Part 11

“The change was made to-day and Vallory authorized it. Altman went over my head last night and took his complaint to Vallory, though I had warned him not to. A little later Vallory fell upon me and wanted to know why I hadn’t ordered the weak spot timbered. I smoothed it over as well as I could; gave him a hint of the use Lushing might make of it if we should advertise the weak spot by timbering it. He saw the point after a while and told me to shift Altman and put Regnier in. But I had to lie to him to bring it about.”

“Bosh! That roof isn’t coming down. You’ve been letting Altman’s nerves put one across on yours!”

It was just here that the first assistant took his courage in both hands.

“I know what I know; and you know it, as well, Mr. Grillage,” he said. “The test drillings showed up the conditions plainly enough, as I wrote you at the time. That entire crevice is filled with loose material that is certain to come down, sooner or later. Why not go to the railroad people frankly, show them what we’re up against, and try to persuade them to let us concrete that break on force account, with the cost of doing it added to our estimate?”

Eben Grillage’s answer to this was brutally direct.

“I’m running the business end of this company’s affairs, Plegg, and when I want your help I’ll call on you. But since you’ve gone this far, I’ll tell you a thing or two. Lushing hasn’t been idle since he climbed over the fence into the railroad pasture. He’s been building prejudice against us to beat the band. If we’d make the break you suggest, I wouldn’t put it beyond him to claim that we’d shaken that roof up purposely with dynamite to get an excuse to run a force account job in on them. Such things have been done, on other jobs, and I shouldn’t wonder if Lushing had helped do some of ’em. No; our safe play is to let sleeping dogs lie.”

“But if somebody should take the trouble to wake this particular dog?” Plegg put in quietly.

“Put Lushing on?” queried the big man at the desk.

“Yes.”

“Who would do it?”

“The bad roof is an open secret. The men in the tunnel shifts all know about it.”

“But none of our men will go to Lushing. They hate him too well.”

“There is one other man who knows about it, too.”

“Who is that?”

“Black Jack Dargin.”

“Huh! How did he find out?”

“That door is pretty wide open, isn’t it? A good many of the hard-rock men blow their money in Dargin’s dives.”

“Are you sure he knows?”

“Yes, quite sure.”

“He’d sell the tip to Lushing?”

Plegg shook his head. “No, I don’t believe he’d sell it. But he might give it.”

“Spit it all out--don’t beat around the bush, Plegg! What’s the inside of the deal? You know more than you’re willing to tell, and that isn’t a safe play for you to make at me!”

Plegg ignored the implication and the threat and answered only the direct question.

“I don’t know the inside of the deal. But one man’s guess is as good as another’s. Lushing goes all the gaits in Powder Can; he did it while he was with us, and he does it now, when he’s here. I’ve thought, more than once, that he might have some sort of a stand-in with Dargin. As the matter stands now, Dargin can give us away any time he feels like it.”

As was his habit when he was putting his back to the wall in any fight, Eben Grillage caught up the paper-knife from his desk and began to test the edge of it with a spatulate thumb.

“I’m beginning to get at the inwards of this thing,” he said slowly. “David was saying something last night about wanting to clean out the Powder Can messes. Dargin is going to hold this tunnel business as a club. Vallory mustn’t meddle with the nuisances; you must see to it that he doesn’t.”

“Vallory doesn’t take ‘seeing to’ very submissively.”

“That’s all right; you keep him from meddling with Dargin’s affairs.”

“You won’t consider my suggestion about making a clean breast of the tunnel situation to Mr. Ford? As I’ve said, I am firmly convinced that the stuff in the crevice will come down, sooner or later. If it slides while we are still driving the heading, no man who happens to be behind it will get out alive.”

“I don’t want your suggestion--or your convictions either, for that matter.”

“Very well. It is your risk and you see fit to take it. I have nothing more to say.”

“Never mind the risk. Have you stopped the calamity talk among the men?”

“For the time being, yes. I raised the pay of the shift bosses, and told them what it was for. That is all in the game, and I’m crooked enough by this time not to mind an additional bit of bribery. But there is one thing that I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again: it’s a damned shame to hoodwink a fine young fellow like Vallory the way I’ve been doing ever since he came on the job. He has no idea that we are not playing square with the railroad people; none whatever. And it’s just as I told you last night; if a smash should come, it will hit him harder than it will anybody else.”

“We’ll take care of all the smashes,” growled the tyrant, who was no longer tame. “All you have to do is to keep your mouth shut and go on sawing wood. You know very well why I want Vallory kept in the dark; or at least, you know the business reason, anyway. He is valuable on this job only so long as he _is_ kept in the dark. You are the man to do it, Plegg, and you’ve got it to do.”

Plegg’s thin lips curled in a dog-like grimace.

“If I don’t do it, you’ll revive that old criminal charge against me on the Falling Water dam and get me jugged--the charge that made me the scapegoat for the use of rotten cement when you and your man Homer were the responsible people,” he said bitterly. “I know perfectly well where I stand with you--and with the courts--Mr. Grillage. But there are limits. One of these days I may decide to tell you to go to hell--and take whatever may be coming to me. Vallory trusts me and I am abusing his confidence every day and resorting to all kinds of shifts to keep him from finding out the thousand-and-one crooked things we’re doing to beat the specifications on this job. You say I know the business reason why he was sent out here, but I don’t. Why you wanted to put a clean young fellow like David Vallory in charge of this job is beyond me.”

“You’re duller than usual to-night, Plegg, and that’s needless,” was the tyrant’s unfeeling retort. “The chief reason is that David has put some capital into this thing. President Ford knows Adam Vallory, and the Vallory connections generally. We’re capitalizing that knowledge. But that’s a side issue. Coming back to this tunnel business: we’re into it and we’ve got to go through with it. The secret of that ‘rotten spot,’ as you insist upon calling it, must be kept quiet so far as the railroad people are concerned. Jack Dargin must keep it, too, if you have to go and buy him outright. Lushing will be out here in a few days, loaded for bear. He has given it out cold that he is going to do us up, and he wouldn’t ask for any better chance than this tunnel roof tempest in a teapot would give him. You may go now; that will be all for to-night.”

It was at this precise moment, when Plegg was leaving the private Pullman in the construction yard, that David Vallory was asking the daughter of profitable contracts a pointed question.

“Is there ever such a thing as a middle course between absolute right and absolute wrong, Vinnie?”

“What a question!” she laughed. “Is that what you’ve been thinking about all this time that you’ve been letting me do the talking?”

“But I’d like to know,” he persisted.

“I imagine you have as much common sense, and rather more conscience, than most men, David. Why do you ask me?”

“Because I know you are honest, and altogether fearless.”

“So are you,” she returned quickly.

“No. I was once, I think; but, somehow, things are changing for me. The old anchorages are slipping away, and I can’t seem to find any new ones. For example: I did a thing last night which seems perfectly justifiable on one side, and almost criminal on the other. I’ve been trying all day to make up my mind as to whether I ought to pat myself on the back, or go to jail.”

“If you should tell me what you did, perhaps I might be able to help your common sense, or your conscience, or whatever it is that is involved,” she suggested.

David glanced at his watch. The hour was late, and there were but few of the Inn guests remaining on the porches.

“I’m keeping you up,” he said shortly. “Some day, perhaps, I’ll take the lid off and let you see the tangle inside of me; but it’s too late to begin on as big a job as that to-night. Are you going to let me show you over the plant to-morrow?”

“What else is there for me to do in this wilderness of a place?” she asked in mock despair. “I shall most probably tag you around like a meddlesome little boy until you’ll be glad to put me on the train and send me home.”

David was still holding the hand of leave-taking. “If you don’t go home until I send you, you’ll stay here a long time,” he said happily. And then he went his way, forgetting, in this newest prospect of joy, the troublesome underthought which had been growing, like an ominous threat, around the incident of the talk with Altman, and its outcome.

XVII

The Tar-Barrel

In any descent to Avernus it is not often given to the wayfarer to recognize the point at which he first begins to go down-hill. In the removal of the careful Altman from the eastern tunnel boring and the substituting of the reckless, devil-may-care Regnier, David Vallory had succeeded in persuading himself that he had merely checked off an item in the day’s work, and was far enough from suspecting that the item figured as another milestone in the downward inclining path.

But certain results followed in due course, and a growth, not in grace. For one of the results, David, being a shrewd-eyed master of his trade, soon began to discover many of the things that Plegg was trying to hide from him--the dishonesties large and small by which unscrupulous Business seeks to increase the margin or profit; to discover them and pass by on the other side with closed eyes. Another result was his changed and changing attitude toward the Powder Can nuisance. From regarding the wide-open mining-camp chiefly as a moral menace, he was beginning to look upon it more as an obstacle to progress--his own industrial progress on the job. It was sapping the strength of his working force, and therefore--in spite of the contractor-king’s injunction, which he took to be another of the little kindnesses designed to make things easier for him--it was to be abolished.

In the field of the discovered dishonesties and the closed eye, effect succeeded to cause with due celerity. The conditions on a well-systematized undertaking like the line-shortening project are fairly telepathic. Almost immediately it began to be whispered about among the gang bosses and the men that the new chief was bent upon making a record; the first assistant said so, and the first assistant ought to know. This being the fact, the bridle might be taken off--always with due regard for the railroad watch-dogs, and for a decent concealment from a chief who, for the look of the thing, must be in a position to say that he knew nothing whatever of cast-off bridles and the substitution of loose halters therefor.

When David Vallory began to realize that his lowering of the standards was taken as an ell for an inch by his subordinates and the rank and file, it may be supposed that he was frankly appalled. But momentum counts for something. And back of the push on the downward slide there was always the debt of obligation owed to Eben Grillage. The king of the contractors might be all that men said he was; a hard bargain driver and a cold-blooded buccaneer of business. But at the same time he was Virginia’s father and the savior of the Vallory good name.

If these were the inner wrestlings, David had as yet shared them with no one. Outwardly, at least on the social side, he was measuring up to a rather exacting standard set by Miss Virginia. Days in which he took her on the construction locomotives and put her in touch with the throbbings of the feverish heart of the activities were intermingled with summer evenings on the Alta Vista porches. For some cause as yet unexplained, the coming of his father and sister was delayed; and for some other cause, into which his infatuation forbade him to inquire, no one of Virginia Grillage’s retinue of suitors had thus far intruded upon the scene.

“And still you are not entirely happy,” she laughed, one evening, when he spoke of the comforting dearth of the suitors.

“What makes you think I’m not happy?” he shot back.

“I can tell. You have something on your mind.”

He made an attempt to turn her aside from the topic of the mind-burdens.

“Haven’t I had you to myself for days and days? I don’t know what more a man could ask.”

“Oh, that!” she mocked. “But, just the same, you’re not happy.” Then she added, apparently as an after-thought: “And neither am I.”

“Don’t tell me it is because you are missing the others,” he pleaded, still intent upon warding off the more personal personalities.

“I am missing them dreadfully; especially Lord Cumberleigh and little Freddy Wishart. But mostly it’s your ingratitude.”

“My ingratitude?”

“That is what I said. In the kiddie days you used to tell me everything. But now you are shutting me out. You lead me along just so far, but beyond that I find myself talking to another David, one that I know less and less every day.”

For a time he was silent. Then he said: “You are altogether right--as you always are, Vinnie. There _is_ another David; a man that I am trying mighty hard to get acquainted with, myself. I don’t know him well enough yet to introduce him to you.”

“That sounds almost uncanny. Is it meant to be?”

“It is uncanny. I can’t account for it--or him--or wholly approve him. This other David isn’t always a pleasant person to meet. Part of the time I seem to recognize him in a vague sort of way, and then again he becomes a total stranger; a man of moods and impulses and perfectly barbarous leanings.”

“I know,” she said quietly. “I’ve seen him now and then. I saw him to-day when we were down at the Cross Gulch bridge. The foreman had apparently been doing something that you had told him not to do. You didn’t rave at him, but for a second or two the other David looked out through your eyes.”

“How do you account for it--or him?”

“How should I be able to account for it--or him--if you can’t? Of course, there are always general principles. If a watch has been keeping good time and begins to go wrong, it is a sign that some one has been tinkering with the works, isn’t it?”

“And you would suggest that some one has been tinkering with my works?”

“I know that you are different--and that I am sorry.”

“Have I been different this evening?”

“Yes, part of the time.”

“There is some little cause for the added grouch just now. I’ve been neglecting a plain duty. Did you notice the thinness of the gangs working on the lower section when we were down there to-day?”

“Not particularly.”

“They were thin. Yesterday was pay-day, and a lot of those hand-to-mouth ‘wops’ are blowing themselves in Powder Can. When I first came here I saw that that mining-camp would have to be cleaned up, but I’ve been putting it off. Out of the goodness of his heart, your father tells me to let it alone; he’d rather take his losses than to have me shoulder another load, I suppose. But the thing has reached the limit. I’m going after it with a sharp stick.”

On this particular evening they were sitting on the western porch, a bit withdrawn, as usual, from the groups of idling summer people. At the end of the porch a low-branching fir grew so close to the building that its nearer twigs, swayed by the gentle breeze sliding down from the heights of Qojogo, made little tapping sounds to break the silence of the mountain night. Under the low-hanging branches of the fir the big St. Bernard belonging to the hotel proprietor was curled up; at least David Vallory thought it was the dog--had reason to think so since it was the St. Bernard’s nightly sleeping-place.

“Something ought to be done,” was the young woman’s agreement with the sharp-stick suggestion. “How will you go about it?”

It was at this conjuncture that the sleeping dog stirred uneasily, but David Vallory did not look aside.

“A man named Dargin is the head and front of things over there. If he were run out, the smaller fellows could be handled without much trouble. I’ve been hesitating between two methods of getting at Dargin. I suppose the simplest plan would be to walk over there some day and tell him that he can have twenty-four hours in which to settle up his affairs and vanish.”

Miss Virginia’s exclamation was a little shriek. “The idea!” she said. “Do you suppose he would go away for anything like that?”

“He would if it were properly backed up; if I should tell him, for example, that if I had the job to do over, I’d do it with a gun.”

“Mercy me! This is the ‘other David’ with a vengeance! Do you really mean it?”

“Why shouldn’t I mean it? If the argument of force is the only one that would appeal to him----”

“But you’d be killed! I’ve heard the most awful stories of this man. He wouldn’t give you the slightest chance. Promise me that you won’t do any such recklessly foolish thing!”

“I shan’t, if you don’t want me to; though it’s much the simpler way to go about it. The other way is to write a personal letter to President Ford of the railroad company. I don’t know him, but my father does, and he is a good man--a clean man. I am practically certain that if he knew the conditions he’d use the railroad company’s power to clean up the camp--the power given it by the land leases. But that is enough about the job and me and my little insanities. I must hike back down the hill to my blankets. I know you’d be yawning if you were not too polite.”

She got up to walk with him to the porch steps, and at the good-night moment he said: “Where are you going to let me take you to-morrow?”

“Before I pick the place I’m going to ask you once more why you have been so persistently refusing to take me to the big tunnel. Don’t you know that I simply adore tunnels?”

Now David had his own good reasons for not having taken Eben Grillage’s quick-witted daughter into the big bore where Regnier was driving his hard-rock crews. Day by day the dangerous ‘fault’ was scattering its warnings in chips and spallings of fresh rock thrown down from the disintegrating roof--evidences which Regnier was careful to remove before they should attract the attention of the railroad inspectors.

“A tunnel in process of construction isn’t a good place in which to entertain inquisitive little girls,” David evaded. “And this particular tunnel is wet and mucky.”

“That isn’t the reason why you haven’t taken me there,” she asserted calmly.

“How do you know it isn’t?”

“Because I was in the tunnel this afternoon. You had been making so many foolish excuses that my curiosity was aroused. I took advantage of your absence at the other end of things and made Mr. Plegg take me. He didn’t want to; he was just as gruff and impossible as he dared to be to the big boss’s daughter. But I made him do it.”

It is easily conceivable that David felt cold chills racing up and down his spine at the bare thought of what might have happened during this unauthorized visit--this, be it remarked, though he fancied he had settled it definitely with himself that nothing was going to happen.

“That was altogether wrong!” he said, in his best workmanlike manner. “Don’t you know you shouldn’t break discipline that way?”

“Poof!” she retorted. “That is what Cumberleigh would call ‘putting on side’. It’s a pity if I have to ask permission when I wish to go somewhere--and of you!”

He shook his head in despair.

“You are not a bit less wilful than you used to be in the old Middleboro days. But, really, Vinnie, you mustn’t go into the tunnel again. It’s--it’s no place for visitors, or at least for women visitors.”

“You have a reason for saying that, and it isn’t any of those you’ve been giving me,” she flashed back.

“Do you think so?” He had not yet reached the point at which he could lie to her deliberately.

“I know it. You haven’t any scruples about letting me get mucky and grimy on any other part of the work; you have rather enjoyed telling me that my face needed washing.”

“Never, unless it did,” he laughed, hoping to find some way of diverting the talk from the unwelcome tunnel channel. But Miss Virginia, with an end in view, was not of those who may be easily turned aside.

“Then there was Mr. Silas Plegg,” she went on. “I have had a good many escorts, first and last--and some of them unwilling, no doubt--but Mr. Plegg capped the climax. He was as nervous as a cat after we got inside, and if I didn’t know him so well, I should say he acted as if he were afraid of something.”

“He was,” Plegg’s chief confirmed grimly. “I have given positive orders that no one, other than those connected with the working shifts, be admitted to the tunnel headings. Plegg knew he would be in for a bawling-out when I should find out what he’d done.”

The young woman’s smile was a mocking little grimace.

“It wasn’t at all that kind of ‘afraid’; it seemed to me more like just plain scare. While we were watching the drills, Mr. Regnier pulled him aside and spoke to him. They probably thought the drills were making such a clatter that I couldn’t hear what they said; but I _did_ hear.”

“Cuss-words?” David suggested. He was still trying to maintain the good-naturedly playful attitude.

She nodded vigorously. “Perfectly hair-raising!” she assured him. “Mr. Regnier said, ‘Why in the’--a long string of sizzling things--‘do you bring her here? Have you not of the senses the--blinkety-blank-blank--smallest portion?’

“I couldn’t hear what excuse Mr. Plegg made, but it was evidently not a very good one, for Mr. Regnier broke loose again: ‘_Sacre bleu!_ you are prip-pare to get yourself deeslike. _Hein!_ you shall chase her out of here so queek as _le bon Dieu_ will let you!’ You spoke of discipline a minute ago. I shouldn’t think you’d allow one of the under-assistants to talk that way to your second in command. It’s disgraceful.”

Answering the disciplinary gibe, David sought once more to stave off the tunnel climax--if so be the breaker of discipline were working toward a climax. But again Miss Virginia proved herself a true inheritor of the Grillage obstinacies and persistences.

“There is something the matter with that tunnel, David, and I want to know what it is,” she urged gravely.

He told a half-truth merely because no plausible or practicable falsehood suggested itself at the moment.

“It is a bit dangerous--in one place.”

“But if it is dangerous for me it is dangerous for the workmen. Why don’t you timber the bad place?”

He laughed. “What do you know about timbering tunnels?”

“You forget that I’ve been eating the bread of the construction camps all my life.”

“That’s so; I had forgotten.” In their excursions together over the job it had given him a glow of superecstasy to find that she was familiar with many of the details of her father’s trade--and his own; details which would have been purest Greek to most women. Silas Plegg’s commendation was amply borne out by the fact; she was, indeed, “a pretty good little engineer, herself.” None the less his lips were sealed in the matter of tunnel-timbering--or the lack of it. He could not tell her that, for the sake of her father’s profit account, the weak roof must not be timbered. Hence, he temporized.