It adjoins your holdings in the same township"
"I had a notion the situation would begin to dawn upon you." The
Colonel was smiling now; his handsome face was gradually assuming the
expression pontifical. "I'll give you a dollar a thousand feet
stumpage for it."
"On whose cruise?"
"Oh, my own cruisers will estimate it."
"I'm afraid I can't accept that offer. We paid a dollar and a half
for it, you know, and if we sold it to you at a dollar, the sale
would not bring us sufficient money to take up our bonded
indebtedness; we'd only have the San Hedrin timber and the Valley of
the Giants left, and since we cannot log either of these at present,
naturally we'd be out of business."
"That's the way I figured it, my boy."
"Well--we're not going out of business."
"Pardon me for disagreeing with you. I think you are."
"Not much! We can't afford it."
The Colonel smiled benignantly. "My dear boy, my very dear young
friend, listen to me. Your paternal ancestor is the only human being
who has ever succeeded in making a perfect monkey of me. When I
wanted to purchase from him a right of way through his absurd Valley
of the Giants, in order that I might log my Squaw Creek timber, he
refused me. And to add insult to injury, he spouted a lot of rot
about his big trees, how much they meant to him, and the utter
artistic horror of running a logging-train through the grove--
particularly since he planned to bequeath it to Sequoia as a public
park.
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