Time passed. John Cardigan no longer swung an axe or dragged a cross-
cut saw through a fallen redwood. He was an employer of labour now,
well known in San Francisco as a manufacturer of split-redwood
products, the purchasers sending their own schooners for the cargo.
And presently John Cardigan mortgaged all of his timber holdings with
a San Francisco bank, made a heap of his winnings, and like a true
adventurer staked his all on a new venture--the first sawmill in
Humboldt County. The timbers for it were hewed out by hand; the
boards and planking were whipsawed.

It was a tiny mill, judged by present-day standards, for in a
fourteen-hour working day John Cardigan and his men could not cut
more than twenty thousand feet of lumber. Nevertheless, when Cardigan
looked at his mill, his great heart would swell with pride. Built on
tidewater and at the mouth of a large slough in the waters of which
he stored the logs his woods-crew cut and peeled for the bull-
whackers to haul with ox-teams down a mile-long skid-road, vessels
could come to Cardigan's mill dock to load and lie safely in twenty
feet of water at low tide. Also this dock was sufficiently far up the
bay to be sheltered from the heavy seas that rolled in from Humboldt
Bar, while the level land that stretched inland to the timber-line
constituted the only logical townsite on the bay.

"Here," said John Cardigan to himself exultingly when a long-drawn
wail told him his circular saw was biting into the first redwood log
to be milled since the world began, "I shall build a city and call it
Sequoia. By to-morrow I shall have cut sufficient timber to make a
start. First I shall build for my employees better homes than the
rude shacks and tent-houses they now occupy; then I shall build
myself a fine residence with six rooms, and the room that faces on