“Buck, you’re a wonder.”

“Not at all.  I’ve merely been through all this before and have profited by my experience.  Now, then, to get back to our muttons.  Will the city council grant you a franchise to enter the city and jump Pennington’s tracks?”

“I’m sure I don’t know, Buck.  You’ll have to ask them—­sound them out.  The city council meets Saturday morning.”

“They’ll meet this evening—­in the private diningroom of the Hotel Sequoia, if I can arrange it,” Buck Ogilvy declared emphatically.  “I’m going to have them all up for dinner and talk the matter over.  I’m not exactly aged, Bryce, but I’ve handled about fifteen city councils and county boards of supervisors, not to mention Mexican and Central American governors and presidents, in my day, and I know the breed from cover to cover.  Following a preliminary conference, I’ll let you know whether you’re going to get that franchise without difficulty or whether somebody’s itchy palm will have to be crossed with silver first.  Honest men never temporize.  You know where they stand, but a grafter temporizes and plays a waiting game, hoping to wear your patience down to the point where you’ll ask him bluntly to name his figure.  By the way, what do you know about your blighted old city council, anyway?”

“Two of the five councilmen are for sale; two are honest men—­and one is an uncertain quantity.  The mayor is a politician.  I’ve known them all since boyhood, and if I dared come out in the open, I think that even the crooks have sentiment enough for what the Cardigans stand for in this county to decline to hold me up.”

“Then why not come out in the open and save trouble and expense?”

“I am not ready to have a lot of notes called on me,” Bryce replied dryly.  “Neither am I desirous of having the Laguna Grande Lumber Company start a riot in the redwood lumber market by cutting prices to a point where I would have to sell my lumber at a loss in order to get hold of a little ready money.  Neither do I desire to have trees felled across the right of way of Pennington’s road after his trainloads of logs have gone through and before mine have started from the woods.  I don’t want my log-landings jammed until I can’t move, and I don’t want Pennington’s engineer to take a curve in such a hurry that he’ll whip my loaded logging-trucks off into a canon and leave me hung up for lack of rolling-stock.  I tell you, the man has me under his thumb, and the only way I can escape is to slip out when he isn’t looking.  He can do too many things to block the delivery of my logs and then dub them acts of God, in order to avoid a judgment against him on suit for non-performance of his hauling contract with this company.”

“Hum-m-m!  Slimy old beggar, isn’t he?  I dare say he wouldn’t hesitate to buy the city council to block you, would he?”

“I know he’ll lie and steal.  I dare say he’d corrupt a public official.”