The Valley of the Giants (Once Upon a Time in California). Peter B. Kyne
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Название: The Valley of the Giants (Once Upon a Time in California)
Автор: Peter B. Kyne
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 4064066052928
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“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:”
Colonel Pennington took from his pocket the rough sketch-map of the region 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 СКАЧАТЬ