The Ely miner. [volume] (Ely, Minn.) 1895-1986, 1920-07-30

|
Pennington, a millionaire white-pine
operator from Michigan. From
chair-warmer on the porch of the
Hotel Sequoia, the Colonel had heard
| the tale of how stiff-necked old John
Cardigan had called the bluff of equal
ly stiff-necked Bill Henderson; so for
the next few weeks the Colonel, under
pretense of going hunting or fishing
| on Squaw creek, managed to make
fairly accurate cursory cruise Of the
Henderson timber-following which
he purchased it from the delighted
Bill for a dollar and q quarter per
thousand feet stumpage.
No man is infalllble, and in plan
ming his logging operations in the San,
| Hedrin watershed John Cardigan
presently made the discovery that he
had erred in judgment. That season,
from May to November, his woods
crew put thirty million feet of logs
| into the San Hedrin river, while the
mill sawed on reserve supply of logs
taken from the last Of the old chop
pings adjacent to Squaw creek. That
| year, however. the rainfall In the San
Hedrin country was fifty per cent.
less than normal, and by the first Of
| May of the following year Cardigan's
wOods-crew had succeeded In driving
! slightly less than half of the cut of
the preceding year to the boom on
! tidewater at the mouth of the river.
| unless the Lord'll gi' US lot more
water in the river" the woods-boss
McTavish complained. 81 dinna see
how I'm to keep the mill runnin'."
He was taking John Cardigan up the
river bank and explaining the situa-
ton. "The heavy butt-logs haze sunk
to the bottom" he continued. "Wie
normal head o. water, the lads'll move
them, but WI the drappie we have the
400" He threw up his hamlike
hands despairingly.
Three days later clOud-burst filled
the river to the brim; 1t came at night
and swept the river clean Of Cardi-
| gan's clear logs. An army of jug
gernauts, they swept down on the
boiling torrent to tidewater, reaching
the bay shortly after the tide had
commenced to ebb
Now, a chain is only as strong as
Its weakest link, and log-boom is a
chaplet of small logs, linked end to
end by means OF short chains; hence
when the vanguard of logs on the
| lip of that flood reached the log
boom, the impetus of the charge was
| too great to be resisted. Straight
through the weakest link in this boom
the huge saw-logs crashed and out
over Humboldt bar to the broad Pa
| cific. With the ebb tide some of them
came back, while others, caught in
cross-currents, bobbed about the bay
al night and finally beached at widely
] scattered points. Out of the fifteen
million feet of logs less than three
million were salvaged, and this task
in itself was an expensive operation.
John Cardigan received the news
calmly. He turned from the manager
and walked away through his logged
over lands, across the little divide
and down into the quarter-section of
green timber he had told McTavish
not to cut. Once In the Valley of the
Giants, he followed well-worn foot
path to the little amphitheater, and
where the sunlight filtered through
like a halo and fell on a plain little
white marble monument, he paused
I and sat down on the now almost de-
| cayed sugar-pine windfall.
/ "Pye come for little comfort,
sweetheart" he murmured to her who
slept beneath the stone. Then he
leaned back against redwood tree,
removed his hat, and closed his eyes,
holding his great gray head the while
4 little to one side in listening atti-
| tude. Long he sat there, great.
| time-bitten deyotee at the shrine of
his comfort; and presently the har-
ried look left his strong. kind face
and was replaced By little president