The Valley of the Giants | Page 6

in the redwoods is not sound but rather the absence of it.
And as he listened, he absorbed a subtle comfort from those huge
brown trees, so emblematic of immortality; in the thought he grew
closer to his Maker, and presently found that peace which he sought.
Love such as theirs could never die... The tears came at last.
At sundown he walked home bearing an armful of rhododendrons and
dogwood blossoms, which he arranged in the room where she lay. Then
he sought the nurse who had attended her.
"I'd like to hold my son," he said gently. "May I?"
She brought him the baby and placed it in his great arms that trembled
so; he sat down and gazed long and earnestly at this flesh of his flesh
and blood of his blood. "You'll have her hair and skin and eyes," he
murmured. "My son, my son, I shall love you so, for now I must love
for two. Sorrow I shall keep from you, please God, and happiness and
worldly comfort shall I leave you when I go to her." He nuzzled his
grizzled cheek against the baby's face. "Just you and my trees," he
whispered, "just you and my trees to help me hang on to a plucky
finish."

For love and paternity had come to him late in life, and so had his first
great sorrow; wherefore, since he was not accustomed to these
heritages of all flesh, he would have to adjust himself to the change.
But his son and his trees--ah, yes, they would help. And he would
gather more redwoods now!

CHAPTER III
A young half-breed Digger woman, who had suffered the loss of the
latest of her numerous progeny two days prior to Mrs. Cardigan's death,
was installed in the house on the knoll as nurse to John Cardigan's son
whom he called Bryce, the family name of his mother's people. A Mrs.
Tully, widow of Cardigan's first engineer in the mill, was engaged as
housekeeper and cook; and with his domestic establishment
reorganized along these simple lines, John Cardigan turned with added
eagerness to his business affairs, hoping between them and his boy to
salvage as much as possible from what seemed to him, in the first
pangs of his loneliness and desolation, the wreckage of his life.
While Bryce was in swaddling clothes, he was known only to those
females of Sequoia to whom his half-breed foster mother proudly
exhibited him when taking him abroad for an airing in his perambulator.
With his advent into rompers, however, and the assumption of his
American prerogative of free speech, his father developed the habit of
bringing the child down to the mill office, to which he added a
playroom that connected with his private office. Hence, prior to his
second birthday, Bryce divined that his father was closer to him than
motherly Mrs. Tully or the half-breed girl, albeit the housekeeper sang
to him the lullabys that mothers know while the Digger girl,
improvising blank verse paeans of praise and prophecy, crooned them
to her charge in the unmusical monotone of her tribal tongue. His father,
on the contrary, wasted no time in singing, but would toss him to the
ceiling or set him astride his foot and swing him until he screamed in
ecstasy. Moreover, his father took him on wonderful journeys which no
other member of the household had even suggested. Together they were
wont to ride to and from the woods in the cab of the logging

locomotive, and once they both got on the log carriage in the mill with
Dan Keyes, the head sawyer, and had a jolly ride up to the saw and
back again, up and back again until the log had been completely sawed;
and because he had refrained from crying aloud when the greedy saw
bit into the log with a shrill whine, Dan Keyes had given him a nickel
to put in his tin bank.
Of all their adventures together, however, those which occurred on
their frequent excursions up to the Valley of the Giants impressed
themselves imperishably upon Bryce's memory. How well he
remembered their first trip, when, seated astride his father's shoulders
with his sturdy little legs around Cardigan's neck and his chubby little
hands clasping the old man's ears, they had gone up the abandoned
skid-road and into the semi-darkness of the forest, terminating suddenly
in a shower of sunshine that fell in an open space where a boy could
roll and play and never get dirty. Also there were several dozen gray
squirrels there waiting to climb on his shoulder and search his pockets
for pine-nuts, a supply of which his father always furnished.
Bryce always looked forward with eagerness to those frequent trips
with his father "to