sell it to Tom, Dick, and Harry, they will be certain to gouge the railroad when the latter tries to buy it from them. They may scare the railroad away.'”

“Naturally!” Bryce replied. “The average human being is a hog, and merciless when he has the upper hand. He figures that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. My father, on the contrary, has always planned for the future. He didn't want that railroad blocked by land-speculators and its building delayed. The country needed rail connection with the outside world, and moreover his San Hedrin timber isn't worth a hoot until that feeder to a transcontinental road shall be built to tap it.”

“But he sold Bill Henderson the mill-site on tidewater that he refused to sell me, and later I had to pay Henderson's heirs a whooping price for it. And I haven't half the land I need.”

“But he needed Henderson then. They had a deal on together. You must remember, Colonel, that while Bill Henderson held that Squaw Creek timber he later sold you, my father would never sell him a mill-site. Can't you see the sporting point of view involved? My father and Bill Henderson were good-natured rivals; for thirty years they had tried to outgame each other on that Squaw Creek timber. Henderson thought he could force my father to buy at a certain price, and my father thought he could force Henderson to sell at a lesser price; they were perfectly frank about it with each other and held no grudges. Of course, after you bought Henderson out, you foolishly took over his job of trying to outgame my father. That's why you bought Henderson out, isn't it? You had a vision of my father's paying you a nice profit on your investment, but he fooled you, and now you're peeved and won't play.”

Bryce hitched his chair farther toward the Colonel. “Why shouldn't my dad be nice to Bill Henderson after the feud ended?” he continued. “They could play the game together then, and they did. Colonel, why can't you be as sporty as Henderson and my father? They fought each other, but they fought fairly and in the open, and they never lost the respect and liking each had for the other.”

“I will not renew your logging contract. That is final, young man. No man can ride me with spurs and get away with it.”

“Oh, I knew that yesterday.”

“Then why have you called on me to-day, taking up my time on a dead issue?”

“I wanted to give you one final chance to repent. I know your plan. You have it in your power to smash the Cardigan Redwood Lumber Company, acquire it at fifty per cent. of its value, and merge its assets with your Laguna Grande Lumber Company. You are an ambitious man. You want to be the greatest redwood manufacturer in California, and in order to achieve your ambitions, you are willing to ruin a competitor: you decline to play the game like a thoroughbred.”

“I play the game of business according to the rules of the game; I do nothing illegal, sir.”

“And nothing generous or chivalrous. Colonel, you know your plea of a shortage of rolling-stock is that the contract for hauling our logs has been very profitable and will be more profitable in the future if you will accept a fifty-cent-per-thousand increase on the freight-rate and renew the contract for ten years.”

“Nothing doing, young man. Remember, you are not in a position to ask favours.”

“Then I suppose we'll have to go down fighting?”

“I do not anticipate much of a fight.”

“You'll get as much as I can give you.”

“I'm not at all apprehensive.”

“And I'll begin by running your woods-boss out of the country.”

“Ah-h!”

“You know why, of course—those burl panels in your dining room. Rondeau felled a tree in our Valley of the Giants to get that burl for you, Colonel Pennington.”

Pennington flushed. “I defy you to prove that,” he almost shouted.

“Very well. I'll make Rondeau confess; perhaps he'll even tell me who sent him after the burl. Upon my word, I think you inspired that dastardly raid. At any rate, I know Rondeau is guilty, and you, as his employer and the beneficiary of his crime, must accept the odium.”

The Colonel's face went white. “I do not admit anything except that you appear to have lost your head, young man. However, for the sake of argument: granting that Rondeau felled that tree, he did it under the apprehension that your Valley of the Giants is a part of my Squaw Creek timber adjoining.”

“I do not believe that. There was malice in the act—brutality even; for my mother's grave identified the land as ours, and Rondeau felled the tree on her tombstone.”

“If that is so, and Rondeau felled that tree—I do not believe he did—I am sincerely sorry, Cardigan, Name your price and I will pay you for the tree. I do not desire any trouble to develop over this affair.”

“You can't pay for that tree,” Bryce burst forth. “No pitiful human being can pay in dollars and cents for the wanton destruction of God's handiwork. You wanted that burl and when my father was blind and could no longer make his Sunday pilgrimage up to that grove, your woods-boss went up and stole that which you knew you could not buy.”

“That will be about all from you, young man. Get out of my office. And by the way, forget that you have met my niece.”

“It's your office—so I'll get out. As for your second command”—he snapped his fingers in Pennington's face—“fooey!”

When Bryce had gone, the Colonel hurriedly called his logging-camp on the telephone and asked for Jules Rondeau, only to be informed, by the timekeeper who answered the telephone, that Rondeau was up in the green timber with the choppers and could not be gotten to the telephone in less than two hours.

“Do not send for him, then,” Pennington commanded. “I'm coming up on the eleven-fifteen train and will talk to him when he comes in for his lunch.”

At eleven o'clock, and just as the Colonel was leaving to board the eleven-fifteen logging-train bound empty for the woods, Shirley Sumner made her appearance in his office.

“Uncle Seth,” she complained, “I'm lonesome. The bookkeeper tells me you're going up to the logging-camp. May I go with you?”

“By all means. Usually I ride in the cab with the engineer and fireman; but if you're coming, I'll have them hook on the caboose. Step lively, my dear, or they'll be holding the train for us and upsetting our schedule.”

CHAPTER XV

By virtue of their logging-contract with Pennington, the Cardigans and their employees were transported free over Pennington's logging railroad; hence, when Bryce Cardigan resolved to wait upon Jules Rondeau in the matter of that murdered Giant, it was characteristic of him to choose the shortest and most direct route to his quarry, and as the long string of empty logging-trucks came crawling off the Laguna Grande Lumber Company's log-dump, he swung over the side, quite ignorant of the fact that Shirley and her precious relative were riding in the little caboose in the rear.

At twelve-ten the train slid in on the log landing of the Laguna Grande Lumber Company's main camp, and Bryce dropped off and approached the engineer of the little donkey-engine used for loading the logs.

“Where's Rondeau?” he asked.

The engineer pointed to a huge, swarthy man approaching across the clearing in which the camp was situated. “That's him,” he replied. And without further ado, Bryce strode to meet his man.

“Are you Jules Rondeau?” he demanded as he came up to the woods-boss. The latter nodded. “I'm Bryce Cardigan,” his interrogator announced, “and I'm here to thrash you for chopping that big redwood tree over in that little valley where my mother is buried.”

“Oh!” Rondeau smiled. “Wiz pleasure, M'sieur.” And without a moment's hesitation he rushed. Bryce backed away from him warily, and they circled.

“When I get through with you, Rondeau,” Bryce said distinctly, “it'll take a good man to lead you to your meals. This country isn't big enough for both of us, and since you came here last, you've got to go first.”

Bryce stepped in, feinted for Rondeau's jaw with his right, and when the woods-boss quickly covered, ripped a sizzling left into the latter's midriff. Rondeau grunted and dropped his guard, with the result that Bryce's great fists played a devil's tattoo on his countenance before he could crouch and cover.

“This is a tough one,” thought Bryce. His blows had not, apparently, had the slightest effect on the woods-boss. Crouched low and with his arms wrapped around his head, Rondeau still came on unfalteringly, and Bryce was forced to give way before him; to save his hands, he avoided the risk of battering Rondeau's hard head and sinewy arms.

Already word that the woods-boss was battling with a stranger had been shouted into the camp dining room, and the entire crew of that camp, abandoning their half-finished meal, came pouring forth to view the contest. Out of the tail of his eye Bryce saw them coming, but he was not apprehensive, for he knew the code of the woodsman: “Let every man roll his own hoop.” It would be a fight to a finish, for no man would interfere; striking, kicking, gouging, biting, or choking would not be looked upon as unsportsmanlike; and as Bryce backed cautiously away from the huge, lithe, active, and powerful man before him, he realized that Jules Rondeau was, as his father had stated, “top dog among the lumberjacks.”

Rondeau, it was apparent, had no stomach for Bryce's style of combat. He wanted a rough-and-tumble fight and kept rushing, hoping to clinch; if he could but get his great hands on Bryce, he would wrestle him down, climb him, and finish the fight in jig-time. But a rough-and-tumble was exactly what Bryce was striving to avoid; hence when Rondeau rushed, Bryce side-stepped and peppered the woodsman's ribs. But the woods-crew, which by now was ringed around them, began to voice disapproval of this style of battle.

“Clinch with him, dancing-master,” a voice roared.

“Tie into him, Rondeau,” another shouted.

“It's a fair match,” cried another, “and the red one picked on the main push. He was looking for a fight, an' he ought to get it; but these fancy fights don't suit me. Flop him, stranger, flop him.”

“Rondeau can't catch him,” a fourth man jeered. “He's a foot-racer, not a fighter.”

Suddenly two powerful hands were placed between Bryce's shoulders, effectually halting his backward progress; then he was propelled violently forward until he collided with Rondeau. With a bellow of triumph, the woods-boss's gorilla-like arms were around Bryce, swinging him until he faced the man who had forced him into that terrible grip. This was no less a personage than Colonel Seth Pennington, and it was obvious he had taken charge of what he considered the obsequies.

“Stand back, you men, and give them room,” he shouted. “Rondeau will take care of him now. Stand back, I say. I'll discharge the man that interferes.”

With a heave and a grunt Rondeau lifted his antagonist, and the pair went crashing to the earth together, Bryce underneath. And then something happened. With a howl of pain, Rondeau rolled over on his back and lay clasping his left wrist in his right hand, while Bryce scrambled to his feet.

“The good old wrist-lock does the trick,” he announced; and stooping, he grasped the woods-boss by the collar with his left hand, lifted him, and struck him a terrible blow in the face with his right. But for the arm that upheld him, Rondeau would have fallen. To have him fall, however, was not part of Bryce's plan. Jerking the fellow toward him, he passed his arm around Rondeau's neck, holding the latter's head as in a vise with the crook of his elbow. And then the battering started. When it was finished, Bryce let his man go, and Rondeau, bloody, sobbing, and semi-conscious, sprawled on the ground.

Bryce bent over him. “Now, damn you,” he roared, “who felled that tree in Cardigan's Redwoods?”

“I did, M'sieur. Enough—I confess!” The words were a whisper.

“Did Colonel Pennington suggest it to you?”

“He want ze burl. By gar, I do not want to fell zat tree—”

“That's all I want to know.” Stooping, Bryce seized Rondeau by the nape of the neck and the slack of his overalls, lifted him shoulder-high and threw him, as one throws a sack of meal, full at Colonel Pennington.

“You threw me at him. Now I throw him at you. You damned, thieving, greedy, hypocritical scoundrel, if it weren't for your years and your gray hair, I'd kill you.”

The helpless hulk of the woods-boss descended upon the Colonel's expansive chest and sent him crashing earthward. Then Bryce, war-mad, turned to face the ring of Laguna Grande employees about him.

“Next!” he roared. “Singly, in pairs, or the whole damned pack!”

“Mr. Cardigan!”

He turned. Colonel Pennington's breath had been knocked out of his body by the impact of his semi-conscious woods-boss, and he lay inert, gasping like a hooked fish. Beside him Shirley Sumner was kneeling, her hands clasping her uncle's, but with her violet eyes blazing fiercely on Bryce Cardigan.

“How dare you?” she cried. “You coward! To hurt my uncle!”

He gazed at her a moment, fiercely, defiantly, his chest rising and falling from his recent exertions, his knotted fists gory with the blood of his enemy. Then the light of battle died, and he hung his head. “I'm sorry,” he murmured, “not for his sake, but yours. I didn't know you were here. I forgot—myself.”

“I'll never speak to you again so long as I live,” she burst out passionately.

He advanced a step and stood gazing down upon her. Her angry glance met his unflinchingly; and presently for him the light went out of the world.

“Very well,” he murmured. “Good-bye.” And with bowed head he turned and made off through the green timber toward his own logging-camp five miles distant.

CHAPTER XVI

With the descent upon his breast of the limp body of his big woods-bully, Colonel Pennington had been struck to earth as effectively as if a fair-sized tree had fallen on him. Indeed, with such force did his proud head collide with terra firma that had it not been for the soft cushion of ferns and tiny redwood twigs, his neck must have been broken by the shock. To complete his withdrawal from active service, the last whiff of breath had been driven from his lungs; and for the space of a minute, during which Jules Rondeau lay heavily across his midriff, the Colonel was quite unable to get it back. Pale, gasping, and jarred from soul to suspenders, he was merely aware that something unexpected and disconcerting had occurred.

While the Colonel fought for his breath, his woodsmen remained in the offing, paralyzed into inactivity by reason of the swiftness and thoroughness of Bryce Cardigan's work; then Shirley motioned to them to remove the wreckage, and they hastened to obey.

Freed from the weight on the geometric centre of his being, Colonel Pennington stretched his legs, rolled his head from side to side, and snorted violently several times like a buck. After the sixth snort he felt so much better that a clear understanding of the exact nature of the catastrophe came to him; he struggled and sat up, looking around a little wildly.

“Where—did—Cardigan—go?” he gasped.

One of his men pointed to the timber into which the enemy had just disappeared.

“Surround him—take him,” Pennington ordered. “I'll give—a month's pay—to each of—the six men that bring—that scoundrel to me. Get him—quickly! Understand?”

Not a man moved. Pennington shook with fury. “Get him,” he croaked. “There are enough of you to do—the job. Close in on him—everybody. I'll give a month's pay to—everybody.”

A man of that indiscriminate mixture of Spaniard and Indian known in California as cholo swept the circle of men with an alert and knowing glance. His name was Flavio Artelan, but his straight black hair, dark russet complexion, beady eyes, and hawk nose gave him such a resemblance to a fowl that he was known among his fellows as the Black Minorca, regardless of the fact that this sobriquet was scarcely fair to a very excellent breed of chicken. “That offer's good enough for me,” he remarked in businesslike tones. “Come on—everybody. A month's pay for five minutes' work. I wouldn't tackle the job with six men, but there are twenty of us here.”

“Hurry,” the Colonel urged them.

Shirley Sumner's flashing glance rested upon the Black Minorca. “Don't you dare!” she cried. “Twenty to one! For shame!”

“For a month's pay,” he replied impudently, and grinned evilly. “And I'm takin' orders from my boss.” He started on a dog-trot for the timber, and a dozen men trailed after him.

Shirley turned helplessly on her uncle, seized his arm and shook it frantically. “Call them back! Call them back!” she pleaded.

Her uncle got uncertainly to his feet. “Not on your life!” he growled, and in his cold gray eyes there danced the lights of a thousand devils. “I told you the fellow was a ruffian. Now, perhaps, you'll believe me. We'll hold him until Rondeau revives, and then—”

Shirley guessed the rest, and she realized that it was useless to plead—that she was only wasting time. “Bryce! Bryce!” she called. “Run! They're after you. Twenty of them! Run, run—for my sake!”

His voice answered her from the timber: “Run? From those cattle? Not from man or devil.” A silence. Then: “So you've changed your mind, have you? You've spoken to me again!” There was triumph, exultation in his voice. “The timber's too thick, Shirley. I couldn't get away anyhow—so I'm coming back.”

She saw him burst through a thicket of alder saplings into the clearing, saw half a dozen of her uncle's men close in around him like wolves around a sick steer; and at the shock of their contact, she moaned and hid her face in her trembling hands.

Half man and half tiger that he was, the Black Minorca, as self-appointed leader, reached Bryce first. The cholo was a squat, powerful little man, with more bounce to him than a rubber ball; leading his men by a dozen yards, he hesitated not an instant but dodged under the blow Bryce lashed out at him and came up inside the latter's guard, feeling for Bryce's throat. Instead he met Bryce's knee in his abdomen, and forthwith he folded up like an accordion.

The next instant Bryce had stooped, caught him by the slack of the trousers and the scruff of the neck and thrown him, as he had thrown Rondeau, into the midst of the men advancing to his aid. Three of them went down backward; and Bryce, charging over them, stretched two more with well-placed blows from left and right, and continued on across the clearing, running at top speed, for he realized that for all the desperation of his fight and the losses already inflicted on his assailants, the odds against him were insurmountable.

Seeing him running away, the Laguna Grande woods-men took heart and hope and pursued him. Straight for the loading donkey at the log-landing Bryce ran. Beside the donkey stood a neat tier of firewood; in the chopping block, where the donkey-fireman had driven it prior to abandoning his post to view the contest between Bryce and Jules Rondeau, was a double-bitted axe. Bryce jerked it loose, swung it, whirled on his pursuers, and rushed them. Like turkeys scattering before the raid of a coyote they fled in divers directions and from a safe distance turned to gaze apprehensively upon this demon they had been ordered to bring in.

Bryce lowered the axe, removed his hat, and mopped his moist brow. From the centre of the clearing men were crawling or staggering to safety—with the exception of the Black Minorca, who lay moaning softly. Colonel Pennington, seeing his fondest hopes expire, lost his head completely.

“Get off my property, you savage,” he shrilled.

“Don't be a nut, Colonel,” Bryce returned soothingly. “I'll get off—when I get good and ready, and not a second sooner. In fact, I was trying to get off as rapidly as I could when you sent your men to bring me back. Prithee why, old thing? Didst crave more conversation with me, or didst want thy camp cleaned out?”

He started toward Pennington, who backed hastily away. Shirley stood her ground, bending upon Bryce, as he approached her, a cold and disapproving glance. “I'll get you yet,” the Colonel declared from the shelter of an old stump behind which he had taken refuge.

“Barking dogs never bite, Colonel. And that reminds me: I've heard enough from you. One more cheep out of you, my friend, and I'll go up to my own logging-camp, return here with a crew of bluenoses and wild Irish and run your wops, bohunks, and cholos out of the county. I don't fancy the class of labour you're importing into this county, anyhow.”

The Colonel, evidently deciding that discretion was the better part of valour, promptly subsided, although Bryce could see that he was mumbling threats to himself, though not in an audible voice.

The demon Cardigan halted beside Shirley and stood gazing down at her. He was smiling at her whimsically. She met his glance for a few seconds; then her lids were lowered and she bit her lip with vexation.

“Shirley,” he said.

“You are presumptuous,” she quavered.

“You set me an example in presumption,” he retorted good humouredly. “Did you not call ME by MY first name a minute ago?” He glanced toward Colonel Pennington and observed the latter with his neck craned across his protecting stump. He was all ears. Bryce pointed sternly across the clearing, and the Colonel promptly abandoned his refuge and retreated hastily in the direction indicated.

The heir to Cardigan's Redwoods bent over the girl. “You spoke to me—after your promise not to, Shirley,” he said gently. “You will always speak to me.”

She commenced to cry softly. “I loathe you,” she sobbed.

“For you I have the utmost respect and admiration,” he replied.

“No, you haven't. If you had, you wouldn't hurt my uncle—the only human being in all this world who is dear to me.”

“Gosh!” he murmured plaintively. “I'm jealous of that man. However, I'm sorry I hurt him. He is no longer young, while I—well, I forgot the chivalry my daddy taught me. I give you my word I came here to fight fairly—”

“He merely tried to stop you from fighting.”

“No, he didn't, Shirley. He interfered and fouled me. Still, despite that, if I had known you were a spectator I think I should have controlled myself and refrained from pulling off my vengeance in your presence. I shall never cease to regret that I subjected you to such a distressing spectacle. I do hope, however, that you will believe me when I tell you I am not a bully, although when there is a fight worth while, I never dodge it. And this time I fought for the honour of the House of Cardigan.”

“If you want me to believe that, you will beg my uncle's pardon.”

“I can't do that. He is my enemy and I shall hate him forever; I shall fight him and his way of doing business until he reforms or I am exhausted.”

She looked up at him, showing a face in which resentment, outrage, and wistfulness were mirrored.

“You realize, of course, what your insistence on that plan means, Mr. Cardigan?”

“Call me Bryce,” he pleaded. “You're going to call me that some day anyhow, so why not start now?”

“You are altogether insufferable, sir. Please go away and never presume to address me again. You are quite impossible.”

He shook his head. “I do not give up that readily, Shirley. I didn't know how dear—what your friendship meant to me, until you sent me away; I didn't think there was any hope until you warned me those dogs were hunting me—and called me Bryce.” He held out his hand. “'God gave us our relations,'” he quoted, “'but thank God, we can choose our friends.' And I'll be a good friend to you, Shirley Sumner, until I have earned the right to be something more. Won't you shake hands with me? Remember, this fight to-day is only the first skirmish in a war to the finish—and I am leading a forlorn hope. If I lose—well, this will be good-bye.”

“I hate you,” she answered drearily. “All our fine friendship—smashed—and you growing stupidly sentimental. I didn't think it of you. Please go away. You are distressing me.”

He smiled at her tenderly, forgivingly, wistfully, but she did not see it. “Then it is really good-by,” he murmured with mock dolorousness.

She nodded her bowed head. “Yes,” she whispered. “After all, I have some pride, you know. You mustn't presume to be the butterfly preaching contentment to the toad in the dust.”

“As you will it, Shirley.” He turned away. “I'll send your axe back with the first trainload of logs from my camp, Colonel,” he called to Pennington.

Once more he strode away into the timber. Shirley watched him pass out of her life, and gloried in what she conceived to be his agony, for she had both temper and spirit, and Bryce Cardigan calmly, blunderingly, rather stupidly (she thought) had presumed flagrantly on brief acquaintance. Her uncle was right. He was not of their kind of people, and it was well she had discovered this before permitting herself to develop a livelier feeling of friendship for him. It was true he possessed certain manly virtues, but his crudities by far outweighed these.

The Colonel's voice broke in upon her bitter reflections. “That fellow Cardigan is a hard nut to crack—I'll say that for him.” He had crossed the clearing to her side and was addressing her with his customary air of expansiveness. “I think, my dear, you had better go back into the caboose, away from the prying eyes of these rough fellows. I'm sorry you came, Shirley. I'll never forgive myself for bringing you. If I had thought—but how could I know that scoundrel was coming here to raise a disturbance? And only last night he was at our house for dinner!”

“That's just what makes it so terrible, Uncle Seth,” she quavered.

“It IS hard to believe that a man of young Cardigan's evident intelligence and advantages could be such a boor, Shirley. However, I, for one, am not surprised. You will recall that I warned you he might be his father's son. The best course to pursue now is to forget that you have ever met the fellow.”

“I wonder what could have occurred to make such a madman of him?” the girl queried wonderingly. “He acted more like a demon than a human being.”

“Just like his old father,” the Colonel purred benevolently. “When he can't get what he wants, he sulks. I'll tell you what got on his confounded nerves. I've been freighting logs for the senior Cardigan over my railroad; the contract for hauling them was a heritage from old Bill Henderson, from whom I bought the mill and timber-lands; and of course as his assignee it was incumbent upon me to fulfill Henderson's contract with Cardigan, even though the freight-rate was ruinous.

“Well, this morning young Cardigan came to my office, reminded me that the contract would expire by limitation next year and asked me to renew it, and at the same freight-rate. I offered to renew the contract but at a higher freight-rate, and explained to him that I could not possibly continue to haul his logs at a loss. Well, right away he flew into a rage and called me a robber; whereupon I informed him that since he thought me a robber, perhaps we had better not attempt to have any business dealings with each other—that I really didn't want his contract at any price, having scarcely sufficient rolling-stock to handle my own logs. That made him calm down, but in a little while he lost his head again and grew snarly and abusive—to such an extent, indeed, that finally I was forced to ask him to leave my office.”

“Nevertheless, Uncle Seth, I cannot understand why he should make such a furious attack upon your employee.”

The Colonel laughed with a fair imitation of sincerity and tolerant amusement. “My dear, that is no mystery to me. There are men who, finding it impossible or inadvisable to make a physical attack upon their enemy, find ample satisfaction in poisoning his favourite dog, burning his house, or beating up one of his faithful employees. Cardigan picked on Rondeau for the reason that a few days ago he tried to hire Rondeau away from me—offered him twenty-five dollars a month more than I was paying him, by George! Of course when Rondeau came to me with Cardigan's proposition, I promptly met Cardigan's bid and retained Rondeau; consequently Cardigan hates us both and took the earliest opportunity to vent his spite on us.”

The Colonel sighed and brushed the dirt and leaves from his tweeds. “Thunder,” he continued philosophically, “it's all in the game, so why worry over it? And why continue to discuss an unpleasant topic, my dear?”

A groan from the Black Minorca challenged her attention. “I think that man is badly hurt, Uncle,” she suggested.

“Serves him right,” he returned coldly. “He tackled that cyclone full twenty feet in advance of the others; if they'd all closed in together, they would have pulled him down. I'll have that cholo and Rondeau sent down with the next trainload of logs to the company hospital. They're a poor lot and deserve manhandling—”

They paused, facing toward the timber, from which came a voice, powerful, sweetly resonant, raised in song. Shirley knew that half-trained baritone, for she had heard it the night before when Bryce Cardigan, faking his own accompaniment at the piano, had sung for her a number of carefully expurgated lumberjack ballads, the lunatic humour of which had delighted her exceedingly. She marvelled now at his choice of minstrelsy, for the melody was hauntingly plaintive—the words Eugene Field's poem of childhood, “Little Boy Blue.”

“The little toy dog is covered with dust,
But sturdy and stanch he stands;
And the little toy soldier is red with rust,
And his musket molds in his hands.
Time was when the little toy dog was new,
And the soldier was passing fair;
And that was the time when our little boy blue,
Kissed them and put them there.”

“Light-hearted devil, isn't he?” the Colonel commented approvingly. “And his voice isn't half bad. Just singing to be defiant, I suppose.”

Shirley did not answer. But a few minutes previously she had seen the singer a raging fury, brandishing an axe and driving men before him. She could not understand. And presently the song grew faint among the timber and died away entirely.

Her uncle took her gently by the arm and steered her toward the caboose. “Well, what do you think of your company now?” he demanded gayly.

“I think,” she answered soberly, “that you have gained an enemy worth while and that it behooves you not to underestimate him.”

CHAPTER XVII

Through the green timber Bryce Cardigan strode, and there was a lilt in his heart now. Already he had forgotten the desperate situation from which he had just escaped; he thought only of Shirley Sumner's face, tear-stained with terror; and because he knew that at least some of those tears had been inspired by the gravest apprehensions as to his physical well-being, because in his ears there still resounded her frantic warning, he realized that however stern her decree of banishment had been, she was nevertheless not indifferent to him. And it was this knowledge that had thrilled him into song and which when his song was done had brought to his firm mouth a mobility that presaged his old whimsical smile—to his brown eyes a beaming light of confidence and pride.

The climax had been reached—and passed; and the result had been far from the disaster he had painted in his mind's eye ever since the knowledge had come to him that he was doomed to battle to a knockout with Colonel Pennington, and that one of the earliest fruits of hostilities would doubtless be the loss of Shirley Sumner's prized friendship. Well, he had lost her friendship, but a still small voice whispered to him that the loss was not irreparable—whereat he swung his axe as a bandmaster swings his baton; he was glad that he had started the war and was now free to fight it out unhampered.

Up hill and down dale he went. Because of the tremendous trees he could not see the sun; yet with the instinct of the woodsman, an instinct as infallible as that of a homing pigeon, he was not puzzled as to direction. Within two hours his long, tireless stride brought him out into a clearing in the valley where his own logging-camp stood. He went directly to the log-landing, where in a listless and half-hearted manner the loading crew were piling logs on Pennington's logging-trucks.

Bryce looked at his watch. It was two o'clock; at two-fifteen Pennington's locomotive would appear, to back in and couple to the long line of trucks. And the train was only half loaded.

“Where's McTavish?” Bryce demanded of the donkey-driver.

The man mouthed his quid, spat copiously, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and pointed. “Up at his shanty,” he made answer, and grinned at Bryce knowingly.

Up through the camp's single short street, flanked on each side with the woodsmen's shanties, Bryce went. Dogs barked at him, for he was a stranger in his own camp; children, playing in the dust, gazed upon him owlishly. At the most pretentious shanty on the street Bryce turned in. He had never seen it before, but he knew it to be the woods-boss's home, for unlike its neighbours the house was painted with the coarse red paint that is used on box-cars, while a fence, made of fancy pointed pickets painted white, inclosed a tiny garden in front of the house. As Bryce came through the gate, a young girl rose from where she knelt in a bed of freshly transplanted pansies.

Bryce lifted his hat. “Is Mr. McTavish at home?” he asked.

She nodded. “He cannot see anybody,” she hastened to add. “He's sick.”

“I think he'll see me. And I wonder if you're Moira McTavish.”

“Yes, I'm Moira.”

“I'm Bryce Cardigan.”

A look of fright crept into the girl's eyes. “Are you—Bryce Cardigan?” she faltered, and looked at him more closely. “Yes, you're Mr. Bryce. You've changed—but then it's been six years since we saw you last, Mr. Bryce.”

He came toward her with outstretched hand. “And you were a little girl when I saw you last. Now—you're a woman.” She grasped his hand with the frank heartiness of a man. “I'm mighty glad to meet you again, Moira. I just guessed who you were, for of course I should never have recognized you. When I saw you last, you wore your hair in a braid down your back.”

“I'm twenty years old,” she informed him.

“Stand right where you are until I have looked at you,” he commanded, and backed off a few feet, the better to contemplate her.

He saw a girl slightly above medium height, tanned, robust, simply gowned in a gingham dress. Her hands were soiled from her recent labours in the pansy-bed, and her shoes were heavy and coarse; yet neither hands nor feet were large or ungraceful. Her head was well formed; her hair, jet black and of unusual lustre and abundance, was parted in the middle and held in an old-fashioned coil at the nape of a neck the beauty of which was revealed by the low cut of her simple frock. Moira was a decided brunette, with that wonderful quality of skin to be seen only among brunettes who have roses in their cheeks; her brow was broad and spiritual; in her eyes, large, black, and listrous, there was a brooding tenderness not untouched with sorrow—some such expression, indeed, as da Vinci put in the eyes of his Mona Lisa. Her nose was patrician, her face oval; her lips, full and red, were slightly parted in the adorable Cupid's bow which is the inevitable heritage of a short upper lip; her teeth were white as Parian marble; and her full breast was rising and falling swiftly, as if she laboured under suppressed excitement.

So delightful a picture did Moira McTavish make that Bryce forgot all his troubles in her sweet presence. “By the gods, Moira,” he declared earnestly, “you're a peach! When I saw you last, you were awkward and leggy, like a colt. I'm sure you weren't a bit good-looking. And now you're the most ravishing young lady in seventeen counties. By jingo, Moira, you're a stunner and no mistake. Are you married?”

She shook her head, blushing pleasurably at his unpolished but sincere compliments.

“What? Not married. Why, what the deuce can be the matter with the eligible young fellows hereabouts?”

“There aren't any eligible young fellows hereabouts, Mr. Bryce. And I've lived in these woods all my life.”

“That's why you haven't been discovered.”

“And I don't intend to marry a lumberjack and continue to live in these woods,” she went on earnestly, as if she found pleasure in this opportunity to announce her rebellion. Despite her defiance, however, there was a note of sad resignation in her voice.

“You don't know a thing about it, Moira. Some bright day your Prince Charming will come by, riding the log-train, and after that it will always be autumn in the woods for you. Everything will just naturally turn to crimson and gold.”

“How do you know, Mr Bryce?”

He laughed. “I read about it in a book.”

“I prefer spring in the woods, I think. It seems—It's so foolish of me, I know; I ought to be contented, but it's hard to be contented when it is always winter in one's heart. That frieze of timber on the skyline limits my world, Mr Bryce. Hills and timber, timber and hills, and the thunder of falling redwoods. And when the trees have been logged off so we can see the world, we move back into green timber again.” She sighed.

“Are you lonely, Moira?”

She nodded.

“Poor Moira!” he murmured absently.

The thought that he so readily understood touched her; a glint of tears was in her sad eyes. He saw them and placed his arm fraternally around her shoulders. “Tut-tut, Moira! Don't cry,” he soothed her. “I understand perfectly, and of course we'll have to do something about it. You're too fine for this.” With a sweep of his hand he indicated the camp. He had led her to the low stoop in front of the shanty. “Sit down on the steps, Moira, and we'll talk it over. I really called to see your father, but I guess I don't want to see him after all—if he's sick.”

She looked at him bravely. “I didn't know you at first, Mr. Bryce. I fibbed. Father isn't sick. He's drunk.”

“I thought so when I saw the loading-crew taking it easy at the log-landing. I'm terribly sorry.”

“I loathe it—and I cannot leave it,” she burst out vehemently. “I'm chained to my degradation. I dream dreams, and they'll never come true. I—I—oh Mr. Bryce, Mr. Bryce, I'm so unhappy.”

“So am I,” he retorted. “We all get our dose of it, you know, and just at present I'm having an extra helping, it seems. You're cursed with too much imagination, Moira. I'm sorry about your father. He's been with us a long time, and my father has borne a lot from him for old sake's sake; he told me the other night that he has discharged Mac fourteen times during the past ten years, but to date he hasn't been able to make it stick. For all his sixty years, Moira, your confounded parent can still manhandle any man on the pay-roll, and as fast as Dad put in a new woods-boss old Mac drove him off the job. He simply declines to be fired, and Dad's worn out and too tired to bother about his old woods-boss any more. He's been waiting until I should get back.”

“I know,” said Moira wearily. “Nobody wants to be Cardigan's woods-boss and have to fight my father to hold his job. I realize what a nuisance he has become.”

Bryce chuckled. “I asked Father why he didn't stand pat and let Mac work for nothing; having discharged him, my father was under no obligation to give him his salary just because he insisted on being woods-boss. Dad might have starved your father out of these woods, but the trouble was that old Mac would always come and promise reform and end up by borrowing a couple of hundred dollars, and then Dad had to hire him again to get it back! Of course the matter simmers down to this: Dad is so fond of your father that he just hasn't got the moral courage to work him over—and now that job is up to me. Moira, I'm not going to beat about the bush with you. They tell me your father is a hopeless inebriate.”

“I'm afraid he is, Mr. Bryce.”

“How long has he been drinking to excess?”

“About ten years, I think. Of course, he would always take a few drinks with the men around pay-day, but after Mother died, he began taking his drinks between pay-days. Then he took to going down to Sequoia on Saturday nights and coming back on the mad-train, the maddest of the lot. I suppose he was lonely, too. He didn't get real bad, however, till about two years ago.”

“Just about the time my father's eyes began to fail him and he ceased coming up into the woods to jack Mac up? So he let the brakes go and started to coast, and now he's reached the bottom! I couldn't get him on the telephone to-day or yesterday. I suppose he was down in Arcata, liquoring up.”

She nodded miserably.

“Well, we have to get logs to the mill, and we can't get them with old John Barleycorn for a woods-boss, Moira. So we're going to change woods-bosses, and the new woods-boss will not be driven off the job, because I'm going to stay up here a couple of weeks and break him in myself. By the way, is Mac ugly in his cups?”

“Thank God, no,” she answered fervently. “Drunk or sober, he has never said an unkind word to me.”

“But how do you manage to get money to clothe yourself? Sinclair tells me Mac needs every cent of his two hundred and fifty dollars a month to enjoy himself.”

“I used to steal from him,” the girl admitted. “Then I grew ashamed of that, and for the past six months I've been earning my own living. Mr. Sinclair was very kind. He gave me a job waiting on table in the camp dining room. You see, I had to have something here. I couldn't leave my father. He had to have somebody to take care of him. Don't you see, Mr. Bryce?”

“Sinclair is a fuzzy old fool,” Bryce declared with emphasis. “The idea of our woods-boss's daughter slinging hash to lumberjacks. Poor Moira!”

He took one of her hands in his, noting the callous spots on the plump palm, the thick finger-joints that hinted so of toil, the nails that had never been manicured save by Moira herself. “Do you remember when I was a boy, Moira, how I used to come up to the logging-camps to hunt and fish? I always lived with the McTavishes then. And in September, when the huckleberries were ripe, we used to go out and pick them together. Poor Moira! Why, we're old pals, and I'll be shot if I'm going to see you suffer.”

She glanced at him shyly, with beaming eyes. “You haven't changed a bit, Mr. Bryce. Not one little bit!”

“Let's talk about you, Moira. You went to school in Sequoia, didn't you?”

“Yes, I was graduated from the high school there. I used to ride the log-trains into town and back again.”

“Good news! Listen, Moira. I'm going to fire your father, as I've said, because he's working for old J.B. now, not the Cardigan Redwood Lumber Company. I really ought to pension him after his long years in the Cardigan service, but I'll be hanged if we can afford pensions any more—particularly to keep a man in booze; so the best our old woods-boss gets from me is this shanty, or another like it when we move to new cuttings, and a perpetual meal-ticket for our camp dining room while the Cardigans remain in business. I'd finance him for a trip to some State institution where they sometimes reclaim such wreckage, if I didn't think he's too old a dog to be taught new tricks.”

“Perhaps,” she suggested sadly, “you had better talk the matter over with him.”

“No, I'd rather not. I'm fond of your father, Moira. He was a man when I saw him last—such a man as these woods will never see again—and I don't want to see him again until he's cold sober. I'll write him a letter. As for you, Moira, you're fired, too. I'll not have you waiting on table in my logging-camp—not by a jugful! You're to come down to Sequoia and go to work in our office. We can use you on the books, helping Sinclair, and relieve him of the task of billing, checking tallies, and looking after the pay-roll. I'll pay you a hundred dollars a month, Moira. Can you get along on that?”

Her hard hand closed over his tightly, but she did not speak.

“All right, Moira. It's a go, then. Hills and timber—timber and hills—and I'm going to set you free. Perhaps in Sequoia you'll find your Prince Charming. There, there, girl, don't cry. We Cardigans had twenty-five years of faithful service from Donald McTavish before he commenced slipping; after all, we owe him something, I think.”

She drew his hand suddenly to her lips and kissed it; her hot tears of joy fell on it, but her heart was too full for mere words.

“Fiddle-de-dee, Moira! Buck up,” he protested, hugely pleased, but embarrassed withal. “The way you take this, one would think you had expected me to go back on an old pal and had been pleasantly surprised when I didn't. Cheer up, Moira! Cherries are ripe, or at any rate they soon will be; and if you'll just cease shedding the scalding and listen to me, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll advance you two months' salary for—well, you'll need a lot of clothes and things in Sequoia that you don't need here. And I'm glad I've managed to settle the McTavish hash without kicking up a row and hurting your feelings. Poor old Mac! I'm sorry I can't bear with him, but we simply have to have the logs, you know.”

He rose, stooped, and pinched her ear; for had he not known her since childhood, and had they not gathered huckleberries together in the long ago? She was sister to him—just another one of his problems—and nothing more. “Report on the job as soon as possible, Moira,” he called to her from the gate. Then the gate banged behind him, and with a smile and a debonair wave of his hand, he was striding down the little camp street where the dogs and the children played in the dust.

After a while Moira walked to the gate and leaning upon it, looked down the street toward the log-landing where Bryce was ragging the laggard crew into some thing like their old-time speed. Presently the locomotive backed in and coupled to the log tram, and when she saw Bryce leap aboard and seat himself on a top log in such a position that he could not fail to see her at the gate, she waved to him. He threw her a careless kiss, and the train pulled out.

Presently, when Moira lifted her Madonna glance to the frieze of timber on the skyline, there was a new glory in her eyes; and lo, it was autumn in the woods, for over that hill Prince Charming had come to her, and life was all crimson and gold!

When the train loaded with Cardigan logs crawled in on the main track and stopped at the log-landing in Pennington's camp, the locomotive uncoupled and backed in on the siding for the purpose of kicking the caboose, in which Shirley and Colonel Pennington had ridden to the woods, out onto the main line again—where, owing to a slight downhill grade, the caboose, controlled by the brakeman, could coast gently forward and be hooked on to the end of the log-train for the return journey to Sequoia.

Throughout the afternoon Shirley, following the battle royal between Bryce and the Pennington retainers, had sat dismally in the caboose. She was prey to many conflicting emotions; but having had what her sex term “a good cry,” she had to a great extent recovered her customary poise—and was busily speculating on the rapidity with which she could leave Sequoia and forget she had ever met Bryce Cardigan—when the log-train rumbled into the landing and the last of the long string of trucks came to a stop directly opposite the caboose.

Shirley happened to be looking through the grimy caboose window at that moment. On the top log of the load the object of her unhappy speculations was seated, apparently quite oblivious of the fact that he was back once more in the haunt of his enemies, although knowledge that the double-bitted axe he had so unceremoniously borrowed of Colonel Pennington was driven deep into the log beside him, with the haft convenient to his hand, probably had much to do with Bryce's air of detached indifference. He was sitting with his elbows on his knees, his chin in his cupped hands, and a pipe thrust aggressively out the corner of his mouth, the while he stared moodily at his feet.

Shirley suspected she knew what he was thinking of; he was less than six feet from her, and a morbid fascination moved her to remain at the window and watch the play of emotions over his strong, stern face. She told herself that should he move, should he show the slightest disposition to raise his head and bring his eyes on a level with hers, she would dodge away from the window in time to escape his scrutiny.

She reckoned without the engine. With a smart bump it struck the caboose and shunted it briskly up the siding; at the sound of the impact Bryce raised his troubled glance just in time to see Shirley's body, yielding to the shock, sway into full view at the window.

With difficulty he suppressed a grin. “I'll bet my immortal soul she was peeking at me,” he soliloquized. “Confound the luck! Another meeting this afternoon would be embarrassing.” Tactfully he resumed his study of his feet, not even looking up when the caboose, after gaining the main track, slid gently down the slight grade and was coupled to the rear logging-truck. Out of the tail of his eye he caught a glimpse of Colonel Pennington passing alongside the log-train and entering the caboose; he heard the engineer shout to the brakeman—who had ridden down from the head of the train to unlock the siding switch and couple the caboose—to hurry up, lock the switch, and get back aboard the engine.

“Can't get this danged key to turn in the lock,” the brakeman shouted presently. “Lock's rusty, and something's gone bust inside.”

Minutes passed. Bryce's assumed abstraction became real, for he had many matters to occupy his busy brain, and it was impossible for him to sit idle without adverting to some of them. Presently he was subconsciously aware that the train was moving gently forward; almost immediately, it seemed to him, the long string of trucks had gathered their customary speed; and then suddenly it dawned upon Bryce that the train had started off without a single jerk—and that it was gathering headway rapidly.

He looked ahead—and his hair grew creepy at the roots. There was no locomotive attached to the train! It was running away down a two per cent. grade, and because of the tremendous weight of the train, it was gathering momentum at a fearful rate.

The reason for the runaway dawned on Bryce instantly. The road, being privately owned, was, like most logging-roads, neglected as to roadbed and rolling-stock; also it was undermanned, and the brake-man, who also acted as switchman, had failed to set the hand-brakes on the leading truck after the engineer had locked the air-brakes. As a result, during the five or six minutes required to “spot in” the caboose, and an extra minute or two lost while the brakeman struggled with the recalcitrant lock on the switch, the air had leaked away through the worn valves and rubber tubing, and the brakes had been released—so that the train, without warning, had quietly and almost noiselessly slid out of the log-landing and started on its mad career. Before the engineer could beat it to the other switch with the locomotive, run out on the main track, let the runaway gradually catch up with him and hold it—no matter how or what happened to him or his engine—the first logging-truck had cleared the switch and blocked pursuit. There was nothing to do now save watch the wild runaway and pray, for of all the mad runaways in a mad world, a loaded logging-train is by far the worst.

For an instant after realizing his predicament, Bryce Cardigan was tempted to jump and take his chance on a few broken bones, before the train could reach a greater speed than twenty miles an hour. His impulse was to run forward and set the handbrake on the leading truck, but a glance showed him that even with the train standing still he could not hope to leap from truck to truck and land on the round, freshly peeled surface of the logs without slipping for he had no calks in his boots. And to slip now meant swift and horrible death.

“Too late!” he muttered. “Even if I could get to the head of the train, I couldn't stop her with the hand-brake; should I succeed in locking the wheels, the brute would be doing fifty miles an hour by that time—the front truck would slide and skid, leave the tracks and pile up with me at the bottom of a mess of wrecked rolling-stock and redwood logs.”

Then he remembered. In the wildly rolling caboose Shirley Sumner rode with her uncle, while less than two miles ahead, the track swung in a sharp curve high up along the hillside above Mad River. Bryce knew the leading truck would never take that curve at high speed, even if the ancient rolling-stock should hold together until the curve was reached, but would shoot off at a tangent into the canyon, carrying trucks, logs, and caboose with it, rolling over and over down the hillside to the river.

“The caboose must be cut out of this runaway,” Bryce soliloquized, “and it must be cut out in a devil of a hurry. Here goes nothing in particular, and may God be good to my dear old man.”

He jerked his axe out of the log, drove it deep into the top log toward the end, and by using the haft to cling to, crawled toward the rear of the load and looked down at the caboose coupling. The top log was a sixteen-foot butt; the two bottom logs were eighteen footers. With a silent prayer of thanks to Providence, Bryce slid down to the landing thus formed. He was still five feet above the coupling, however; but by leaning over the swaying, bumping edge and swinging the axe with one hand, he managed to cut through the rubber hose on the air connection. “The blamed thing might hold and drag the caboose along after I've pulled out the coupling-pin,” he reflected. “And I can't afford to take chances now.”

Nevertheless he took them. Axe in hand, he leaped down to the narrow ledge formed by the bumper in front of the cabooses—driving his face into the front of the caboose; and he only grasped the steel rod leading from the brake-chains to the wheel on the roof in time to avoid falling half stunned between the front of the caboose and the rear of the logging-truck. The caboose had once been a box-car; hence there was no railed front platform to which Bryce might have leaped in safety. Clinging perilously on the bumper, he reached with his foot, got his toe under the lever on the side, jerked it upward, and threw the pin out of the coupling; then with his free hand he swung the axe and drove the great steel jaws of the coupling apart.

The caboose was cut out! But already the deadly curve was in sight; in two minutes the first truck would reach it; and the caboose, though cut loose, had to be stopped, else with the headway it had gathered, it, too, would follow the logging-trucks to glory.

For a moment Bryce clung to the brake-rod, weak and dizzy from the effects of the blow when, leaping down from the loaded truck to the caboose bumper, his face had smashed into the front of the caboose. His chin was bruised, skinned, and bloody; his nose had been broken, and twin rivulets of blood ran from his nostrils. He wiped it away, swung his axe, drove the blade deep into the bumper and left it there with the haft quivering; turning, he climbed swiftly up the narrow iron ladder beside the brake-rod until he reached the roof; then, still standing on the ladder, he reached the brake-wheel and drew it promptly but gradually around until the wheel-blocks began to bite, when he exerted his tremendous strength to the utmost and with his knees braced doggedly against the front of the caboose, held the wheel.

The brake screamed, but the speed of the caboose was not appreciably slackened. “It's had too good a start!” Bryce moaned. “The momentum is more than I can overcome. Oh, Shirley, my love! God help you!”

He cast a sudden despairing look over his shoulder downward at the coupling. He was winning, after all, for a space of six feet now yawned between the end of the logging-truck and the bumper of the caboose. If he could but hold that tremendous strain on the wheel for a quarter of a mile, he might get the demon caboose under control! Again he dug his knees into the front of the car and twisted on the wheel until it seemed that his muscles must crack.

After what seemed an eon of waiting, he ventured another look ahead. The rear logging-truck was a hundred yards in front of him now, and from the wheels of the caboose an odour of something burning drifted up to him. “I've got your wheels locked!” he half sobbed. “I'll hold you yet, you brute. Slide! That's it! Slide, and flatten your infernal wheels. Hah! You're quitting—quitting. I'll have you in control before we reach the curve. Burn, curse you, burn!”

With a shriek of metal scraping metal, the head of the Juggernaut ahead took the curve, clung there an instant, and was catapulted out into space. Logs weighing twenty tons were flung about like kindling; one instant, Bryce could see them in the air; the next they had disappeared down the hillside. A deafening crash, a splash, a cloud of dust—

With a protesting squeal, the caboose came to the point where the logging-train had left the right of way, carrying rails and ties with it. The wheels on the side nearest the bank slid into the dirt first and plowed deep into the soil; the caboose came to an abrupt stop, trembled and rattled, overtopped its centre of gravity, and fell over against the cut-bank, wearily, like a drunken hag.

Bryce, still clinging to the brake, was fully braced for the shock and was not flung off. Calmly he descended the ladder, recovered the axe from the bumper, climbed back to the roof, tiptoed off the roof to the top of the bank and sat calmly down under a manzanita bush to await results, for he was quite confident that none of the occupants of the confounded caboose had been treated to anything worse than a wild ride and a rare fright, and he was curious to see how Shirley Sumner would behave in an emergency.

Colonel Pennington was first to emerge at the rear of the caboose. He leaped lightly down the steps, ran to the front of the car, looked down the track, and swore feelingly. Then he darted back to the rear of the caboose.

“All clear and snug as a bug under a chip, my dear,” he called to Shirley. “Thank God, the caboose became uncoupled—guess that fool brakeman forgot to drop the pin; it was the last car, and when it jumped the track and plowed into the dirt, it just naturally quit and toppled over against the bank. Come out, my dear.”

Shirley came out, dry-eyed, but white and trembling. The Colonel placed his arm around her, and she hid her face on his shoulder and shuddered. “There, there!” he soothed her affectionately. “It's all over, my dear. All's well that ends well.”

“The train,” she cried in a choking voice. “Where is it?”

“In little pieces—down in Mad River.” He laughed happily. “And the logs weren't even mine! As for the trucks, they were a lot of ratty antiques and only fit to haul Cardigan's logs. About a hundred yards of roadbed ruined—that's the extent of my loss, for I'd charged off the trucks to profit and loss two years ago.”

“Bryce Cardigan,” she sobbed. “I saw him—he was riding a top log on the train. He—ah, God help him!”

The Colonel shook her with sudden ferocity. “Young Cardigan,” he cried sharply. “Riding the logs? Are you certain?”

She nodded, and her shoulders shook piteously.

“Then Bryce Cardigan is gone!” Pennington's pronouncement was solemn, deadly with its flat finality. “No man could have rolled down into Mad River with a trainload of logs and survived. The devil himself couldn't.” He heaved a great sigh, and added: “Well, that clears the atmosphere considerably, although for all his faults, I regret, for his father's sake, that this dreadful affair has happened. Well, it can't be helped, Shirley. Don't cry, my dear. I know it's terrible, but—there, there my love. Do brace up. Poor devil! For all his damnable treatment of me, I wouldn't have had this happen for a million dollars.”

Shirley burst into wild weeping. Bryce's heart leaped, for he understood the reason for her grief. She had sent him away in anger, and he had gone to his death; ergo it would be long before Shirley would forgive herself. Bryce had not intended presenting himself before her in his battered and bloody condition, but the sight of her distress now was more than he could bear. He coughed slightly, and the alert Colonel glanced up at him instantly.

“Well, I'll be hanged!” The words fell from Pennington's lips with a heartiness that was almost touching. “I thought you'd gone with the train.”

“Sorry to have disappointed you, old top,” Bryce replied blithely, “but I'm just naturally stubborn. Too bad about the atmosphere you thought cleared a moment ago! It's clogged worse than ever now.”

At the sound of Bryce's voice, Shirley raised her head, whirled and looked up at him. He held his handkerchief over his gory face that the sight might not distress her; he could have whooped with delight at the joy that flashed through her wet lids.

“Bryce Cardigan,” she commanded sternly, “come down here this instant.”

“I'm not a pretty sight, Shirley. Better let me go about my business.”

She stamped her foot. “Come here!”

“Well, since you insist,” he replied, and he slid down the bank.

“How did you get up there—and what do you mean by hiding there spying on me, you—you—oh, YOU!”

“Cuss a little, if it will help any,” he suggested. “I had to get out of your way—out of your sight—and up there was the best place. I was on the roof of the caboose when it toppled over, so all I had to do was step ashore and sit down.”

“Then why didn't you stay there?” she demanded furiously.

“You wouldn't let me,” he answered demurely. “And when I saw you weeping because I was supposed to be with the angels, I couldn't help coughing to let you know I was still hanging around, ornery as a book-agent.”

“How did you ruin your face, Mr. Cardigan?”

“Tried to take a cast of the front end of the caboose in my classic countenance—that's all.”

“But you were riding the top log on the last truck—”

“Certainly, but I wasn't hayseed enough to stay there until we struck this curve. I knew exactly what was going to happen, so I climbed down to the bumper of the caboose, uncoupled it from the truck, climbed up on the roof, and managed to get the old thing under control with the hand-brake; then I skedaddled up into the brush because I knew you were inside, and—-By the way, Colonel Pennington, here is your axe, which I borrowed this afternoon. Much obliged for its use. The last up-train is probably waiting on the siding at Freshwater to pass the late lamented; consequently a walk of about a mile will bring you a means of transportation back to Sequoia. Walk leisurely—you have lots of time. As for myself, I'm in a hurry, and my room is more greatly to be desired than my company, so I'll start now.”

He lifted his hat, turned, and walked briskly down the ruined track.

Shirley made a little gesture of dissent, half opened her lips to call him back, thought better of it, and let him go. When he was out of sight, it dawned on her that he had risked his life to save hers.

“Uncle Seth,” she said soberly, “what would have happened to us if Bryce Cardigan had not come up here to-day to thrash your woods-boss?”

“We'd both be in Kingdom Come now,” he answered truthfully.

“Under the circumstances, then,” Shirley continued, “suppose we all agree to forget that anything unusual happened to-day—”

“I bear the young man no ill will, Shirley, but before you permit yourself to be carried away by the splendour of his action in cutting out the caboose and getting it under control, it might be well to remember that his own precious hide was at stake also. He would have cut the caboose out even if you and I had not been in it.”

“No, he would not,” she insisted, for the thought that he had done it for her sake was very sweet to her and would persist. “Cooped up in the caboose, we did not know the train was running away until it was too late for us to jump, while Bryce Cardigan, riding out on the logs, must have known it almost immediately. He would have had time to jump before the runaway gathered too much headway—and he would have jumped, Uncle Seth, for his father's sake.”

“Well, he certainly didn't stay for mine, Shirley.”

She dried her moist eyes and blushed furiously. “Uncle Seth,” she pleaded, taking him lovingly by the arm, “let's be friends with Bryce Cardigan; let's get together and agree on an equitable contract for freighting his logs over our road.”

“You are now,” he replied severely, “mixing sentiment and business; if you persist, the result will be chaos. Cardigan has in a large measure squared himself for his ruffianly conduct earlier in the day, and I'll forgive him and treat him with courtesy hereafter; but I want you to understand, Shirley, that such treatment by me does not constitute a license for that fellow to crawl up in my lap and be petted. He is practically a pauper now, which makes him a poor business risk, and you'll please me greatly by leaving him severely alone—by making him keep his distance.”

“I'll not do that,” she answered with a quiet finality that caused her uncle to favour her with a quick, searching glance.

He need not have worried, however, for Bryce Cardigan was too well aware of his own financial condition to risk the humiliation of asking Shirley Sumner to share it with him. Moreover, he had embarked upon a war—a war which he meant to fight to a finish.

CHAPTER XVIII

George Sea Otter, summoned by telephone, came out to Freshwater, the station nearest the wreck, and transported his battered young master back to Sequoia. Here Bryce sought the doctor in the Cardigan Redwood Lumber Company's little hospital and had his wrecked nose reorganized and his cuts bandaged. It was characteristic of his father's son that when this detail had been attended to, he should go to the office and work until the six o'clock whistle blew.

Old Cardigan was waiting for him at the gate when he reached home. George Sea Otter had already given the old man a more or less garbled account of the runaway log-train, and Cardigan eagerly awaited his son's arrival in order to ascertain the details of this new disaster which had come upon them. For disaster it was, in truth. The loss of the logs was trifling—perhaps three or four thousand dollars; the destruction of the rolling-stock was the crowning misfortune. Both Cardigans knew that Pennington would eagerly seize upon this point to stint his competitor still further on logging-equipment, that there would be delays—purposeful but apparently unavoidable—before this lost rolling-stock would be replaced. And in the interim the Cardigan mill, unable to get a sufficient supply of logs to fill orders in hand, would be forced to close down. Full well Pennington knew that anything which, tends to bring about a shortage of raw material for any manufacturing plant will result inevitably in the loss of customers.

“Well, son,” said John Cardigan mildly as Bryce unlatched the gate, “another bump, eh?”

“Yes, sir—right on the nose.”

“I meant another bump to your heritage, my son.”

“I'm worrying more about my nose, partner. In fact, I'm not worrying about my heritage at all. I've come to a decision on that point: We're going to fight and fight to the last; we're going down fighting. And by the way, I started the fight this afternoon. I whaled the wadding out of that bucko woods-boss of Pennington's, and as a special compliment to you, John Cardigan, I did an almighty fine job of cleaning. Even went so far as to muss the Colonel up a little.”

“Wow, wow, Bryce! Bully for you! I wanted that man Rondeau taken apart. He has terrorized our woods-men for a long time. He's king of the mad-train, you know.”

Bryce was relieved. His father did not know, then, of the act of vandalism in the Valley of the Giants. This fact strengthened Bryce's resolve not to tell him—also to get the fallen monarch sawed up and the stump blasted out before an operation should restore his father's sight and reveal to him the crowning cruelty of his enemy.

Arm in arm they walked up the garden path together.

Just as they entered the house, the telephone in the hall tinkled, and Bryce answered.

“Mr. Cardigan,” came Shirley Sumner's voice over the wire.

“Bryce,” he corrected her.

She ignored the correction,

“I—I don't know what to say to you,” she faltered.

“There is no necessity for saying anything, Shirley.”

“But you saved our lives, and at least have a right to expect due and grateful acknowledgment of our debt. I rang up to tell you how splendid and heroic your action was—”

“I had my own life to save, Shirley.”

“You did not think of that at the time.”

“Well—I didn't think of your uncle's, either,” he replied without enthusiasm.

“I'm sure we never can hope to catch even with you, Mr. Cardigan.”

“Don't try. Your revered relative will not; so why should you?”

“You are making it somewhat hard for me to—to—rehabilitate our friendship, Mr. Cardigan. We have just passed through a most extraordinary day, and if at evening I can feel as I do now, I think you ought to do your share—and help.”

“Bless your heart,” he murmured. “The very fact that you bothered to ring me up at all makes me your debtor. Shirley, can you stand some plain speaking—between friends, I mean?”

THE VALLEY OF THE GIANTS

By Peter B. Kyne

Author of Cappy Ricks, The Long Chance, Etc.

Illustrated by Dean Cornwell(Illustrations are not available in this edition)

TO MY WIFE

THE VALLEY OF THE GIANTS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

Illustrated by Dean Cornwell
(Illustrations are not available in this edition)