“You may change your mind.”

“Never.”

“I suppose I’ll have to abandon logging in Township Nine and go back to the San Hedrin,” Bryce sighed resignedly.

“If you do, you’ll go broke.  You can’t afford it.  You’re on the verge of insolvency this minute.”

“I suppose, since you decline to haul our logs, after the expiration of our present contract, and in view of the fact that we are not financially able to build our own logging railroad, that the wisest course my father and I could pursue would be to sell our timber in Township Nine to you.  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.  He expects the city to grow up to it during the next twenty years.

“My boy, that was the first bad break your father made.  His second break was his refusal to sell me a mill-site.  He was the first man in this county, and he had been shrewd enough to hog all the water-front real estate and hold onto it.  I remember he called himself a progressive citizen, and when I asked him why he was so assiduously blocking the wheels of progress, he replied that the railroad would build in from the south some day, but that when it did, its builders would have to be assured of terminal facilities on Humboldt Bay.  ’By holding intact the spot where rail and water are bound to meet,’ he told me, ’I insure the terminal on tidewater which the railroad must have before consenting to build.  But if I sell it to Tom, Dick, and Harry, they will be certain to gouge the railroad when the latter tries to buy it from them.  They may scare the railroad away.’”