"I was never a mon to take charity,"
he roared furiously, and left the office. Bryce called after him a
cheerful good-bye, but he did not answer. And he did not remain in
town; neither did he return to his shanty in the woods. For a month
his whereabouts remained a mystery; then one day Moira received a
letter from him informing her that he had a job knee-bolting in a
shingle mill in Mendocino County.
CHAPTER XIX
In the interim Bryce had not been idle. From his woods-crew he picked
an old, experienced hand--one Jabez Curtis--to take the place of the
vanished McTavish. Colonel Pennington, having repaired in three days
the gap in his railroad, wrote a letter to the Cardigan Redwood
Lumber Company, informing Bryce that until more equipment could be
purchased and delivered to take the place of the rolling-stock
destroyed in the wreck, the latter would have to be content with
half-deliveries; whereupon Bryce irritated the Colonel profoundly by
purchasing a lot of second-hand trucks from a bankrupt sugar-pine
mill in Lassen County and delivering them to the Colonel's road via
the deck of a steam schooner.
"That will insure delivery of sufficient logs to get out our orders
on file," Bryce informed his father. "While we are morally certain
our mill will run but one year longer, I intend that it shall run
full capacity for that year.
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