“So am I,” he retorted.  “We all get our dose of it, you know, and just at present I’m having an extra helping, it seems.  You’re cursed with too much imagination, Moira.  I’m sorry about your father.  He’s been with us a long time, and my father has borne a lot from him for old sake’s sake; he told me the other night that he has discharged Mac fourteen times during the past ten years, but to date he hasn’t been able to make it stick.  For all his sixty years, Moira, your confounded parent can still manhandle any man on the pay-roll, and as fast as Dad put in a new woods-boss old Mac drove him off the job.  He simply declines to be fired, and Dad’s worn out and too tired to bother about his old woods-boss any more.  He’s been waiting until I should get back.”

“I know,” said Moira wearily.  “Nobody wants to be Cardigan’s woods-boss and have to fight my father to hold his job.  I realize what a nuisance he has become.”

Bryce chuckled.  “I asked Father why he didn’t stand pat and let Mac work for nothing; having discharged him, my father was under no obligation to give him his salary just because he insisted on being woods-boss.  Dad might have starved your father out of these woods, but the trouble was that old Mac would always come and promise reform and end up by borrowing a couple of hundred dollars, and then Dad had to hire him again to get it back!  Of course the matter simmers down to this:  Dad is so fond of your father that he just hasn’t got the moral courage to work him over—­and now that job is up to me.  Moira, I’m not going to beat about the bush with you.  They tell me your father is a hopeless inebriate.”

“I’m afraid he is, Mr. Bryce.”

“How long has he been drinking to excess?”

“About ten years, I think.  Of course, he would always take a few drinks with the men around pay-day, but after Mother died, he began taking his drinks between pay-days.  Then he took to going down to Sequoia on Saturday nights and coming back on the mad-train, the maddest of the lot.  I suppose he was lonely, too.  He didn’t get real bad, however, till about two years ago.”

“Just about the time my father’s eyes began to fail him and he ceased coming up into the woods to jack Mac up?  So he let the brakes go and started to coast, and now he’s reached the bottom!  I couldn’t get him on the telephone to-day or yesterday.  I suppose he was down in Arcata, liquoring up.”

She nodded miserably.

“Well, we have to get logs to the mill, and we can’t get them with old John Barleycorn for a woods-boss, Moira.  So we’re going to change woods-bosses, and the new woods-boss will not be driven off the job, because I’m going to stay up here a couple of weeks and break him in myself.  By the way, is Mac ugly in his cups?”

“Thank God, no,” she answered fervently.  “Drunk or sober, he has never said an unkind word to me.”

“But how do you manage to get money to clothe yourself?  Sinclair tells me Mac needs every cent of his two hundred and fifty dollars a month to enjoy himself.”