Part 10

The other man was the “mucker” of the yard watchman’s report, the man Plegg had been following. On the Grillage pay-roll he appeared as Simeon Backus, serving on the day shift as a muck shoveler in the eastern heading of the great tunnel. He sat in one of the upholstered chairs with a deep seat, and his deformities--the lopped shoulder and arms much too long for his body--were accentuated. His face, with its lines half obliterated by a ragged beard, lacked none of the villainous characteristics of the ingrained criminal; beady eyes that would look at nothing steadily, a retreating chin, a thin-lipped, acrid mouth.

When Silas Plegg reached his spying place on the gallery, Dargin was speaking.

“Cut it out, Simmy; cut it all out and get down to brass tacks!” he was growling. “Your hard job in the tunnel isn’t any skin off of me; and you get paid twice for it, at that.”

“What little rake-off you give me for steerin’ the money-burners down here don’t cut no ice with me!” snapped the smaller man. “I’ve got bigger game to-night.”

“Shoot,” said Dargin.

“I’ve got a line on the new boss. Did you know he was down here lookin’ you over the other night?”

“I saw him,” was the brief reply.

“Well, he’s goin’ to run you out--clean up the shop--wipe off the slate.”

“Who says he is?”

“He says so, by cripes! I’ve got it straight. This here hell-hole’s got to be took off the map. It’s bu’stin’ up his gangs and robbin’ his men, and he ain’t goin’ to stand for no such. And say, Jack--_he’s got the old geezer behind him_!”

“Grillage? Not in a thousand years, Simmy.”

“I’m tellin’ you I got it straight. There’s a skirt in it this time.”

“Cough it up.”

“It’s this-away; that young cock-o’-the-walk’s goin’ to marry Grillage’s daughter--see?”

“How do you know he is?”

“There ain’t much that a bunch as big as ours don’t know about its bosses--or that it can’t find out if it tries. Vallory hadn’t hardly lit down on the job before ever’body knew that he got his boost from the inside--that it was all in the family. Why, hell; he’s nothin’ but an overgrowed kid!”

“You talk too many, Simmy,” was the gruff interruption. “Get down to the face-cards and aces.”

“All right, I will. Did you know Grillage is here?”

“I knew he was coming.”

“Well, he’s come--and he’s fetched the girl with him. You know what she tried to get him to do last fall, after Lushing was fool enough to bring that look-see crowd down here from the hotel?”

“I know,” said Dargin. “She tried to get the old man to put the kibosh on us. He wouldn’t do it then; and he isn’t going to back Vallory now.”

“Don’t you believe it! The girl will make him back Vallory, if she feels like it. I’m tellin’ you again--I got it straight. The minute Vallory hears she’s here, he makes a straight shoot for the hotel, and sits most o’ the evenin’ on the porch with her. I kep’ cases on ’em.”

“That doesn’t prove anything.”

“It proves what I’m sayin’. You’re goin’ to get the hook, Dargin, and I’m the one man that can keep it out o’ your liver.”

Silas Plegg, from his cramped spying place on the gallery, saw a bleak smile flicker for a moment in the cold eyes of the master gambler.

“You get your pay, don’t you, Simmy?”

“For leggin’ for your skin game down-stairs, yes. But this time I’ve got somethin’ to sell--somethin’ that Grillage’ll pay for, if you don’t want it.”

“Suppose you tell me what it is, Simmy.”

“I’ll tell you this much: s’pose you could go to Grillage and say, ‘Look-ee here, old sport; I’m wise to somethin’ that’ll knock all the money out o’ this railroad job o’ yours, and then some; you keep this here Vallory hook out o’ me, and I’ll keep mine out o’ you.’ How does that hit you?”

Again Plegg saw the vanishing smile.

“Where did you get all this flim-flam dope, Simmy?”

“Some of it I’ve had a good little spell. The rest of it I got to-night listenin’ under the windows of Vallory’s bunk car.”

“Who was doing the talking?”

“Three of ’em, first and last: young Altman and Vallory, and then Vallory and that gun-totin’ under-boss o’ his’n, Plegg.”

“Supposing I say that I’m not in the market; then what?”

The lop-shouldered man struggled up in his chair and spat his reply out viciously. “Then, by cripes, I’ll go to Grillage himself! _He’ll_ buy!”

“I see,” said Dargin softly. “You’ll sell this thing to me or to Grillage, whichever one of us bids the highest. Is that it?”

“You’re shoutin’ now. I’m tired o’ hidin’ out and dodgin’ Hank Bullock in these dam’ mountains. Some o’ these days he’s goin’ to hike up this-away and get the drop on me; and then”--the misshapen man made a gesture pantomiming the clicking of handcuffs upon wrists. “I want to skip down yonder to Honduras, ’r some o’ them places where they never heard o’ me ’r the croakin’ business in Gunnison. And you lissen to me, Jack; I’m goin’ to have a wad big enough to stake me when I get there, and don’t you forget it!”

The swarthy giant on the opposite side of the table was still tilting his chair and still had his hands deeply buried in his pockets.

“Let’s see if I’m getting it straight, Simmy,” he said gently. “You’ve thought it all out, and you’re going to sell this thing you’ve got hold of--and which you haven’t named for me yet--either to me or to the big boss. If I get it, I can make the hook miss; and if Grillage beats me to it--what happens then?”

“Why, then Grillage plays safe on his profit by gettin’ me out o’ the country; see? And then, if Vallory wants to stick his fork into you----”

The man in the deep chair stopped short. The other made no move. His dark face with its leaden eyes and the heavy drooping mustaches was as impassive as the face of the Buddha. The lop-shouldered “mucker” seemed to be trying to read the Buddha face, and when he failed he gave a gulping swallow.

“I--I reckon I’m talkin’ through my hat, Jack,” he wavered. “Grillage ain’t in the deal; I’m goin’ to sell my stock to you.”

Plegg, looking on at a distance of not more than half the width of the room would have sworn that no man of Dargin’s build could have moved so swiftly. At one instant he was swaying gently in the tilted chair. At the next he was leaning across the table and thrusting the muzzle of a pistol against the shrinking body of the talebearer. When he spoke his voice was like the whistling of the north wind. “No, Simmy, you’re not going to sell it to me; you’re going to _give_ it to me, _now_!”

For possibly five minutes, as if the pressing pistol muzzle were a magnet to electrify and hold him rigid, Simeon Backus, ex-cattle rustler, ex-yeggman, and now a manslayer hiding from justice, sat erect and motionless, pouring forth a stammering story. There was little in the story that was new to the listening ear at the window. Chiefly it was made up of the facts concerning the weak roof in the tunnel--facts still unknown to the railroad people; wherein lay their value to one who could trade upon them. Plegg heard Altman’s talk with Vallory repeated; then, almost word for word, his own talk with Vallory, with the emphasis laid upon the consequences which he, himself, had predicted would follow any leakage of the facts in Lushing’s direction.

Plegg waited until he was measurably certain that he had heard all that Backus had to spill, and when there were signs that the talebearer was about to be released, he hastened to make his retreat, retracing his steps through the dark cross hall and locking the doors behind him with his skeleton key. Safely down the outside stair and afoot in the street he hesitated. The facts about the dangerous tunnel roof were no longer a secret to be carefully guarded by the Grillage staff. They were weapons in the hands of a man who would use them instantly in his own behalf. There were two ways in which they might be used. Dargin might go to Grillage and buy the immunity which the contractor-king would doubtless assure by laying positive orders upon Vallory to let the Powder Can man-traps alone. Or, if by some unheard-of chance, Virginia Grillage could succeed in swinging her father over to her side and Vallory’s, Dargin could use his information to make capital with Lushing, and at one stroke entrench himself with the railroad management and--through the loss which would be saddled upon the Grillage company--square his account with Vallory.

All this the first assistant saw, and saw clearly, in the momentary halt made upon the street corner. Holding his watch in the light streaming from the windows of the Dargin bar-room he found that it stiff lacked a few minutes of eleven. There was a chance and he took it, walking rapidly up the street toward the place where, a few nights before, he had drawn aside to become charitably blind and deaf while David Vallory was talking to Judith Fallon.

XV

Plegg’s Back-Fire

For good and sufficient reasons Silas Plegg did not wish to show himself in the dance-hall opposite the Murtrie Mine ore sheds. On all accounts he would have been glad to be assured that he had thus far gone unrecognized through the ill-lighted Powder Can street. Standing before the wide-open doors of this other outreaching of Dargin’s, he could pass the shuffling dancers in review. The woman he was looking for was not among them, and neither was she at the piano.

Turning away with a sigh of relief he crossed the street, circled the ore sheds, and came upon the row of shack cottages belonging to the Murtrie company. Only one of the cottages showed a lighted window, and here, again, Plegg made careful reconnaissance before he knocked on the door. It was Judith Fallon who opened to him.

“Oh, ’tis you, is it?” she said, when the light fell upon him. “If it’s my father you’re wanting, he’ll be over at the mine. ’Tis his week to be on the night shift.”

“No, I don’t want to see your father, Judith,” he said quietly. “I came to see you. May I come in?”

The black eyes snapped and their light was unfriendly. “’Tis an honor to the likes of me. The door is open.”

Plegg accepted the scant welcome and went in. The interior of the cottage was plain almost to poverty. Since the young woman would not sit down he was forced to plunge bluntly into his errand.

“I’ve come to you, Judith, because I am David Vallory’s friend,” he began. “Have I made a mistake?”

Her attitude was still antagonistic. “You needn’t be worrying,” she snapped. “I know my place. ’Tis not I that will be running after Davie Vallory.”

“You misunderstood me completely,” he hastened to say. And then: “Won’t you please sit down?”

She moved toward the lighted window. “’Tis better that I don’t--and that you don’t,” she flung out; and Plegg was quick to take the hint. She was expecting some one else, and the some one would doubtless be Dargin, the man who had constituted himself her protector.

“I’ll take a chance, Judith--for Vallory’s sake,” he thrust in boldly. “Won’t you do the same?”

“’Tis himself would kill you if he found you here. But what is it you’ll want to be saying about Davie?”

There was neither time nor opportunity for a guarded approach to his object, and Plegg plunged again.

“Listen, Judith: Black Jack has just been told something that gives him a strangle hold on Vallory; if he uses it, it will cost Vallory his place on this job, to say the least. I’m not saying that Dargin wouldn’t be justified, from his own point of view. Vallory would clean up these Powder Can joints if he had the authority--which he hasn’t, and won’t have. But he has said he would, and Dargin knows it.”

“How would Jack be using this thing that you haven’t tied a name to?” she asked.

“By passing it on to Lushing.”

“That black-hearted devil!” she burst out. “’Tis little but the back of my hand that I’m owing him!”

Plegg saw his opening and drove the wedge promptly.

“We all know Lushing,” he said; “you probably have good reasons for hating him.”

“Reasons, it is? Do you know what he’d be doing to me? For shame I can’t tell you. But if Jack Dargin had listened to him, it’s not here that I’d be, keeping house for my father!”

“Dargin wants to marry you?” said Plegg quickly.

The woman’s hard black eyes grew suddenly tender. “’Tis not all bad he is, Mr. Plegg. Show me the man like him that would do what he’s done.”

Plegg had never faced a problem requiring swifter or more skilful handling. In the very nature of it he had to take much for granted; to assume the values of the unknown quantities where he could not demonstrate them.

“You knew Vallory before you came here, didn’t you?” he asked.

Her eyes fell. “I grew up with him--in Middleboro.”

Plegg smiled. It was easier now.

“I’m not going to ask you why you refused to talk with him the other night; we’ll let that go. I’m going to leave this thing with you, Judith. David Vallory stands to get a knife in the back. Jim Lushing will do the stabbing, but it will be Dargin who will hand him the knife. Your woman’s heart will tell you what to do, and how to do it.”

She covered her face with her hands. “I can’t--_I can’t!_” she shuddered. “Himself would kill me, and I’d not be blaming him--after what he’s done for me in this place. Think of what you’d be asking me to do--to put the double-cross on the one man who would be caring anything for me!”

Plegg caught his breath and took his last long leap in the dark.

“Dargin is Dargin,” he said, speaking slowly, “but--you love David Vallory, Judith. That’s all I had to say; good-night.” And he opened the door and vanished.

Having thus done his best to avert a possible tragedy--at the possible cost of another tragedy--the first assistant owned but one pressing anxiety, namely, to get out of the mining-camp speedily, and without stumbling upon some one of the late-hour stragglers who might recognize him.

Leaving the Fallon cottage, he was at first minded to climb the steep slope of Gold Hill, thus making his exit without passing again through the town street. But the night was dark, and there was no path over the hill shoulder that he could recall. Dismissing the alternative, he faced about to return as he had come; but before he had taken a dozen steps toward the street the lights of the dance-hall opposite showed him a man turning the corner at the ore sheds and coming toward him.

Though the distance was too great and the light too uncertain to enable him to identify the man, there could be little doubt that it was Dargin. Judith Fallon had shown plainly that she was expecting him. Instantly Plegg realized that there were likely to be consequences if Dargin should meet him. The Fallon house was the only one in the shack-cottage group that showed any signs of life, and Dargin would be swift to draw conclusions. But there was even a greater danger than this to be feared. Plegg had left Judith Fallon in tears, wrestling with the sharpest problem that can confront any woman, gentle or simple. If Dargin should find her thus, and before she was given time to compose herself....

Plegg’s hand flew to his hip pocket and his resolve was taken. Of the two evils he would choose that which seemed to be the lesser. Half-way down the little hill he met the master gambler and blocked his path. Dargin stopped and thrust his head forward for a better sight of the obstructionist. Then: “Oh, it’s you, is it? What the hell----”

“I was looking for you, Dargin,” Plegg said promptly, turning fugitive expectation into aggressive fact. Then he added the whole-cloth lie. “Somebody said I’d find you at John Fallon’s.”

“Well, now that you’ve found me, what of it?”

It may be imagined that never, in a life-time that had not been in any manner devoid of exciting moments, had Silas Plegg been more sorely put to it to fill a suddenly yawning gap. But at any cost time must be gained.

“It’s a personal matter, Dargin,” he explained coolly. “Word has been passed in camp that you’re out gunning for Vallory. I’d like to believe that it’s nothing but camp gossip; some of the hard-boiled eggs talking just to make a noise. How about it?”

“What business is it of yours?”

“I’m making it my business, Jack. Vallory’s my boss and my friend. He isn’t a gun-toter, and you know it. He’d stand just about as much show with you as these pick-and-shovel men do betting against your faro-game.”

“I haven’t said I was after him, have I?”

“Not to me, you haven’t. And I don’t ask you either to say it or deny it. All I want to say is this: if you go gunning for Vallory, you’ve got to include me. You understand?”

The giant grunted. “Perhaps you’d like to try it out right now?” he suggested.

“As you please,” said Plegg calmly. “I’m heeled, and I know you are. If you think you can get to it quicker than I can, the bars are down.”

This time the “killer’s” grunt lapsed into a chuckle.

“I don’t need a man for breakfast to-morrow morning,” he said. “When I do, I’ll let you know. S’pose you get out o’ the way and let me pass.”

“With pleasure,” snapped Plegg. “Only what I say, goes. If you hit Vallory, you hit me. And it will be safer if you hit me first, and you always know where to find me.”

Judith’s saving interval having thus been bought and paid for, Plegg stood aside and let Dargin have the path. But after he had left the town behind and was plodding across the basin on his way back to the headquarters camp and his long-deferred rest, he was weighing judicially the value of the expedient to which he had resorted. To which extreme of the arc would the pendulum of a woman’s emotions be carried? Would Judith Fallon be true to whatever feeling she still cherished for David Vallory? Or would she refuse to betray the man who, so far as his limitations had permitted, had stood between her and utter degradation?

“I guess it’s on the knees of the gods,” was the first assistant’s final summing-up of the matter; the conclusion reached as he was crossing the yard tracks to the isolated bunk car. “There may be some man living who can tell what a woman will do under given conditions, but the good Lord knows I’m not that man.”

And so leaving it he swung up the steps of the car and crept to his bunk, quietly, so as not to disturb his sleeping chief.

XVI

Master and Man

On the day following the arrival of Mr. Grillage’s private car at Powder Gap, word was passed from camp to camp that the big boss was about to make an inspection round with the new chief of construction, and the activities automatically speeded themselves up to grace the occasion.

At the bridge sites the clank and grind of the concrete mixers, the upshoot and dumping tip of the hoist buckets, and the clattering descent of the concrete into the forms played the industrial quick-step. In the hill cuttings the intermittent clamor of steam-shovels and the strident exhausts of locomotives dragging the spoil to the fills made deafening discords. In the short tunnel under Dead Man’s Ridge the hard-rock men timed their forenoon blasts accurately to make a thunderous crash of dynamite salute the upcoming of the light engine and way-car bearing President Grillage and his chief engineer.

So far as any routine-changing result was concerned, the inspection trip was conspicuously barren. It was rather a triumphal progress for the new chief. At each stopping-place the big boss climbed down dutifully from the way-car to look on and listen while David explained some new method of cost-cutting, and there was always the word of gruff approval, coupled with the suggestion that they move along.

“I’m taking all your little economies and short-cuttings for granted, David,” said the tamed tyrant, as the way-car special shot around the curves of approach to the main tunnel. “I got it pretty straight from Coulee du Sac that you were up in all the late kinks in money-saving and systematizing. You are doing good work, and I’m right proud of you.”

Again David’s heart warmed to the big man who had been so grossly misrepresented as a hard boss. Thus far, there had been no single word of criticism; nothing but hearty appreciation and praise. David knew well enough that his work couldn’t be beyond criticism; that to a master workman as experienced as Eben Grillage the shortcomings must surely be apparent. Yet there had been nothing said that would lead him to believe that the contractor-king was making anything but the most perfunctory duty trip over the job.

At the tunnel portal they found Plegg, who was apparently waiting for them. There was a halt of a few minutes while the first assistant, in obedience to a signal which David was not permitted to see, held his chief to ask some routine question about a proposed re-sloping of the approach cutting. Eben Grillage walked on into the tunnel alone. The great black bore was lighted only by a string of inadequate electric bulbs hung at hundred-foot intervals, and the massive figure of the president was soon lost to view in the depths. David Vallory answered Plegg’s queries impatiently, the more so because they seemed to be peculiarly trivial and ill-timed. It was something less than respectful to allow the president to go stumbling into the tunnel unattended.

When they finally overtook him the big boss had penetrated to the working heading, and was looking on quietly while the drillers and their helpers removed the drill-columns and prepared for a blast. Again there were words commendatory of the discipline and the industrial systematizing.

“Fine!” was Eben Grillage’s comment, when David came up with Plegg at his elbow. “I’ll be losing you two fellows to the efficiency squad one of these fine days; that’s a fact.” Then to the black-eyed, black-mustached little French-Canadian who had taken Altman’s place: “Hello, Regnier! So they’ve got you on the mole job, now, have they?”

Regnier came across to join the onlooking group.

“Eet is moz’ in’ospitable, but in five minute ze men will fire ze blast,” he announced. “Me, I am _désolé_ to ’ave to h’ask you zhentlemen to go h’out, _mais_----”

“But we’d better go out if we don’t want to get our necks stretched, eh?” laughed the visiting overlord. “That’s all right, Regnier; we’ve seen all we need to, I guess.” And the retreat was made so hurriedly that David had no chance to inspect the dangerous spot in the roof, or to call the president’s attention to it, as he had fully intended doing.

These were the commonplace incidents of the day of inspections, and there were no other kind. But when the day was ended, and David Vallory was once more finding a reward for duty done in an ecstatic hour with Virginia on the Inn porch, it is conceivable that the joy-nerve might have lost some of its thrills if he could have been endowed with the gift of double personality, enabling him to see and hear what was transpiring coincidently in the Grillage private Pullman at the foot of the ridge. In the open central compartment of the car Plegg was once more under fire, and the special target of the bombardment was his estimate of the bad roof in tunnel heading Number One.

“You are losing your sand, Plegg, the same as young Altman did,” Grillage was asserting bluntly. “I took the chance you made for me this morning and had a good look at that ‘fault’ while you were holding Vallory at the portal. In spite of your test-borings, and all that you’ve had to say about it, I say the roof will stay up while we’re driving. If the railroad company wants to concrete it after we’re through, that’s a horse of another color. We’re not hunting for a chance to throw good money away.”

“I know,” said Plegg, almost humbly.

“How did you manage to get Altman out and Regnier in?”