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Updated: May 14, 2025
How well he remembered their first trip, when, seated astride his father's shoulders with his sturdy little legs around Cardigan's neck and his chubby little hands clasping the old man's ears, they had gone up the abandoned skid-road and into the semi-darkness of the forest, terminating suddenly in a shower of sunshine that fell in an open space where a boy could roll and play and never get dirty.
And he patted her hand gently, as if to silence any denial, while far down the skid-road a voice a half-trained baritone floated faintly to them through the forest. Somebody was singing or rather chanting a singularly tuneless refrain, wild and barbaric. "What is that?" Shirley cried. "That is my son, coming to fetch his old daddy home," replied John Cardigan.
"How did you discover this?" Bryce demanded. "Judge Moore, representing the new owner, called round this morning and took me in tow. He said his client knew the property held for me a certain sentimental value which wasn't transferred in the deed, and so the Judge had been instructed to have the skid-road planked and the forest trail grubbed out for me.
"Somebody has gone to work and planked that old skid-road and put up a hand-railing on each side, while the trail through the Giants has been grubbed out and smoothed over. All that old logging-cable I abandoned in those choppings has been strung from tree to tree alongside the path on both sides. I can go up there alone now, once George sets me on the old skid-road; I can't get lost."
"I've been up to the Valley of the Giants." Bryce was amazed. "Why, how could you?" he demanded. "The old skid- road is impassable, and after you leave the end of the skid-road, the trail in to Mother's grave is so overgrown with buckthorn and wild lilac I doubt if a rabbit could get through it comfortably." "Not a bit of it," the old man replied.
Built on tidewater and at the mouth of a large slough in the waters of which he stored the logs his woods-crew cut and peeled for the bull- whackers to haul with ox-teams down a mile-long skid-road, vessels could come to Cardigan's mill dock to load and lie safely in twenty feet of water at low tide.
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.
Some woods-boss, that and his first job with this company was the dirtiest you could hand him smearing grease on the skid-road at a dollar and a half a day and found. He's made too good to lose out now. I don't care what his private morals may be. He CAN get out the logs, hang his rascally hide, and I'm for him." "I'm afraid you haven't anything to say about it, Buck," Bryce replied dryly.
He passed his gnarled hand over his leonine head. "Ah, yes, I suppose so. I shall attend to it." He rose and left the house, walking with bowed head out of Sequoia, up the abandoned and decaying skid-road through the second-growth redwoods to the dark green blur that marked the old timber. It was May, and Nature was renewing herself, for spring comes late in Humboldt County.
Last time I was up, I slipped between the logs on the old skid-road and like to broke my old fool neck. But even that wasn't warning enough for me. I cracked right on into the timber and got lost." "Lost? Poor old partner! And what did you do about it?" "The sensible thing, my boy. I just sat down under a tree and waited for George Sea Otter to trail me and bring me home." "And did he find you?
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