And when it comes, a stranger may own your
San Hedrin timber and reap the reward of my lifetime of labour."
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. But I was stubborn; I'd played the
game so long, you know--I didn't want to let that man Pennington
outgame me. So I tackled the San Hedrin again. We put thirty million
feet of logs into the river that year, and when the freshet came,
McTavish managed to make a fairly successful drive. But he was all
winter on the job, and when spring came and the men went into the
woods again, they had to leave nearly a million feet of heavy butt
logs permanently stranded in the slack water along the banks, while
perhaps another million feet of lighter logs had been lifted out of
the channel by the overflow and left high and dry when the water
receded. There they were, Bryce, scattered up and down the river, far
from the cables and logging-donkeys, the only power we could use to
get those monsters back into the river again, and I was forced to
decide whether they should be abandoned or split during the summer
into railroad ties, posts, pickets, and shakes--commodities for which
there was very little call at the time and in which, even when sold,
there could be no profit after deducting the cost of the twenty-mile
wagon haul to Sequoia, and the water freight from Sequoia to market.
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