The Valley of the Giants Part 10

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-sh.o.r.emen, 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s--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 doc.u.ments 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 b.u.t.t quite ruined the appearance of the amphitheatre by reason of the fact that it const.i.tuted 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 b.u.t.t-- 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 gra.s.ses 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 pa.s.sed 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 b.u.t.tering 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 a.s.similate 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 "sw.a.n.k," 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 a.s.sured 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 circ.u.mstances 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 amus.e.m.e.nt.