Then the doctor came to him and mentioned the matter of
funeral arrangements.
Cardigan looked up at him blankly. "Funeral arrangements?" he
murmured. "Funeral arrangements?" 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. From an alder thicket a pompous cock grouse boomed
intermittently; the valley quail, in pairs, were busy about their
household affairs; from a clump of manzanita a buck watched John
Cardigan curiously. On past the landing where the big bull donkey-
engine stood (for with the march of progress, the logging donkey-
engine had replaced the ox-teams, while the logs were hauled out of
the woods to the landing by means of a mile-long steel cable, and
there loaded on the flat-cars of a logging railroad to be hauled to
the mill and dumped in the log-boom) he went, up the skid-road
recently swamped from the landing to the down timber where the
crosscut men and barkpeelers were at work, on into the green timber
where the woods-boss and his men were chopping.
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