Part 12

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have called it dangerous; it isn’t so bad as you may be imagining. Timbering is an obstruction to the work, and we always get along without it if we can.” Then, resolute to shelve the subject so high that it couldn’t be reached again: “What has become of your father? I haven’t seen him for two or three days.”

“He is down at the car to-night. But he hasn’t been well.”

“Not well? I can’t think of him as not being well. He always looks to me as if he’d never known what it was to be sick.”

“He hasn’t known very often, and for that reason he never takes any care of himself. But something over a year ago he scared me silly; he had a touch of apoplexy. The doctors told me, but they wouldn’t tell him. He got well in almost no time, but since, I’ve been trying to make him take things easy. That was one reason why I insisted on coming out here with him this summer.”

“He needs a complete rest,” said David.

“Yes; and maybe he’ll get one when your father comes. By the way--when are they coming--your father and Lucille?”

“See how association with you makes me forget things!” he jested. “I knew I had something to tell you. They will be here to-morrow. I had a letter this morning.”

“Are you ready for them?” she asked.

“They are to have that cottage over there under the pines, and they can take their meals here in the hotel.”

It was a perfect summer night, with the stars burning like beacon-lights in the inverted bowl of the heavens, a crescent moon hanging low over the saw-tooth outline of Qojogo, and the elevated backgrounds sweeping in the blackest of shadow to the high horizons.

“The sublime majesty of it!” said the young woman softly, commenting on the grandeurs. “And to think that Lucille won’t be able to see it when she comes! It’s heart-breaking, David!”

“I think--I hope--the little sister doesn’t miss what she hasn’t had since she was four years old,” he returned, matching her low tone.

“I know; though it seems as if she must. But you are making her miss some of the things she needn’t miss, David.”

“I have been a poor plotter,” he confessed. “I’ll admit that in getting them out here I was confidently counting upon breaking it off for Oswald. But it seems that I have only made matters worse. The letter that I spoke of was from Herbert. He has taken a partner in his law business and is giving himself a vacation. He says Dad’s health is still poor and it is hardly right for him to travel with the care of Lucille; so he, Bert, is coming along. I suppose I shall be obliged to read the riot act to him again.”

Miss Virginia was standing on the lowest porch step and she drew herself up in combative protest.

“You will do nothing of the sort,” she declared, with a touch of her father’s peremptory manner. “If you do, I shall let Lord Cumberleigh and Freddy Wishart know what a perfectly gorgeous place this is in which to spend a summer vacation. Good-night; it’s late and I’m going in.”

When David had descended the hill to his bunk car headquarters he found that Plegg had not yet come in. But Jean Marie François Regnier was there, dark-faced, and with the Gallic temper coruscating.

“Thees devil of hard-rock men!” he sputtered. “They ’ave not so moch as the courage of a mice! They say to me, ‘You s’all timber thees bad place or shoot it down, or bygod we s’all strike.’ _Sacr-r-re!_”

As once before, in a similar crisis, David Vallory sat on the edge of his bunk to take off his lace-boots.

“I’ll think about it, Regnier” he said slowly. “You tell your men that you’ve put it up to me. I’ll see you to-morrow.”

After Regnier had gone, David went on mechanically with his bed-time preparations. Then, as if at the bidding of a sudden impulse, he hurriedly put the boots and his coat on again and went out to the rear platform of the small car.

When he saw that the lights were still on in Mr. Grillage’s Pullman he dropped from the step and went across the tracks to present himself at the porter-guarded door of the _Athenia_.

XVIII

In Loco Parentis

Admitted to the office compartment of the private car, David Vallory found its occupant preparing to go up to the hotel; but at the swing of the corridor door Eben Grillage sat down again in the capacious swing-chair at his desk and relighted the stub of his cigar.

“Come in, David,” he growled not unkindly; and before Vallory could speak: “Vinnie ’phoned down a few minutes ago to tell me that you’re looking for your father to-morrow. That sounds mighty good to me. We’ll have another chance to renew our youth. You don’t appreciate how much that means; you’re too young. But some day you will.”

David drew up one of the wicker chairs and sat down. The abrupt dip into the purely friendly relations side-tracked his errand, temporarily; but it also gave him time to gather himself for the plunge into the weightier matter.

“Yes,” he assented; “I had a letter this morning. There will be three of them; Dad and my sister and Bert Oswald.”

“You don’t mean John Oswald’s boy?”

“Yes, that is the one. Bert is a lawyer now, in business for himself in Middleboro.”

Eben Grillage wagged his head as one incredulous, and the massive features were relaxed in a reminiscent smile.

“Well, well; the idea of that little red-headed, blue-eyed chap of Oswald’s growing up to be a man and a lawyer! How time does skip along!” Then: “What’s he coming out here for? We don’t need any lawyers on this job--not yet, I hope.”

“Bert says the trip is a vacation excursion for him,” David replied, suppressing Oswald’s true motive. Then he began on his own errand. “I came over here to bother you for a bit of advice on something that I’ve changed my mind about half a dozen times or more. It’s that weak place in the roof of heading Number One that Plegg wrote you about before I came on the job.”

“Well, what about it?”

“At first I was willing to discount all the nervous stories. I spent one entire summer in hard-rock work, and I know how prone the drill crews are to cry ‘wolf’ when they drive through something a little different. But latterly I’ve been a little anxious myself.”

“I shouldn’t worry, if I were you,” said the big man, with the lenient indulgence of a master for a neophyte. “There’s a good old saying, David, that you ought always to remember: Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you. I’ve had a look at that tunnel roof, myself. You needn’t lose any sleep over it.”

“It looks a bit bad to me,” David made bold to say. “And now Regnier tells me that the men have gone from complaining to making threats.”

“Threats?--what kind of threats?”

“They say if we don’t timber, or shoot the bad roof down, they’ll strike on us; which will be giving open notice to the railroad people that there is something wrong.”

David Vallory did not know that, under conditions similar to those he was presenting, the king of the contractors was wont to explode in volcanic wrath, consigning everybody remotely implicated to the scrap-heap of the nerveless and the yellow-streaked. Nor did he know that he was especially favored when his chief consented to argue the matter with him.

“It has always been that way with the hard-rock crews,” the master maintained; “they’re not happy if they don’t have something to kick about. As to the threat; Lushing and his inspectors know--or ought to know--all that anybody can tell them about that ‘fault’. It’s their business to find out.”

David felt that he was losing ground, but he tried once more.

“It has always seemed better to me to be safe than sorry,” he ventured; and he was going on to make the same suggestion that Plegg had made, about taking the matter up with the railroad company for a new contract, when the exponent of modern business success broke in.

“‘Safety first’ is a good idea, but it has been run into the ground, like a lot of other good things, David. You were telling me that your college vacations were spent working for the railroads, and there you would naturally get the safety idea rubbed into you good and hard. I’ve seen railroad engineers spend thousands of dollars--of other people’s money--on precautions that will never be tested while the world stands. When you are working for your own pocketbook it’s different.”

“Yet I suppose we ought not to take too many chances,” David constrained himself to say.

“That is where you are wrong,” was the prompt contradiction. “All business is a taking of chances. The merchant who buys a stock of goods in spring that he hopes to sell in the fall is taking a chance. The lawyer who expects to charge a fat fee if he wins his cause is taking a chance. The farmer who plows and plants is taking a mighty long chance on what the season and the weather will do to him. Don’t you see how it runs through everything a man can do?”

“Yes, but----”

“Take our own job here and look at the hamperings. I’m talking to you now as Adam Vallory’s boy and not as a hired man. We were ground to the limit on the bidding; and at every turn the railroad people are trying to get more than they bargained for--something for nothing. It’s all right; that’s their part of it, you’ll say. But in addition to all this we’ve got Jim Lushing against us; a man who will stoop to any kind of low, disreputable trickery to do us up. You may say it’s dog eat dog, and so it is. But it’s business.”

David took a leaf from his father’s book and proffered it, not too confidently.

“Dad was always so strong on the ethics of a thing,” he began; but Eben Grillage interrupted with a good-natured laugh.

“Your father is a white-haired old angel; and he is just about as completely out of touch with the modern business world as the other angels are. There are no theoretical ethics in business, David. If you don’t fight for your own hand, you go to the wall, every time. That is one reason why I offered you a job. I didn’t want to see Adam Vallory’s boy settle down in the old Middleboro Security and become a fossilized back-number before he could grow a beard.”

Here it was, deep in the personalities again, and David Vallory would have been either more or less than human if he could have disentangled himself from the purely friendly relation.

“You have been mighty good to me--good to all of us,” he broke out gratefully. “If I’ve said too much about that tunnel roof----”

“Just you forget the tunnel roof and let it go. It has stood up all right since we drove through it, and you know what it would cost to shoot it down and plug the hole. I want to see you succeed, David, and you can’t do it if you are always worrying about the other fellow’s side of things. I only wish I had a boy like you of my own.”

“You have something vastly better,” said the model son, with a smile.

“Vinnie, you mean? Sometimes I think so; and then, again, I’m sort of worried. When it comes right down to the jumping-off place, I’m afraid she isn’t going to pick out a sure-enough man. Look at the crowd she runs with! Half of ’em are after my money, and the other half haven’t got brains enough to fry, or sand enough in ’em to keep the wheels from slipping.”

David was far enough beyond the tunnel and all other troubles now to be able to laugh happily. It was reasonably evident that any obstacles which might lie in his way in the sentimental race were not such as might be raised by a purse-proud father, and once again his heart warmed toward the benefactor and foster-father who was so generously overlooking the master-and-man hamperings.

“Virginia is your own daughter, Mr. Grillage; you needn’t be alarmed about her,” he put in loyally.

“I know; but she’s got a raft of high-flown notions about ethical culture--whatever that is--and the brotherhood of man, and ‘tainted money’, and all that--you probably know the whole rigmarole. And when Vinnie sets her head on anything you couldn’t switch her with a hundred-and-fifty-ton crane and a five-yard steam-shovel put together. I tell her what she needs is to marry a man who is in the thick of the business fight for himself--and for her. Then she’d learn a few practical, every-day facts.”

David Vallory felt that it would be almost a breach of confidence--the confidence that had been growing up day by day between Virginia and himself--if he should let the talk dig any deeper into the personalities in Virginia’s direction. So he spoke again of his father’s coming, and of his hope that the change of scene and climate might prove beneficial.

“We’ll make it beneficial,” declared the big man, with a return to the genially masterful mood; and after a few minutes more of the friendly talk, David took his leave, warming himself once again at the fires of henchman loyalty. Who was he to set up the standards of his own narrow convincements against the wisdom and experience of a man whose success was equalled only by his generosity and princely liberality? And beyond this, had not Eben Grillage as good as said that his consent was already gained if his daughter’s choice should fall upon a man who was _not_ of the great army of idlers?

Other phases of the talk emphasized themselves for the young chief of construction after he had seen the big boss striding sturdily up the steep path toward the ridge-top hotel. In no uncertain sense his father’s benefactor had shown himself willing to be a second father to the son, supplying, from his wider experience of men and things, the lacks of a too-narrow upbringing. In an upflash of the newer partisanship, David could smile at his own compunctions. In a world of shrewd battlings one might easily theorize too much. But deep down under this generalization the new loyalty, born first of worthy gratitude, was digging a channel for itself; the channel leading now to blind fealty. The problem was no longer a question of right and wrong in the abstract. It was resolving itself into a grim determination to hew doggedly to the line--the line being the success, in a financial sense, of the Grillage Engineering Company.

With this determination in the saddle, David Vallory did not return to his bunk car. A locomotive was about to make the run up to the tunnel with a supply of freshly blacksmithed drill-bits, and he boarded it. The night breeze, slipping down from the peaks of the higher range, was like a draft of invigorating wine. The moon had gone down, but the carbide flares and electric arcs illuminating the scene in the huge cuttings made the men and machines stand out in harsh relief. Above the clatter of the locomotive the rapid, intermittent volley-fire of the steam-shovels rose like the snortings of strange monsters; and against the inky background of the western mountain a single electric star marked the mouth of the tunnel.

At the portal David dropped from the step of the engine and made his way, unaccompanied, into the heart of the mountain. The thread of incandescent bulbs starred the blackness, each illuminating its little circle of the underworld. The distant clamor of the drills ceased shortly after David reached the spot where the threatening roof was sprinkling its daily warnings. Posturing solely as the cool-headed engineer and technician, he would have decided at once that the danger signals were growing more portentous--did so decide in the inner depths of him. The overhead rock had an appearance not unlike that of a slaking lime bed, checked and crisscrossed in every direction with fine seams and cracks.

While he was still examining the roof and telling himself that this was only one of the many chances that had to be taken in the battle for success, a man came out of the half-lighted darkness of the farther depths and spoke to him. It was Silas Plegg.

“Getting your goat so that you can’t sleep nights, is it?” said the first assistant, with his teeth-baring smile.

David ignored the reference to his responsibilities and asked a question.

“Any more strike talk among the men?”

“A little; yes.”

“What do you think about this roof by this time? I know what you thought a few days ago.”

Plegg shook his head.

“It’s not up to me to do the thinking. What do you think?”

“Frankly, Plegg, I don’t know what to say. Just before you came up I was thinking that if I were called in here as an outsider and asked to give an opinion I’d say it was a risk--a damned bad risk. But as a Grillage man, I’ve come around to your point of view on the necessities. We’ve got to trust to luck and bully it through.”

“Yes; if the devil doesn’t take too good care of his own.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that it doesn’t lie with us any more to keep this thing quiet.”

“What? Have the inspectors caught on?”

“Since we haven’t had a bunch of them jumping onto us, I infer not. But there is at least one warm enemy of yours who knows about it.”

“Who is it?”

“Black Jack Dargin.”

David flew into a rage for the second time that day.

“Can’t I get a positive order obeyed any more on this job?” he rasped. “How many times have I got to say that nobody from the outside is to be allowed in this tunnel?”

“Dargin hasn’t been here,” said Plegg evenly. “But he has had one of his steerers working here as a mucker.” A pause, and then, in the same even tone: “I guess you’ll have to give up your idea of running Black Jack off the lot. It isn’t worth while, anyway.”

David Vallory was still angry. “I’ll be shot if I’ll give it up!” he snapped. “I’ve got a string to pull that will clean those Powder Can dives off the map, and I’ll pull it to-night before I sleep!”

“And take the risk of Dargin’s giving this thing away?”

“I’m not considering risks just now! If that tin-horn gambler thinks he can put something over on us, let him try it.”

Plegg turned aside and stooped as if to examine a joint in the pressure pipe which led the air from the compressor-plant at the portal to the drills in the heading. When he straightened up it was to say, “Have you seen Lushing?”

“No.”

“He is here at the front again; so Altman told me this afternoon.”

“Which means that from now on we’re to have him around under foot!” gritted the angry one.

Plegg glanced back into the depths where the _chug-chug_ of the drills had ceased.

“We’d better be moving out; they’re getting ready to fire a round of shots,” he offered; and after they were in the open air and the muffled reverberations of the dynamite had come rolling out to jar upon the midnight silence: “Lushing will do more than get under foot. He is spiteful, and when he gets ready to hit out, we’ll all know about it. I’m only hoping that he and Dargin won’t get together and compare notes.”

They had started to walk down to the approach track where the waiting locomotive was standing before David made his comment on the Lushing vindictiveness.

“Plegg,” he said grittingly, “you know, and I know, the particular reason why Lushing wants to stick a knife into us. It’s running in my mind that somebody ought to put him out of the game. And if he strikes me just right, I’m the man to do it!”

XIX

The Ultimatum

On the day succeeding David Vallory’s midnight visit to the tunnel the guest list of the Alta Vista Inn had a number of additions. Upon the arrival of the stub train from Agorda, David met the three for whose coming Oswald’s letter had prepared him, and even in the moment of welcomings saw his difficulties take on added thorninesses. Oswald, his face set in lines of frowning determination, was evidently anticipating reproaches, or something sharper; but when David saw his sister, and marked her quick little groping for Oswald’s hands in the descent from the car-steps, his heart smote him and he said neither more, nor less, than was meet.

A mountain motor hack was at the service of the Alta Vista group for the drive to the top of the ridge, and with the transfer in process, David had time to observe the other arrivals. One was a well-groomed young man with sleepy eyes and a bored expression, and on one of the numerous traveling-bags obstructing the foot space in the car David read the initials “F. W.” Another of the newcomers was a rather solemn-faced person in clothes of English cut; he, also, looked bored, and the monocle which he occasionally fitted to an eye with grimaces provocative of subdued mirth in the other passengers, gave him the appearance of a weary owl contemplating sad and depressive surroundings with a single eye. David, sitting with his father and pointing out the various phases of the big job as the car climbed the ridge, needed no additional tags to enable him to identify the pair on the opposite seat. Of Miss Virginia’s retinue at least two, Mr. Frederic Wishart and the Englishman, Cumberleigh, had discovered her retreat.

In the hotel dining-room, where he secured a table for his own party, David ate his heart out under an outward mask of the welcomer’s cheerfulness when he saw Virginia making merry with the owlish Englishman and the son of the multimillionaire breakfast-food king at a table four removes distant. Gone for him were the joyous excursions over the work in the company of a khaki-clad maiden whose interest in the technical activities had been scarcely second to his own. Gone, likewise, were the ecstatic evenings in the secluded porch nook, shadowed by the wall-tapping fir-tree, with no one to interfere and none to distract.

“Yes, we are getting along fairly well,” David was saying, continuing the talk with his father and Oswald and wrenching himself forcibly aside from the heart-consuming spectacle four tables away. “If nothing unforeseen happens, the through trains ought to be running over the new line before snow flies.”

“Accidents, you mean?” queried the sweet-voiced one who sat in darkness.

“Accidents or other hamperings. Of course, on a job as big as this there is always a chance for the unexpected.” And he went on to enumerate some of the hamperings which might cause delay, carefully avoiding, however, any mention of tunnels and caving roofs therein.

Later, the table talk was led to other topics. David wished to know how they had fared on the long journey from Middleboro; he spoke of the satisfaction it gave him to have the family united again; melting a little in the glow of his own galvanized warmth, he was even hypocritical enough to descant upon the good luck which had enabled Oswald to join the vacation party.

After dinner business intruded. Plegg came up to secure his chief’s decision upon certain foundations which were being sunk for one of the bridges, and David had to go with him to the bunk-car office to consult the blue-prints. When he was free to return to the Inn he found his family scattered. Eben Grillage had swooped down upon the friend of his youth and had spirited him away; and it was only after some little search on the porches that David discovered his sister and Oswald.

Coming up behind them unnoticed, he went away again without intruding upon them. The after-glow of another of the gorgeous sunsets was spreading itself in the western heavens, and Oswald was describing it for the blind girl. It was the low-spoken admission of the blind one that made David forbear to break in. “You think I am missing it, Herbert, but that is not so. Sometimes it seems as if I could see things through your eyes better than if I had my own.”

On another of the porches David had a glimpse of Virginia and the two newcomers, and a dull fire of resentment was kindled. The daughter of the luxuries was evidently in her gayest mood, and if there were any lingering regret for the change from the technicalities and the duet evenings in the shadow of the fir-tree her manner did not betray it. David turned away when he saw her holding a match to light Wishart’s cigarette. The most infatuated of lovers may be permitted a pang of disappointment at the discovery that he has apparently been useful only as a convenient fill-in.