The Valley of the Giants Part 7

"I should say not."

"How many did you make?"

"Two."

"May I have one all for myself, Mrs. Tully?"

"Indeed you may, my dear."

"Thank you, but I do not want it for myself. Mrs. Tully, will you please wrap one of those wonderful pies in a napkin and the instant George Sea Otter comes in with the car, tell him to take the pie over to Colonel Pennington's house and deliver it to Miss Sumner? There's a girl who doubtless thinks she has tasted pie in her day, and I want to prove to her that she hasn't." He selected a card from his card- case, sat down, and wrote:

Dear Miss Sumner:

Here is a priceless hot wild-blackberry pie, especially manufactured in my honour. It is so good I wanted you to have some. In all your life you have never tasted anything like it.

Sincerely, BRYCE CARDIGAN.

He handed the card to Mrs. Tully and repaired to his old room to remove the stains of travel before joining his father at dinner.

Some twenty minutes later his unusual votive offering was delivered by George Sea Otter to Colonel Pennington's Swedish maid, who promptly brought it in to the Colonel and s.h.i.+rley Sumner, who were even then at dinner in the Colonel's fine burl-redwood-panelled dining room. Miss Sumner's amazement was so profound that for fully a minute she was mute, contenting herself with scrutinizing alternately the pie and the card that accompanied it. Presently she handed the card to her uncle, who affixed his pince-nez and read the epistle with deliberation.

"Isn't this young Cardigan a truly remarkable young man, s.h.i.+rley?" he declared. "Why, I have never heard of anything like his astounding action. If he had sent you over an armful of American Beauty roses from his father's old-fas.h.i.+oned garden, I could understand it, but an infernal blackberry pie! Good heavens!"

"I told you he was different," she replied. To the Colonel's amazement she did not appear at all amused.

Colonel Pennington poked a fork through the delicate brown crust. "I wonder if it is really as good as he says it is, s.h.i.+rley."

"Of course. If it wasn't, he wouldn't have sent it."

"How do you know?"

"By intuition," she replied. And she cut into the pie and helped the Colonel to a quadrant of it.

"That was a genuine hayseed faux-pas," announced the Colonel a few moments later as s.h.i.+rley was pouring coffee from a samovar-shaped percolator in the library. "The idea of anybody who has enjoyed the advantages that fellow has, sending a hot blackberry pie to a girl he has just met!"

"Yes, the idea!" she echoed. "I find it rather charming."

"You mean amusing."

"I said 'charming.' Bryce Cardigan is a man with the heart and soul of a boy, and I think it was mighty sweet of him to share his pie with me. If he had sent roses, I should have suspected him of trying to 'rush' me, but the fact that he sent a blackberry pie proves that he's just a natural, simple, sane, original citizen--just the kind of person a girl can have for a dear friend without incurring the risk of having to marry him."

"I repeat that this is most extraordinary."

"Only because it is an unusual thing for a young man to do, although, after all, why shouldn't he send me a blackberry pie if he thought a blackberry pie would please me more than an armful of roses? Besides, he may send the roses to-morrow."

"Most extraordinary!" the Colonel reiterated.

"What should one expect from such an extraordinary creature? He's an extraordinary fine-looking young man, with an extraordinary scowl and an extraordinary crinkly smile that is friendly and generous and free from masculine guile. Why, I think he's just the kind of man who WOULD send a girl a blackberry pie."

The Colonel noticed a calm little smile fringing her generous mouth.

He wished he could tell, by intuition, what she was thinking about-- and what effect a hot wild-blackberry pie was ultimately to have upon the value of his minority holding in the Laguna Grande Lumber Company.

CHAPTER IX

Not until dinner was finished and father and son had repaired to the library for their coffee and cigars did Bryce Cardigan advert to the subject of his father's business affairs.

"Well, John Cardigan," he declared comfortably, "to-day is Friday.

I'll spend Sat.u.r.day and Sunday in sinful sloth and the renewal of old acquaintance, and on Monday I'll sit in at your desk and give you a long-deferred vacation. How about that programme, pard?"

"Our affairs are in such shape that they could not possibly be hurt or bettered, no matter who takes charge of them now," Cardigan replied bitterly. "We're about through. I waited too long and trusted too far; and now--well, in a year we'll be out of business."

"Suppose you start at the beginning and tell me everything right to the end. George Sea Otter informed me that you've been having trouble with this Johnny-come-lately, Colonel Pennington. Is he the man who has us where the hair is short?"

The old man nodded.

"The Squaw Creek timber deal, eh?" Bryce suggested.

Again the old man nodded. "You wrote me all about that," Bryce continued. "You had him blocked whichever way he turned--so effectually blocked, in fact, that the only pleasure he has derived from his investment since is the knowledge that he owns two thousand acres of timber with the exclusive right to pay taxes on it, walk in it, look at it and admire it--in fact, do everything except log it, mill it, and realize on his investment. It must make him feel like a bally jacka.s.s."

"On the other hand," his father reminded him, "no matter what the Colonel's feeling on that score may be, misery loves company, and not until I had pulled out of the Squaw Creek country and started logging in the San Hedrin watershed, did I realize that I had been considerable of a jacka.s.s myself."

"Yes," Bryce admitted, "there can be no doubt but that you cut off your nose to spite your face."

There was silence between them for several minutes. Bryce's thoughts harked back to that first season of logging in the San Hedrin, when the cloud-burst had caught the river filled with Cardigan logs and whirled them down to the bay, to crash through the log-boom at tidewater and continue out to the open sea. In his mind's eye he could still see the red-ink figures on the profit-and-loss statement Sinclair, his father's manager, had presented at the end of that year.

The old man appeared to divine the trend of his son's thoughts. "Yes, Bryce, that was a disastrous year," he declared. "The mere loss of the logs was a severe blow, but in addition I had to pay out quite a little money to settle with my customers. I was loaded up with low- priced orders that year, although I didn't expect to make any money.

The orders were merely taken to keep the men employed. You understand, Bryce! I had a good crew, the finest in the country; and if I had shut down, my men would have scattered and--well, you know how hard it is to get that kind of a crew together again. Besides, I had never failed my boys before, and I couldn't bear the thought of failing them then. Half the mills in the country were shut down at the time, and there was a lot of distress among the unemployed. I couldn't do it, Bryce."

Bryce nodded. "And when you lost the logs, you couldn't fill those low-priced orders. Then the market commenced to jump and advanced three dollars in three months--"

"Exactly, my son. And my customers began to crowd me to fill those old orders. Praise be, my regular customers knew I wasn't the kind of lumberman who tries to crawl out of filling low-priced orders after the market has gone up. Nevertheless I couldn't expect them to suffer with me; my failure to perform my contracts, while unavoidable, 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 compet.i.tors 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 s.h.i.+pment 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 Francis...o...b..y 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 a.s.sured 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."