The Valley of the Giants Part 3

"Well, for one thing, Henderson, I noticed Cardigan has carefully housed his rolling-stock--and he hasn't sc.r.a.pped 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 sc.r.a.ppin' 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 sc.r.a.ppin' 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 sh.o.r.e. 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 b.u.t.t-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 G.o.d 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 att.i.tude. 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 b.u.t.ton 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 b.u.t.ton 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 a.s.sumption, 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 p.u.s.s.y-footing around the comer 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 a.s.sumption 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-pa.s.senger was heading toward the automobile also. She heard him say:

"h.e.l.lo, 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.