Call Miss Sumner's attorney, Judge Moore, on the telephone and ask
him to come to the office at nine o'clock to-morrow, when the papers
can be drawn up and signed. That is all."
The Colonel did not return to his home in Redwood Boulevard that
night. He had no appetite for dinner and sat brooding in his office
until very late; then he went to the Hotel Sequoia and engaged a
room. He did not possess sufficient courage to face his niece again.
At four o'clock the next day the Colonel, his baggage, his
automobile, his chauffeur, and the solemn butler James, boarded the
passenger steamer for San Francisco, and at four-thirty sailed out of
Humboldt Bay over the thundering bar and on into the south. The
Colonel was still a rich man, but his dream of a redwood empire had
faded, and once more he was taking up the search for cheap timber.
Whether he ever found it or not is a matter that does not concern us.
At a moment when young Henry Poundstone's dream of legal opulence was
fading, when Mayor Poundstone's hopes for domestic peace had been
shattered beyond repair, the while his cheap political aspirations
had been equally devastated because of a certain damnable document in
the possession of Bryce Cardigan, many events of importance were
transpiring. On the veranda of his old-fashioned home, John Cardigan
sat tapping the floor with his stick and dreaming dreams which, for
the first time in many years, were rose-tinted.
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