Cardigan's
death, was installed in the house on the knoll as nurse to John
Cardigan's son whom he called Bryce, the family name of his mother's
people. A Mrs. Tully, widow of Cardigan's first engineer in the mill,
was engaged as housekeeper and cook; and with his domestic
establishment reorganized along these simple lines, John Cardigan
turned with added eagerness to his business affairs, hoping between
them and his boy to salvage as much as possible from what seemed to
him, in the first pangs of his loneliness and desolation, the
wreckage of his life.
While Bryce was in swaddling clothes, he was known only to those
females of Sequoia to whom his half-breed foster mother proudly
exhibited him when taking him abroad for an airing in his
perambulator. With his advent into rompers, however, and the
assumption of his American prerogative of free speech, his father
developed the habit of bringing the child down to the mill office, to
which he added a playroom that connected with his private office.
Hence, prior to his second birthday, Bryce divined that his father
was closer to him than motherly Mrs. Tully or the half-breed girl,
albeit the housekeeper sang to him the lullabys that mothers know
while the Digger girl, improvising blank verse paeans of praise and
prophecy, crooned them to her charge in the unmusical monotone of her
tribal tongue.
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