"An enemy has done
this thing," he cried aloud to the wood-goblins. "And over her
grave!"
Presently, smothering his emotion, he walked the length of the dead
giant, and where the top tapered off to a size that would permit of
his stepping across it, he retraced his steps on the other side of
the tree until he had reached a point some fifty feet from the butt--
when the vandal's reason for felling the monster became apparent.
It was a burl tree. At the point where Bryce paused a malignant
growth had developed on the trunk of the tree, for all the world like
a tremendous wart. This was the burl, so prized for table-tops and
panelling because of the fact that the twisted, wavy, helter-skelter
grain lends to the wood an extraordinary beauty when polished. Bryee
noted that the work of removing this excrescence had been
accomplished very neatly. With a cross-cut saw the growth, perhaps
ten feet in diameter, had been neatly sliced off much as a housewife
cuts slice after slice from a loaf of bread. He guessed that these
slices, practically circular in shape, had been rolled out of the
woods to some conveyance waiting to receive them.
What Bryce could not understand, however, was the stupid brutality of
the raiders in felling the tree merely for that section of burl.
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