“Where do you live, cook?” he demanded of that functionary; and upon being informed, he retired to the office and called up the Sequoia meat-market.

“Bryce Cardigan speaking,” he informed the butcher.  “Do you ever buy any pigs from our mill cook?”

“Not any more,” the butcher answered.  “He stung me once with a dozen fine shoats.  They looked great, but after I had slaughtered them and had them dressed, they turned out to be swill-fed hogs—­swill and alfalfa.”

“Thank you.”  Bryce hung up.  “I knew that cook was wasteful,” he declared, turning to his father’s old manager, one Thomas Sinclair.  “He wastes food in order to take the swill home to his hogs—­and nobody watches him.  Things have certainly gone to the devil,” he continued.

“No fault of mine,” Sinclair protested.  “I’ve never paid any attention to matters outside the office.  Your father looked after everything else.”

Bryce looked at Sinclair.  The latter was a thin, spare, nervous man in the late fifties, and though generally credited with being John Cardigan’s manager, Bryce knew that Sinclair was in reality little more than a glorified bookkeeper—­and a very excellent bookkeeper indeed.  Bryce realized that in the colossal task that confronted him he could expect no real help from Sinclair.

“Yes,” he replied, “my father looked after everything else—­while he could.”

“Oh, you’ll soon get the business straightened out and running smoothly again,” Sinclair declared confidently.

“Well, I’m glad I started on the job to-day, rather than next Monday, as I planned to do last night.”

He stepped to the window and looked out.  At the mill-dock a big steam schooner and a wind-jammer lay; in the lee of the piles of lumber, sailors and long-shoremen, tallymen and timekeeper lounged, enjoying the brief period of the noon hour still theirs before the driving mates of the lumber-vessels should turn them to on the job once more.  To his right and left stretched the drying yard, gangway on gangway formed by the serried rows of lumber-piles, the hoop-horses placidly feeding from their nosebags while the strong-armed fellows who piled the lumber sat about in little groups conversing with the mill-hands.

As Bryce looked, a puff of white steam appeared over the roof of the old sawmill, and the one o’clock whistle blew.  Instantly that scene of indolence and ease turned to one of activity.  The mill-hands lounging in the gangways scurried for their stations in the mill; men climbed to the tops of the lumber-piles, while other men passed boards and scantlings up to them; the donkey-engines aboard the vessels rattled; the cargo-gaffs of the steam schooner swung outward, and a moment later two great sling-loads of newly sawed lumber rose in the air, swung inward, and descended to the steamer’s decks.