Part 14

“Better look out that you don’t get stepped on--like other worms--Simmy,” he warned; and then, reaching for the hanging lamp over the table to turn it out: “Get a crawl on you; I’m going to shut up shop.”

XXI

The Other David

When David Vallory, plodding doggedly, reached the construction camp upon his return from Powder Can, he found Herbert Oswald waiting for him at the steps of the office bunk car.

“Everybody had gone to bed in the hotel, and I thought I’d straggle down to see if I could find your headquarters,” was the way in which the young lawyer accounted for himself. “If you are tired and want to turn in, you are at liberty to shoo me away.”

“No,” said David crisply. “Come on in.”

Oswald groped his way into the dark interior of the car at the heels of his crusty welcomer and found a seat on Plegg’s unoccupied bunk while David was lighting a lamp. At the blowing-out of the match, the lamp-lighter stood staring gloomily down upon his late-in-the-evening visitor.

“I know pretty well what you’ve come to say,” he thrust in gruffly. “Suppose you say it and have it over with.”

Oswald looked up in mild surprise.

“I didn’t come here to scrap with you, David. And, so far as I know, I haven’t done anything to make you run at me with a chip on your shoulder. Of course, I know you are thinking I ought not to have come out here, but----”

“What I may think doesn’t seem to cut any figure,” said David, with the air of a man who would rather precipitate a quarrel than avoid one. “I told you exactly and precisely what I thought a year ago as I was leaving Middleboro, and I haven’t had any reason to change my mind.”

Oswald, ready enough in any legal matching of man against man, seemed helplessly nonplussed.

“You have changed rather ferociously,” he remarked. “I don’t quite know how to take you. If you are giving me a fair shot at your present self, you are not the David Vallory I used to know.”

“No, I am not the same. A little while ago I was trying my best to kill a man; I shall do it yet, one of these days, if he doesn’t keep out of my sight. But go on and say what you’ve got to say.”

“It amounts to this: for a whole year I’ve kept faith with you--honest faith--and every day of that year has been a day of heartburnings and regrets. Your attitude toward your sister is entirely unreasonable. There have been blind wives before this, and they have been happy wives--and mothers, for that matter; at least, their blindness hasn’t necessarily been a bar to happiness. A year ago, if I had spoken, I should have spoken only for myself: now I am speaking for Lucille as well as for myself.”

“All of which is entirely beside the question,” was the irritable rejoinder. “I know Lucille, and however far she has allowed herself to go in the matter of learning to care for you or for any man, it’s a sure thing she has never thought of marriage, even as a possibility. If you propose it, two things will happen; she will wake up to the fact that she has been mistaking love for friendship; and she will realize that she has to refuse the love. After that, her life will be nothing but a miserable, repining blank.”

“I can’t agree with you at all,” objected the lover, argumentatively ready to defend his own point of view. “If you were the David Vallory I once knew, you would listen to reason; at least, to the extent of giving your sister a voice in ordering her own future. I have come to the fork of the road, David, and I am here to say it to you, face to face. I need Lucille, and she needs me. When the time is fully ripe I shall ask her to be my wife. You put me under bonds of a certain sort a year ago, but now I shall refuse longer to be bound by them; I repudiate them absolutely.”

David Vallory sat down, and for a time the silence of the small car interior was broken only by the clash and jangle of a shifting-engine in the upper yard. Finally the decision came.

“Oswald, Lucille is my sister, and I am going to stand between her and the life of heartbroken wretchedness you are planning for her. You give me your word that you will not break over while you are both here together, and upon that condition you may stay in Powder Gap as long as you see fit.”

Oswald stood up and his lips were pale.

“And if I refuse to submit to any such unreasonable and humiliating condition--what then?”

David Vallory frowned up at his one-time schoolmate.

“You say that you have been bound by your promise of a year ago, but that you now repudiate it; as a man of honor, you are bound by it until I release you.”

“You are not answering my question.”

“I’ll answer it. The stub train going east leaves here every morning at seven-thirty; I’ll give you a day or two in which to think it over--with the promise still holding good.”

“And if, at the end of the day or two, I still refuse to recognize your right to interfere?”

“This is not Middleboro; and, as you have remarked, I am not the David Vallory you used to know. If you still decline to listen to reason, you’ll take that train and get out of here--if I have to hog-tie you and throw you into the baggage-car!”

“_David!_”

“You needn’t beg; I mean it. I am neither drunk nor insane. You have said your say and I have said mine, and that settles it.”

The young lawyer took a step toward the door. But with his hand on the knob he stopped and faced about.

“So this is what Eben Grillage has done for you, is it?” he grated. “Like master, like man; with the doctrine of brute force for your code. I wouldn’t have believed it possible for the son of your father, David.”

“I have had the brute force all along, only I haven’t had sense enough to apply it,” was the surly rejoinder. “But it’s never too late to mend. Good-night--if you’re going.”

“I am going, but not before I have finished saying my say. For the present, and purely because I don’t consider the time fully ripe, I shall postpone asking your sister to marry me. But I refuse utterly and definitely to be bound by your tyrannical conditions.”

Shortly after Oswald had gone, David Vallory rummaged in Plegg’s kit-locker until he found a blued service revolver in its holster. He hung it under his coat by the shoulder-strap, and then dug further for a supply of cartridges. Thus armed, he took to the open again. The shock of the bullet bruise was still unsteadying him, and the bruise itself was hurting savagely, but he would not give up to it. At Brady’s Cut he found Plegg.

“The war is on,” he announced briefly, when he had taken the first assistant aside.

“You have seen Lushing?” Plegg asked.

“Yes; and he gave himself away: says he means to break us. We had it back and forth for a few minutes, and then he pulled a gun on me.”

“Good Lord!” said Plegg. “Where were you?”

“In one of Dargin’s card-rooms. We mixed it. I couldn’t stand for the gun-pulling--and some other things. He tried to plug me, but I’m hoping he got as good as he sent. Anyhow, I’ve cleared the air a bit. I’ve taken the liberty of borrowing your extra forty-five, and I’m going loaded for him after this. I’ve told him what he may expect if he shows his face on this job again while I’m here.”

“For heaven’s sake! I--well, it isn’t my put in, but you’ve rather got me going, you know. Can you--er--do you know how to use the forty-five?”

“Not very well; I did a little pistol-practice in Florida. But to-morrow you’ll take me back in the hills and show me a bit. Just now we’ve got other fish to fry. We’re going to fight Lushing on his own ground. He says we’re a gang of thieves, and if we have the name, we may as well have the game.”

“But even if you’ve bluffed him into staying off the job, he still has the ear of the railroad people.”

“That’s all right; I’ll fight him to a knockout, all the way up to Mr. Ford--if he wants to carry it that far. In the meantime we’ll show him, and the men who are paying his salary, that we know how to hit back when they call us thieves. Pass the word to our staff, and let the fellows pass it on to the foremen and subcontractors. They’ll know how to cut the corners, and how to keep the railroad inspectors from finding out--no coarse-hand work, you know, Plegg, but every dollar that can be squeezed out of this job from now on. That’s what we want.”

Plegg was shaking his head like a man in a maze; and the new chief--new now in his attitude as well as in the shortness of his service--went on.

“About that weak spot in the tunnel; have you found out who gave it away to Dargin?”

“Yes; a fellow named Backus, who worked in one of the muck shifts. The men say he was a steerer for Dargin’s faro-game.”

“What has become of him?”

“He’s fired: I suppose he’s in Powder Can.”

“He is the man we want. I’m going to put it up to you, Plegg, to find him and grab him before he gets next to Lushing. When he is found, buy him, and shoot him out of the country--anywhere where he’ll be out of Lushing’s reach until we get this job done.”

“And if he can’t be bought?”

“Lock him up somewhere and keep him from talking. Now about the bad roof itself: that is where Lushing can hit us the hardest. Give Regnier his tip, and do it to-night. Tell him to have the tunnel re-wired for lights so there won’t be a bulb anywhere near that soft spot. Tell him to keep his men quiet if he has to raise the pay of every man in the three shifts. Then make him understand that the rule against the admission of outsiders must be rigidly enforced, if he has to maintain an armed guard at the portal.”

“That won’t keep Lushing’s inspectors out,” Plegg suggested mildly.

“I’m coming to that. Regnier must see to it that some man of ours who can be trusted is within reach every time an inspector goes in. We don’t care to hurt anybody needlessly, but if one of our hard-rock bullies should happen to get into a scrap with the man who chances to discover that ‘fault’--well, you know what I mean. Mr. Grillage says that place is perfectly safe, and we’re going to take his word for it.”

The first assistant nodded, and the slow smile bared his teeth and wrinkled at the corners of his eyes.

“I certainly owe you an apology,” he said, with the faintest suggestion of irony in his tone; “several of them, in fact. There was a time when I fancied you were going to be too good--to revert to that morning in the Pullman a year ago; and I imagine Mr. Grillage harbored the same inadequate notion. You’ll want to be getting back to headquarters, I suppose: there is an engine due down from the tunnel--there it comes--I’ll flag it for you.”

David caught the eastbound engine, but he did not stop off at the headquarters camp. That was because Crawford, the concrete bridge builder, was at the yard platform to climb to the cab with a bit of news. Under new orders, inspectors had been placed at the three bridges in Crawford’s section, and they were in relays so that there was hardly an hour in the three shifts when one of them was not on duty. Crawford was looking for Plegg, but when he found that the first assistant was unattainable, he unburdened himself to the chief, setting forth the hard conditions.

“Well?” said David, while the engine halted.

“It’s--er--making it sort of difficult for me,” said Crawford, unwilling to go much deeper into the matter in the face of Plegg’s inhibition forbidding detail talk with the boss.

“Difficult? How?”

“Why--er--there can’t very well be two bosses on a job, and when I give an order and Strayer countermands it----”

“Do you mean to say that Strayer is trying to boss your job?”

“It amounts to that.”

David turned to the engine-driver.

“Run us down to bridge Number Two, Pete,” he ordered, and the heavy construction locomotive lumbered down through the yard and out over the switches.

The run was a short one, and at the bridge approach David and his assistant got off to walk over to the new structure. The bridge plant was well lighted by carbide gas flares, and prominent on the form stagings was the big figure of Strayer, the railroad inspector. David Vallory called up to him.

“Come down here a minute, Strayer; I want to talk to you,” he said.

When the railroad engineer joined him he led the way to the cement platform, where the noise of the mixer was less insistent.

“What’s the idea, Strayer?” he demanded.

The big man did not affect to misunderstand.

“You know perfectly well, Vallory; or if you don’t, you ought to. Crawford’s scamping these bridges shamelessly. He is scanting the ‘mix’, and also the reinforcing steel. I’ve caught him at it.”

“Why didn’t you complain to me?”

“What the devil good would it do? I’ve yelled at you people for everything, and you patch one hole only to leave another.”

“I suppose you have your orders to come here and take the direction of the work out of the hands of my man?”

“I have orders to see that you don’t pull any more bones on us, if I have to eat and sleep on the job to prevent it. And I’m like little old Casabianca, Vallory; I obey orders.”

“Who gave you the orders?”

“Lushing: he’s back now.”

“Don’t you know that he’s a damned crook, himself, Strayer?”

The square-jawed, bearded inspector laughed grimly.

“Set a thief to catch a thief, eh?” he grinned. “Between us two, Vallory, I haven’t much use for Lushing; none at all, personally. But he’s the boss.”

“Do you know where he is now?”

“Yes; he’s over at Powder Can: makes his headquarters in the Hophra House.”

“I take it you’re not particularly struck on standing over Crawford this way, day and night, are you?”

“Well, if you put it that way, I’m not. Crawford’s a good boy, and he means well. See here, Vallory, if you’ll give me your word that you’ll make the boy live up to the specifications on these bridges, I’ll do what I can to keep Lushing off of you. Is it a go?”

David was thoughtful for a moment, and then he said: “I’ll do better than that, Strayer. I’m needing another engineer to handle the tunnel approach work on the other side of the mountain. I know what the railroad company is paying you, and I’ll better the salary. This is straight goods. What do you say?”

The big man shook his head slowly.

“You oughtn’t to make a break like that at me, Vallory, and you know it. It’s too bald, and--well, dog-gone it all, I thought better of you!” The inspector turned and walked away with his head down and his hands in his pockets. David Vallory waited until he had passed the corner of the cement house, and then, at a signal from Crawford, he sprang upon the bridge stagings.

“We’re up against it,” said the bridge builder hastily; “that’s why I went after Plegg. We’ve reached the point where we’ve got to place the top span reinforcement, _and I haven’t got the steel_!”

“How is that?”

“It’s this way,” Crawford explained, still more hurriedly. “When we begun on this job, Plegg and I figured the plans over and he--that is, we concluded that it was simply wasting steel to put it in as thickly as the plans called for--why, the factor of safety was the whole cheese! So we agreed to cut the steel down. If you can’t get Strayer away from here for an hour or so, I’ll have to stop the run and take the risk of the concrete’s setting in the forms while we’re getting some more steel down here.”

A month earlier David Vallory would have known what to say, and would have said it, without garnishings. But now he merely nodded and walked down the runway and across to the cement house where Strayer was still pacing back and forth.

“This situation needs threshing out from the bottom up, Strayer,” he began crisply. “Suppose you get on the engine and go up to headquarters with me where we can fight it out to some sort of a conclusion. I’m tired of this business of scrapping with you fellows all the time.”

“I’m sorry, Vallory, but Lushing is the man you’ll have to talk to.”

“You’re his second, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but you know the rules; I don’t have anything to say when he is on the job.”

“Well, he isn’t on the job. He had a racket with a man over in Powder Can a couple of hours ago, and they tell me he’s knocked out for the present. That puts it up to you, again, doesn’t it?”

“Why, yes; I guess so--if he’s--how badly is he hurt?”

“I don’t know; pulled a gun on a man, and the man jumped him.”

Strayer shook his head.

“That’s bad; neither Mr. Ford nor Mr. Maxwell will stand for anything like that. Just between us two, Vallory, Lushing has always spent a lot of time in Powder Can--did it while he was with your people.”

“I know. But now that he’s out of it, temporarily, at least, why can’t we get together and straighten up some of the kinks? You know how exasperating it is for these fellows of mine to have somebody standing over them with a club all the time. Come on up to camp with me and we’ll hammer it out.”

Crawford had stopped his concrete mixer because he had to; no more concrete could be poured until the steel bars were placed. The crisis had come, and while Strayer hesitated, David Vallory, the new David, took the deep-water plunge into the stagnant pool of open trickery. Crawford’s men were bringing the scanted supply of steel bars, getting in each other’s way to kill time. David stepped over to the steel pile and counted the pieces.

“Say, Crawford!” he called out; “you haven’t got enough steel here! Heavens and earth, man! don’t you know any better than to run right up against a shortage like this?”

Crawford gasped twice, and then he understood. “Ding bust it, Mr. Vallory, I ought to be fired! Mr. Strayer, here, has been keeping me so busy that I haven’t looked at that steel pile. What are we going to do?”

“Do? You’ll just have to place what you’ve got, and hold your mixer until we can get some more down to you. I’ll go back to the yard and see that it’s hustled out. Come on, Strayer; let’s take a ride.”

The crisis was past and the big inspector climbed on the engine with the Grillage chief.

“I’ll take an hour off with you, Vallory, after I’ve seen that steel put on the car,” he laughed; and at a sign from David, the throttle was opened and the locomotive clattered away up the grade.

XXII

At Bridge Three

After the dash in the card-room at Black Jack Dargin’s place, and its immediate and transforming consequences, Silas Plegg, shrewd observer and most efficient of assistants, looked confidently for trouble, and went about prepared to stand by his chief when the trouble should materialize. It was during Lushing’s administration as the Grillage chief of construction that the Powder Can kennels had begun to flourish, and it had been broadly hinted that he had been a sharer in the profits. Rumor had it that he was still hand-in-glove with the kennel-keepers; and with such a lawless contingent at his command, the ex-chief became--at least in Plegg’s estimation--a man whose enmity was to be feared.

Besides keeping a brotherly watch over his chief, Plegg contrived to keep in touch with the Powder Can end of things. Lushing, he learned, had been laid up for a matter of two or three days as the result of the brief card-room battle, and he was still making his headquarters in the Powder Can tavern. Thus far he had not been visible on the work, though from the increased activities of his inspectors it was apparent that he was directing a searching campaign of investigation.

Vallory’s men were required to dig try-holes beside foundation walls of abutments and retaining masonry to prove that the foundations went deep enough. Test-borings were made in the fills to ascertain their density. The slopes of the hill cuttings were surveyed and re-surveyed to make sure that the angles agreed with the map notes. In one of the bridges, Strayer--this time with apologies to David Vallory--had holes drilled to verify the placing of the reinforcing steel. In uncounted ways the investigation was pushed; to the discomfort of all concerned--and also to the sharpening of the wits of those who had something to conceal.

Throughout this interval David Vallory gave an excellent imitation of a man hard at work, riding the line incessantly, encouraging, driving; plotting with his subordinates to outwit the inspectors, and keeping a vengeful eye out for Lushing. In due time it began to be whispered about that “the little big boss,” as he was affectionately called by the rank and file, not only “had it in” for Lushing, but that he had fairly bluffed the chief inspector off the job. It was known that he went armed; and on at least one occasion when he disappeared for an hour or so in Little Creek gorge, there was some one to report that he had spent the time practicing at a target with a “forty-five.”

Naturally, with so many working crises thickly bestudding the days, David had little time to climb the hill to the Inn; or, if he had the time, he seldom took it. Duty visits he paid, indeed, to his father and sister in the tree-sheltered cottage; but these were brief--crabbedly brief when Oswald chanced to be one of the cottage’s inmates. On all of these excursions he avoided the hotel, with morose offishness in the saddle. None the less, he now and then got a glimpse of Virginia--and chanced to see her always in company with one or both of the men upon whom the desirable moon--unattainable by those who cry for it--seemed now to be shining its brightest.

It was after one of these brief evening visits to the cottage under the pines that David found Plegg waiting for him at the foot of the ridge.

“Just to make sure you shouldn’t be taken off your guard,” said the first assistant; and without further preface: “Lushing is on his way up here with a bunch of men sworn in as deputies. Crawford has just ’phoned in from bridge Number One.”

“What’s the object?”

“Nobody seems to know, but I have a guess coming. Burford, the new transit-man working with Strayer, gave me a hint. He’s a soak, and yesterday, after he’d been hitting his pocket-bottle pretty freely, he let out a word or two about something sensational which was to follow this epidemic of inspection we’ve been having.”

“Didn’t describe it, did he?”

“No; he was so plainly ‘lit up’ that I didn’t pay much attention to him. But since, I’ve been piecing the odd bits together. This dead set that the railroad force has been making at us can have only one object--to get evidence of some sort against us that will hold in court.”

“Well?”

“I shouldn’t wonder if they have the evidence.”

“The tunnel?”

“No; that is safe, as yet, I believe. It is in the bridges. There is a certain specified penalty for jerry-building bridges that are to be used for human traffic, you know.”

“Bosh!” said David. “These little two-by-four spans we are throwing over the Powder River would carry anything you could pile upon them; you know they would, Plegg. And they’d do it if they didn’t have a single bar of steel in them.”

“Sure!” said Plegg, with a dry smile. “But we’d better be getting over to the car and the ’phone. If those temporary sheriffs are coming up here, we ought to know it.”

“Lushing won’t come,” David averred, as they walked together toward the bunk car office.

“Think not?”

“He’d better not.”

The service telephone was buzzing when they entered the car. Plegg picked up the receiver and held it to his ear. After a time, he said, “It’s Crawford again. He is at Number Three bridge now. The Lushing crowd had a break-down with their gasoline push-car, and Tommy skipped across the hill in the hair-pin curve and got to Number Three ahead of them. He says he talked to one of the men who came back to Number One to borrow a monkey-wrench. The man was foolish enough to let the cat out of the bag and brag about it. The bunch is coming up here to arrest you and Mr. Grillage. Crawford wants to know what he shall do with the few minutes he has at his disposal.”

David Vallory took three seconds for reflection.

“Tell him he has a brain of his own, and now is a good time to use it,” he said shortly. “And you may add that we’d like to buy a little delay if there is any in the market.”