Part 13

Having the social--and sentimental--nerve centers thus painfully cauterized, David was fain to fall back upon the job and its requirements. There need be no lack of occupation. He knew that Plegg would be hard at work checking the estimate for the month; and there was always the overseeing round of the night shifts, which one or the other of them usually made before turning in. But there was another urge which fitted in better with the mood of the moment. Plegg’s news, that Lushing was back at the head of the inspection staff, and that Dargin was the possessor of the tunnel secret, had not yet been acted upon. In some less morose frame of mind, David Vallory might have thought twice before yielding to a sudden impulse to carry the war into the enemy’s country. As it was, he turned his back upon the hotel and a short half-hour later was entering the single street of the mining-camp.

The impulse which had sent him across the basin was not very definite in its promptings. In accordance with the minatory promise made to Plegg, he had written to the president of the railroad company, asking that some drastic action be taken in the matter of the nuisances. Something might come of this, in time, but meanwhile Dargin must be prevented from using his weapon. How to go about the preventing presented a rather difficult problem. Things which seem measurably easy of accomplishment at a distance are apt to take on new and difficult aspects in the face-to-face encounter, and as David made his way toward the Dargin lair where he had once looked on with Plegg, he was still undecided as to the manner in which the gambler should be approached.

As he soon found out, an approach of any sort at the moment was plainly impossible. The bi-monthly Grillage pay-day was still a fresh memory and the town and its resorts were filled with the money-scattering workmen. The Dargin place was packed to the doors, and David had some trouble in wedging himself into the gambling room at the rear of the bar. Here the impossibility of getting speech with Dargin became apparent. The master gambler was dealing at the faro table, and his isolation for the time being was safely assured and secure.

As David was shouldering his way back to the street entrance for a breath of clean air a man in the bar-room throng touched him upon the shoulder, calling him by name. It was a prompting of the morose demon in possession that made him turn and stare at the questioner half-angrily before he made answer. The man was well-dressed, something below the middle height, and rather heavy set, dark, and with a closely cropped brown beard. The mouth outlined beneath the tightly curled mustaches was full-lipped and gross, and the bulging eyes, with a hint of a hard drinker in them, evenly matched the sensuous lips.

“Vallory is my name, yes,” David admitted, and the bare admission was a challenge.

“Mine is Lushing,” was the curt announcement. “I suppose you have heard of me before this?”

David did not say whether he had or had not. An antagonism of a sort that he had never before experienced was laying hold upon him so fiercely that he scarcely dared trust himself to speak. This was the man who had been audacious enough to make love to Virginia, and who was now boasting that he would break the Grillage Engineering Company.

“You were looking for me?” David said.

Lushing bit the end of a cigar and struck a match.

“Yes; I’ve been wanting to get hold of you,” he rapped out, between puffs. “I want to have a talk with you. It’s too noisy here; let’s go back to one of Jack’s private rooms.”

If David Vallory hesitated it was only because the feeling of antagonism was growing by leaps and bounds, and he was afraid to be alone with the man--afraid for Lushing, not for himself.

“Is it business?” he inquired curtly. Then he added: “I’m waiting to see Dargin.”

“Yes, it’s business. And if you’re waiting for Jack, you’ll wait a long time. When he sits in at the game, he stays to see it out. Let’s get out of this mess.”

David reluctantly followed his guide to one of a series of small card-rooms back of the bar. Lushing snapped the electric light switch as one who knew his surroundings intimately, and sat down at the card-table.

“What’ll you drink?” he demanded brusquely.

“Nothing at all; I’m not thirsty.”

Lushing pressed the bell-push for himself, and when the bar-man came, ordered a whiskey-sour. “Won’t you change your mind?” he suggested, after the drink had been served; and when David shook his head: “All right; every man to his own taste. Here goes,” and he drained his glass.

More and more David was wishing himself well out of it. There could be nothing but enmity between him and this loose-lipped man across the card-table, and the savage prompting to precipitate an open conflict was becoming ungovernable.

“If you’ll say what you wish to say,” he grated. “My time is pretty strictly limited.”

“Not if you’re waiting for Jack Dargin,” said Lushing. “But perhaps you want to get back to the hotel.” Then he added in a tone which seemed to be intentionally insulting: “They tell me you are one of Eben Grillage’s pets.”

David’s anger flamed alive like a flash of dry powder, but he was telling himself in many repetitions that his time had not yet come.

“We shall get along faster, and perhaps farther, if you will cut out the personalities,” he said sourly.

“I was only repeating what I have heard. You are young to be at the head of a job of this size, and people have a way of explaining such things to suit themselves.”

“I might go into the repeating business myself, if I cared to,” David was beginning; but Lushing cut him off with a short laugh.

“I know; some of them have told you that I have a personal quarrel with Grillage, and perhaps some others have hinted that I wanted to marry into the company and got kicked out for my impudence. We’ll let that go. What was, is ancient history, and we’re dealing with the here and now. Your company is as crooked as a dog’s hind leg, and if you don’t know it, you ought to. Its days on this job are numbered.”

“Threats are the cheapest things in the world,” said David.

“You will find that this is more than a threat. You are a new man in the field, and I’ve nothing against you--as yet. What I wanted to see you for was to say to you that you’d better go while the sledding is good.”

“You are advising me to discharge myself?”

“That’s it--quit--throw up the job--climb out while you can get out with a whole skin.”

“But why?”

“Because if you don’t, you’ll be shown up with the other pirates and sneak thieves.”

David glanced again at the flushed face and bibulous eyes. It was evident that the drink tossed off while the bar-man waited was only the latest of a series which had been begun much earlier in the day.

“You are in no condition to talk business with me or with any one,” he said bluntly. “Some other time, perhaps, when you are entirely sober----”

Lushing brought his fist down upon the card-table with an oath.

“No, young fellow; you’ll hear what I’ve got to say now, and then you may take it straight to the fish-eyed old buccaneer you’re working for. Grillage hasn’t a dollar in this world that he has made honestly, and you may tell him I say so. Also, you may tell him that I’m going to make it my business to hound him to his finish. When all the crooked deals he has worked off on this job are shown up, he’ll be lucky if he can stay out of the pen. On top of all that, you may tell him that his daughter will see the day when she’ll beg me on her knees to let up--and I won’t do it!”

David was upon his feet and his eyes were blazing.

“You’ve said enough, and more than enough!” he broke out in hot wrath. “If you were not too drunk to be held accountable, I’d cram your words down your neck for that insult to Miss Grillage! Past that, I’ll say, once for all, that Mr. Grillage is more than my employer; he is my friend and my father’s friend. Go to it when you’re ready, and I shall know how to get back at you.”

At this, Lushing whipped an automatic pistol from his pocket and laid it upon the table, covering it with his hand.

“You make any bad breaks and I’ll drill you,” he said viciously. “Take that for a back-sight any time you feel tempted to beat me up. When a man of your size comes at me, I shoot first and shoot quick. I’m out to get your crooked company and the man who owns it. You say you’ll fight for him, and that puts you on the black list. I’m fair enough to give you a tip, and I’ve given it to you. If you don’t get off this job quick and fade away, you’ll wake up some fine morning to find yourself dead.”

What little calm judgment David Vallory still retained was telling him to go away; that there was nothing to be gained by staying and listening to Lushing’s threats. But by this time he was well out of reach of any of the calm voices.

“You’re taking it for granted that I’m unarmed, and you are right,” he flashed back. “I don’t care for your gun. You’ve laid the law down for me, and now I’ll lay a little of it down for you. Your inspectors will be welcome on the job anywhere and at any time, but as for yourself, you’ll stay away from it. If you show up in any camp of mine, you want to bring that gun along with you, for I shall take care to have one of my own, and I’ll use it!”

Lushing picked up the weapon and let it lie in his palm.

“Did the little Grillage tell you to kill me off out of the way?” he leered.

That was the final straw. David Vallory flung himself across the card-table in a mad-bull charge, carrying the table with him in his eagerness to close with his antagonist. For a few breathless seconds the battle was obstructed. David’s rush had borne Lushing backward, tilting the chair in which he was sitting until it brought up against the wall and was crushed under his weight and David’s and that of the overturned table. Too furious to fight coolly, David tried to snatch the wreck of the broken chair out of the way so that he could get at the man entangled in it and held down by the tipped table. One good punch he got in, or thought he did, and then there was a stunning crash, a fleeting whiff of powder smoke, and the light went out.

XX

In the Ore Shed

When David came to his senses he found himself lying on bare ground in the dark. There seemed to be a weight like that of an elephant’s knee pressing upon his chest, and it was with the greatest difficulty that he could get his breath. Somewhere near at hand he could hear sounds as of a woman sobbing. Next he realized vaguely that his boots had been taken off. Groping aimlessly in the dark, his hand found the woman. She was kneeling beside him, and at his touch the sobs became a choking cry.

“Davie, dear; is it yourself that’s alive?” The voice seemed to come from an immense distance, but he heard it and recognized it.

“You, Judith?”--then, jerkily: “What’s--happened--to me?”

“’Tis killed dead you are!” she whimpered.

“Nothing like it.” The words were coming a bit easier now and he did not have to stop and gasp between each pair of them. Also, he was beginning to remember some of the events precedent. “Did--did the house fall down on me?” he asked.

“Jim Lushing--the black curse be upon him!--he shot you; didn’t you know that?”

“I don’t remember. Whereabouts am I hit?”

“I wouldn’t be knowing that at all, Davie; I’m just this minute here. The shed watchman came and told me that Lushing had killed you in Jack’s place down the street. ’Twas scared they were to have you found dead in that place, so they carried you here.”

“Scared?” said David.

“For what your men might do; there’s a many of them in town, and they’d have wrecked the place. Where is it hurting you, Davie, dear?”

“I feel as if somebody had given me the heart punch--I believe that’s what the ring-fighters call it. But it’s letting up a bit now. Where am I?”

“In the Murtrie ore shed. They’d be putting it up to Mike Drogheen, the watchman, to say he’d shot you--taking you for an ore thief.”

“And paying him well for it, I suppose.” He was groping carefully for the wound and found only a rip in the left breast of the brown duck shooting-coat. There was no blood; only a tremendous soreness. He raised himself and sat up. “If we only had a light of some sort,” he muttered.

“Wait,” she said, and ran away to come back within the minute with the watchman’s lantern. “Poor old Mike’s hiding beyond in the blacksmith shop, scared trembling at the lie he’s thinking he’s got to tell. Don’t sit up, Davie; you might be bleeding to death.”

David was groping again, and this time, out of the ripped pocket of the brown coat he fished an engineer’s field-note book. Then he knew why there was no blood, and why the body area behind the pocket was as painful as if it had been beaten with a hammer. Lushing’s shot had been a glancing one, and the thick note-book had turned it aside. There was little left of the book save the perforated leather cover and a mass of torn leaves.

“The fellows who carried me off must have been pretty badly rattled, not to have found out that I wasn’t even scratched,” he commented.

“’Tis no wonder. When Mike brought me here, the doctor himself would have said you were dead. There was no breath in you at all, and your heart had stopped entirely.”

“What became of Lushing?”

“’Tis little I know, or care--the black dog! Mike says they told him you’d half killed him.”

“I think I meant to,” said David soberly. “And after this, I suppose I’ll have to kill him--or let him kill me. But that’s a future. He knows what he’s got to do if he wants to keep on living. Where are my boots?”

She found the boots with the help of the lantern and gave them to him. He put them on, though the effort, and the lacing of them, made him grit his teeth and swear.

“What did they want to take my boots off for?” he growled.

“Don’t you know?” she asked. “’Tis that way in the camps. They wouldn’t be letting anybody die with his boots on, if they could help it.”

“Rotten superstition!” he complained, and swore again.

The woman heard wonderingly.

“’Tis you that have changed, Davie, till I’d hardly be knowing you,” she said.

“Yes; I’ve changed. And so have you, Judith. Are you living with Dargin?”

“I am not!”

“But from what they tell me, you might as well be. You’ve taken help from him.”

“And if I have; ’tis nothing I’ve taken that an honest woman might not take.”

“You’re telling me the truth?”

“I am. When did I ever lie to you, Davie?”

“Never,” he conceded. But the main question was yet untouched. “I know how you came here to Powder Can--Plegg told me,” he went on bluntly. “It’s no place for you, here in Powder Can. You know that, don’t you?”

“Where would I be going, then?”

David held his head in his hands and tried to think. With the return of his faculties the spirit of morose disheartenment and impatient resentment which had brought him to the mining-camp, and had been the chief factor in precipitating the quarrel with Lushing, was reasserting itself. Since the bitter moods grow by what they feed upon, he could see nothing in just perspective. What a fool’s Paradise he had been living in since the Grillage private car had come to anchor in the construction yard! He had been crying for the moon, and the moon had been kind enough to shine for him--when there was no one else to shine upon. But now there were others....

“I don’t know,” he said abstractedly, in answer to her question as to where she should go. “It’s a pretty tough old world, Judith.” Then, suddenly: “Are you still blaming me?”

“For what would I be blaming you?”

“For chasing around with you in the old days and giving you the idea that I was going to marry you some time?”

“That’s all past and gone, Davie, dear.”

“Past and gone, maybe, but that doesn’t let me out. I know you’ve got your father, but I can’t help feeling more or less responsible for you. It has worried me a lot.”

“You shouldn’t be worrying.”

“I can’t help it. Last year, after I went to Wisconsin, I had a sort of plan worked out, and I wrote you twice before I found out that you’d left Middleboro. What you need--what you’ve always needed, Judith--is something that you could put your whole heart into, like--well, like music. My notion was that you could go to some good conservatory and study, and I was ready to help you. Is it too late to consider something of that kind now?”

She shook her head. “’Tis much too late, Davie.”

“You mean that you’re tied up with this man Dargin?”

“We’ll leave Jack Dargin be. There’s the old father; he’s not what he used to be, Davie; what with mother dying, and me----”

“I know,” he interposed hastily. “Plegg told me about that, too. But here’s more trouble, Judith. This man Dargin is your friend, or at least I’m trying to believe that he has befriended you, and I’ve got to chase him and his bunch out of Powder Can. I came over here to-night to tell him so. That muddles things still worse.”

“You’d better be letting Powder Can alone.”

“No, I can’t do that; it’s cutting too much out of the efficiency record on the job. I can’t fight Lushing and his outfit, and a booze joint as well. And right there, you break in. From what you’ve admitted, a lick at Jack Dargin is going to hurt you worse than it will him. And I don’t want to hurt you, Judith.”

“You shouldn’t be thinking so much about me.”

“Yes, I should; you need somebody to think about you. I wish you’d consider that notion of mine. You could take your father with you. He is too good a workman to be throwing himself away in a mine repair shop. He can get a better job anywhere he goes. I could get Mr. Grillage to help a bit in that direction. He knows everybody, everywhere.”

“He’d be wanting to know why,” she objected.

“What if he does? I’ll tell him why.”

“Tell him that you’re trying to help a poor girl back to her feet?--and you wanting to marry his daughter?”

“Who told you I wanted to marry his daughter?”

“There’s little goes on in the camps that we don’t hear in Powder Can. There’s never a man of yours to come over here without having his say about you and the daughter of the man you’d be working for. ’Tis well I know it was Vinnie Grillage you were telling me about that night at home when you were leaving. I’d not be messing up your life and hers, Davie.”

He forced a sour smile. “My part of it is already messed up. Vinnie has been good to me--chiefly because we were kiddies together, long before I knew you, Judith. But that’s all there is to it. There are two other entries now, and I’m out of the race. Does that make it any easier for you to think of my plan?”

“It does not!” she flashed out, almost vindictively, he thought.

Since there seemed to be nothing more to be said, he got upon his feet, scarcely realizing that the girl stooped and put her arms around him and half lifted him. For a few seconds the dimly lighted interior of the ore shed spun around in dizzying circles, and the bullet bruise throbbed like a whirlwind of hammer blows. But he found he could breathe better standing.

“I must get back to camp,” he said. “Have you any idea what time it is?”

“’Tis early yet.” Then, anxiously: “You couldn’t be walking all that way, Davie!”

“Yes, I can; I’ll be all right in a few minutes more. Can you show me the way out of this place? I don’t want to go through the town unless I have to.”

She did not show him; she led him, with a strong arm under his to steady him. At the wagon gate at the rear of the ore yard he would have sent her home, but she would not go. “’Tis not fit you are to be going alone,” she said; and in spite of his urgings she went on with him, choosing a path that skirted the shoulder of the hill and left the town to the right. In sober silence they walked on until half of the distance between Powder Can and the construction camp lay behind them. Then David Vallory made his urgings mandatory.

“You must go back,” he insisted. “I’m quite all right, now. If Dargin should hear of this----”

“What is it Jack Dargin can do to you?” she interrupted shortly.

“It is something about the work; something that he knows. If he should tell Lushing----”

She interrupted again. “What has Jack got against you that would make him be giving you away to Jim Lushing?”

“I told you a little while ago. I’m trying to wipe him and his man-traps off the map, and he doubtless knows it.”

“Jack Dargin would only be respecting you the more for that. Sure, it’s himself that knows how bad Powder Camp would be needing a cleaning up.”

“But, good heavens, girl! Dargin is the head and front of the lawlessness himself!”

“’Tis so; but that makes no difference. You can’t tell what’s in the heart of a man, Davie--and I know Jack Dargin; that side of him that not you, nor any one else knows. He’d fight you; maybe he’d kill you. But he’d respect you the more.”

There was a grim humor in the paradox, but David Vallory was not in the mood to appreciate it.

“He’ll be gunning for me; and so will Lushing. But I don’t care; I’ll fight the whole outfit, if I have to. I was fool enough to go into that dive to-night unarmed, but that won’t happen again. Lushing had pulled a gun on me; that was one reason why I jumped him. The next time----”

“’Tis little you’d know about the shooting, Davie.”

“What I don’t know I can learn. Now you are going straight back home from here ... no, not another step with me. Good-night--Glory--and--God bless you!”

Once again, if David Vallory could have had a small modicum of the gift of omniscience; could have detached his astral body, let us say, to send it back over the road he had just traversed; there would have been revelations, puzzling, perhaps, but still not without interest to one fighting against the powers of darkness. At the side of the road the detached messenger would have found a woman, crumpled in a forlorn heap on the cold ground, and sobbing as if her heart would break. Still farther back, in the mining-camp itself, the astral David might have looked into a shabbily luxurious upper room where a curious confirmation of Judith Fallon’s prediction touching the contradictory motives which may lie side by side in the human heart was staging itself.

After the fight in the card-room and its supposed tragical outcome, the down-stairs game-room had been hastily closed. As on the night of Plegg’s eavesdropping, the upper room held two occupants, and they were the same two whose voices had reached the first assistant through the partly opened gallery window. And, as before, the lop-shouldered man was the bearer of news.

“By cripes! I guess I know what I’m talking about?” he snarled. “I’ve just come from there. He’s gone, I tell you; lit out--skipped. The watchman swears he don’t know nothin’ about it--didn’t go near the shed after they took him there.”

The master gambler, again with his hands in his pockets, and again tilting gently in the wooden-seated chair, nodded his approval. “I’m glad of it,” he said.

“The hell you are! And him tryin’ to butt in on your game and run you out?”

“That’s what I said”--curtly.

“And you ain’t goin’ to use that dope that you pulled out o’ me at the end of a gun?”

“Not in a thousand years, Simmy. Haven’t you been with me long enough to know that I’m no damn’ worm to crawl up a man’s leg and bite him to death? You say the young duck’s alive and has made his get-away. That’s all right. If he comes at me like a two-fisted man, maybe I’ll send him word that he’d better come heeled. But that’s all.”

“You won’t take the dope and do him up the way I was tellin’ you?”

“Nothing doing.”

“Well, then, by cripes! I know somebody that will take it--and pay good money for it!” shrilled the disappointed one.

“Grillage, you mean?”

“No; I tried him, and what do I get? He tells that big, black nigger porter of his to put me out of the car. I’ll show him--him and Vallory at the same clatter!”

The master gambler got up, as if to signify that he had heard enough.