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.”