his pack to his broad and powerful back and strode resolutely into
the timber at the mouth of a little river.

The man was John Cardigan; in that lonely, hostile land he was the
first pioneer. This is the tale of Cardigan and Cardigan's son, for
in his chosen land the pioneer leader in the gigantic task of hewing
a path for civilization was to know the bliss of woman's love and of
parenthood, and the sorrow that comes of the loss of a perfect mate;
he was to know the tremendous joy of accomplishment and worldly
success after infinite labour; and in the sunset of life he was to
know the dull despair of failure and ruin. Because of these things
there is a tale to be told, the tale of Cardigan's son, who, when his
sire fell in the fray, took up the fight to save his heritage--a tale
of life with its love and hate, its battle, victory, defeat, labour,
joy, and sorrow, a tale of that unconquerable spirit of youth which
spurred Bryce Cardigan to lead a forlorn hope for the sake not of
wealth but of an ideal. Hark, then, to this tale of Cardigan's
redwoods:

Along the coast of California, through the secret valleys and over
the tumbled foothills of the Coast Range, extends a belt of timber of
an average width of thirty miles. In approaching it from the Oregon
line the first tree looms suddenly against the horizon--an outpost,
as it were, of the host of giants whose column stretches south nearly
four hundred miles to where the last of the rear-guard maintains
eternal sentry go on the crest of the mountains overlooking Monterey
Bay. Far in the interior of the State, beyond the fertile San Joaquin
Valley, the allies of this vast army hold a small sector on the west
slope of the Sierras.