Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 28, 2025
True to his word, when John Cardigan finished his logging in his old, original holdings adjacent to Sequoia and Bill Henderson's Squaw Creek timber, he quietly moved south with his Squaw Creek woods-gang and joined the crew already getting out logs in the San Hedrin watershed.
Mother and I will wait together now in this spot she fancied. I'm tired I want rest. Look after old Mac and Moira and Bill Dandy, who lost his leg at Camp Seven last fall and Tom Ellington's children and all the others, son. You know, Bryce. They're your responsibilities. Sorry I can't wait to see the San Hedrin opened up, but I've lived my life and loved my love.
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.
"No, you don't, Bryce. I've never told you, but I'll tell you now the real reason. Humboldt County has no rail connection with the outside world, so we are forced to ship our lumber by water. But some day a railroad will be built in from the south from San Francisco; and when it comes, the only route for it to travel is through our timber in the San Hedrin Valley.
"I'm mortgaged to the last penny," he confessed, "and Pennington has been buying Cardigan Redwood Lumber Company first-mortgage bonds until he is in control of the issue. He'll buy in the San Hedrin timber at the foreclosure sale, and in order to get it back and save something for you out of the wreckage, I'll have to make an unprofitable trade with him.
"The infamous old outlaw!" "Mac knows the San Hedrin as I know my own pocket. He'll be a tower of strength when we open up that tract after the railroad builds in. By the way, has my dad been down this morning?" "Yes. Moira read the mail to him and then took him up to the Valley of the Giants. He said he wanted to do a little quiet figuring on that new steam schooner you're thinking of building.
Old Bill Tarpey, who lost his three boys in a forest fire over on the San Hedrin, passed out last week. The Tarpey boys died in the Cardigan employ, and so your father gave Bill the use of a farm out near Freshwater." "Well, you'd better be his successor, Sinclair. You're no longer a young man, and you've been thirty years in this office.
It must make him feel like a bally jackass." "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 jackass myself."
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.
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.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking