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