All about Bryce were scenes of activity, of human endeavour; and to him in that moment came the thought:  “My father brought all this to pass—­and now the task of continuing it is mine!  All those men who earn a living in Cardigan’s mill and on Cardigan’s dock—­those sailors who sail the ships that carry Cardigan’s lumber into the distant marts of men—­are dependent upon me; and my father used to tell me not to fail them.  Must my father have wrought all this in vain?  And must I stand by and see all this go to satisfy the overwhelming ambition of a stranger?” His big hands clenched.  “No!” he growled savagely.

“If I stick around this office a minute longer, I’ll go crazy,” Bryce snarled then.  “Give me your last five annual statements, Mr. Sinclair, please.”

The old servitor brought forth the documents in question.  Bryce stuffed them into his pocket and left the office.  Three quarters of an hour later he entered the little amphitheatre in the Valley of the Giants and paused with an expression of dismay.  One of the giants had fallen and lay stretched across the little clearing.  In its descent it had demolished the little white stone over his mother’s grave and had driven the fragments of the stone deep into the earth.

The tremendous brown butt quite ruined the appearance of the amphitheatre by reason of the fact that it constituted a barrier some fifteen feet high and of equal thickness athwart the centre of the clearing, with fully three quarters of the length of the tree lost to sight where the fallen monarch had wedged between its more fortunate fellows.  The fact that the tree was down, however, was secondary to the fact that neither wind nor lightning had brought it low, but rather the impious hand of man; for the great jagged stump showed all too plainly the marks of cross-cut saw and axe; a pile of chips four feet deep littered the ground.

For fully a minute Bryce stood dumbly gazing upon the sacrilege before his rage and horror found vent in words.  “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.