CHAPTER VI
It was on the day that John Cardigan received the telegram from Bryce
saying that, following four years at Princeton and two years of
travel abroad, he was returning to Sequoia to take over his redwood
heritage--that he discovered that a stranger and not the flesh of his
flesh and the blood of his blood was to reap the reward of his fifty
years of endeavour. Small wonder, then, that he laid his leonine head
upon his desk and wept, silently, as the aged and helpless weep.
For a long time he sat there lethargic with misery. Eventually he
roused himself, reached for the desk telephone, and pressed a button
on the office exchange-station. His manager, one Thomas Sinclair,
answered. "Thomas," he said calmly, "you know, of course, that Bryce
is coming home. Tell George to take the big car and go over to Red
Bluff for him."
"I'll attend to it, Mr Cardigan. Anything else?"
"Yes, but I'll wait until Bryce gets home."
George Sea Otter, son of Bryce Cardigan's old half-breed nurse, was a
person in whose nature struggled the white man's predilection for
advertisement and civic pride and the red man's instinct for
adornment. For three years he had been old man Cardigan's chauffeur
and man-of-all-work about the latter's old-fashioned home, and in the
former capacity he drove John Cardigan's single evidence of
extravagance--a Napier car, which was very justly regarded by George
Sea Otter as the king of automobiles, since it was the only imported
car in the county.
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