The Ely miner. [volume] (Ely, Minn.) 1895-1986, 1920-08-20

| SLiPo tiot >oAAy . AoAhOSA
into the distant marts of men-are de-
| pendent upon me; and my father used
| to tell me not to fail them. Must my
father have wrought all this in vain?
And must l stand by and see all this
to satisfy the overwhelming ambition
of stranger" His big hands clench-
ed. "Now he growled savagely. "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 en-
tered the little amphitheater 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 de-
scent it had demolished the little
white stone over his mothers grave
| and had driven the fragments Of the
stone deep into the earth.
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 Uttered the
ground.
For fully a minute Bryce stood
dumbly gazing upon the sacrilege be
fore his rage and horror found vent in
words. "An enemy has done this
thing" he cried aloud to the wood
COLLINS. "And over her gravel"
1t 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 priced 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. Bryce 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 housewife cuts
slice after Slice from loaf of bread.
He guessed that these slices, practi-
cally circular in shape, had been rolled
out of the woods to some conveyance
waiting to receive them.
What Bryce could not understand,
however, was the stupid brutality of
the raiders in telling the tree merely
for that section of burl. By permit
ting the tree to stand and merely
building staging up to the burl, the
latter could have been removed with
out vital injury to the tree whereas
by destroying the tree the wretches
had evidenced all too clearly to Bryce
a wanton desire to add insult to in
jury.
"Poor old Dadw he murmured.
I'm glad now he has been unable to
get up here and see this. 1t would
have broken his heart. I'll have this
tree made into fence posts and the
stump dynamited and removed this
summer. After he is operated on ard
gets back his sight, he will come up
here-and he must never know. Per-
haps he will have forgotten how many
trees stood in this circle"
He paused. Peeping out from I'M
der chip among the, litter at his feet
was the moldy corner of a white
envelope. In an instant, Bryce had it
in his hand. The envelope was dirty
and weatherbeaten, but to a certain
extent the redwood chips under which
it had lain hidden had served to pro-
tect it, and the writing on the face
was still legible. The envelope was
empty and addressed to Jules Ron
deau, care of the Laguna Grande
Lumber company, Sequoia, California.
Bryce read and reread that address.
"Rondeaur' he muttered. Jules
Rondeau! I've heard that name. be-
fore-ah, yes! Dad spoke of him last
night He's Pennington's Yoods-boss
and"
An enemy had done this thing-and
in all the world John Cardigan had
but one enemy-Colonel Seth Penning-
ton. Had Pennington sent his woods
boss to do this dirty work out Of
sheer spite? Hardly. The section of
burl was gone, and this argued that
the question of spite had been purely
matter of secondary consideration.
Evidently, Bryce reasoned, someone
had desired that burl redwood greatly,
and that someone had not been Jules
Rondeau, since a woods-boss would not
be likely to spend five minutes of his
leisure time in consideration of the
beauties of burl tabletop or panel
Hence, if Rondeau had superintendent
the task of telling the tree, it must
have been at the behest of superior !;
and since a woOds-boss acknowledges
no superior save the creator of the
payroll, the recipient of that stolen
burl must have been Colonel Penning
ton.
Suddenly he thrilled. If Jules Ron
deau had stolen that burl to present
1t to Colonel Pennington, his employer,
then the finished article must be In
Pennington's home! And Bryce had
been invited to that home for dinner
the following Thursday by the Coloners
niece
.Tll go, after ALL" he told himself.
.Tll go-and I'll see what shall see"
CHAPTER VI
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