The Valley of the Giants (Once Upon a Time in California). Peter B. Kyne

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