Part 15

Plegg repeated the message, rounding it out with a demand for a quick report as to results. The waiting interval was remarkably short. When the ’phone buzzed again, Plegg answered with a single word. “Shoot!” he said, and David, sitting in the opposite bunk, could hear the minified repetition of the reporting voice without being able to distinguish the words. Crawford was brief, as befitted a man of action; and when Plegg returned the receiver to its hook he was smiling grimly.

“You’ll have to hand it to Tommy for being able to make a hurry use of what little brain he may have,” he commented. “He slipped a stick of dynamite into the stone bin at Number Three, and now he says there are about forty tons of crushed rock spilled on the track for the gasoline car to climb over. And the car is not yet in sight.”

“That is better,” said David coolly. “They’ll get around the obstruction, no doubt, but it will hold them for a little while. Now for our part of it. You once remarked that the law doesn’t reach this far from the nearest court-house. We don’t know, officially, that these men are coming as officers, and we’ll act upon that ignorance. You go over to the bunk shacks and turn out a handful of Brady’s day-shift men. Tell them to bring pick-handles. Then go to the light plant and tell the night engineer to listen for a pistol shot. If he hears one, he is to pull the switch on the yard circuit and leave us in the dark.”

“So that the Lushing crowd won’t be able to identify any of us?”

“So that we shan’t be able to identify them--as officers.”

“Once more I’m apologizing to you,” said Plegg, in mild irony. “Anything else?”

“Nothing, except that you are to pick your men, and let it be understood that the raiders are after Mr. Grillage and me. If you pick the right men, they’ll fight for that. I’ll run over to the _Athenia_ and get Mr. Grillage out of the way. I don’t want to have him mixed up in this, even by implication.”

As Plegg went one way, David went the other, hurrying across to the private Pullman, which he knew was occupied because it was lighted. When he pushed through the vestibule swing-door he found the contractor-king poring over an estimate sheet. Taken for an instant off his guard, the big man looked haggard and care-worn. It was this that made David begin with a sober protest.

“You put in too many hours down here, Mr. Grillage,” he said, much as he might have said it to his own father. “How about that fishing trip you were going to take with Dad?”

“We’re going, pretty soon, now,” was the gruff reply. And then: “David, you’re right; I’ve got too darned many irons in the fire, and some of ’em get too hot, and some of ’em freeze. Hurry up and get through with this Short Line crucifixion, so you can take hold and blow some of the other bellowses for me.”

“‘Crucifixion’ is right!” said David, with a workmanlike scowl. “I haven’t worried you much about the job lately, but the railroad people--with Lushing egging them on, of course--have been mighty active for the past few days--perniciously active, I’d say. I didn’t know what was up until just now; though I’ve been ready for anything. It seems they’ve been trying to find a peg upon which to hang a legal fight, and they think they’ve found it--just what sort of a peg, I don’t know.”

“Legal, you say; do you mean criminal?”

“Plegg thinks it may be; based on alleged jerry-work on the bridges, or something of that sort. Anyhow, Lushing is on his way up here with a gang of subsidized deputies, and Crawford telephones that the object of the raid is to arrest you and me.”

“Huh!” grunted the giant, straightening himself in his chair. “Going to try that, is he?”

“So Crawford says. I came to ask you to go up to the hotel and let me handle it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Some few days ago I met Lushing and we had a--er--well, a little disagreement, you might call it. He----”

“I heard about it,” interrupted the boss of bosses, with a satisfied grin. “You beat him up and warned him to stay off the job if he wanted to keep his hide whole. I owe you something for that, David; it did me a whole lot of good. But go on.”

“Plegg’s getting a few of Brady’s Irishmen together, and we’ll take care of these raiders. We don’t know, in any legal way, that they are deputies, and we shall act accordingly. What I need is to get you out of it; so far out that you won’t know anything about it, if any one should ask you after the fact.”

Eben Grillage gripped the edge of his desk with both hands and pulled himself out of his chair. David marked the forced muscle-strain that went into the effort, and immediately saw a curious change come over the massive face with its staring eyes and hanging, dewlap jaws.

“Run away from a fight, David? I guess--it would be the--first----”

David leaped, and was in time to ease the big body back into the swing-chair before it could crumple and fall. For a few seconds Eben Grillage sat motionless, purple-faced and gasping. Then he reached into a desk drawer, found some tablets in a druggist’s box, and swallowed one. The effect was almost instantaneous.

“It’s all right, now, David,” he mumbled, a bit thickly; “just a little spell. But it’s telling me that my fighting days are over, I guess. Lucky I’ve got you, my boy. Stick me up on the hill path, and I’ll keep out of your way and give you a free hand.”

David did more than was required. Precious as time might be, he went all the way to the Inn with his charge, and at the leave-taking laid filial commands upon the man whose right to command him he had never questioned.

“This settles it, Mr. Grillage,” he protested warmly. “To-morrow you’ll take Dad and your fishing tackle and get out of here--go away and stay away until we get this railroad snarl straightened out. Go on in, now, and go to bed. Plegg and I will do the needful.”

With this parting injunction he fled down the ridge path and took command of the little group of huskies that Plegg had assembled beside the bunk car.

“Any more news?” he demanded; and Plegg answered.

“Another ’phone from Crawford. He is blockaded in the Number Three bridge office shack, but he got a bit of talk through before they cut his ’phone wire. Lushing has taken our night shift off the bridge and set it at work shoveling the crushed stone off the track. Tommy says they will be able to get through with their gas-car within the next few minutes.”

“Good. We won’t wait for them,” said David quickly. “Get that engine up there at the coal chute, and couple an empty flat-car ahead of it, and another behind it. Hurry!”

The order was carried out briskly, and when the oddly made up train slowed to a stand beside the bunk car, the pick-handle squad climbed upon the rearward car, and the chief and his first assistant sprang into the engine cab. “Down the line!” was David’s order to the engine-driver, and the train moved off, gathering such momentum as the roughly surfaced construction track permitted.

In the make-up of the train the engine was backing, with an empty flat-car for its pilot. Being a construction machine, the locomotive had a headlight at either end. With the yard switches left behind, David reached up, uncoiled the short signal-bell cord, and shouted into the ear of the big Irishman at the throttle. “Listen, Callahan: I’m going up on the coal to keep a lookout and flag for you. If I give you one bell, clamp your brakes and make an emergency stop; if I give you two bells, let her have all she will take. Understand?”

The Irishman nodded; and David, with Plegg at his heels, climbed over the coal to a lookout position on the rear end of the tender. By this time the scenery, or so much of it as the starlight revealed, was unreeling itself rapidly on either hand, and in the beam of the tender-carried headlight the straight-away stretches of the track rushed up in quick succession to be shot to the rear under the roaring wheels. “Lord!” yelped Plegg; “if we should meet ’em on a curve!----” but David Vallory made no reply. He was gripping the bell-cord and staring steadily down the track ahead, following the double line of rails to the farthest reach of the spreading cone of light.

As it chanced, the meeting point with the gasoline-driven push-car was not on a curve. On the mile-long tangent which marked the approach to bridge Number Three the converging lines of the rails in the distance met in a dark blot; a moving blot that shot quickly into the glare of the headlight. Plegg saw a series of black dots tumbling grotesquely from the blot to right and left, heard a sharp double clang of the signal in the cab behind him, and felt the sudden lurch of the tender as the engine’s throttle was opened. “_Duck!_” was the command shouted in his ear, and the next instant there was a crash and the air was filled with flying wreckage.

Luckily, no wheel of the attacking train was derailed, and a minute or so later, Callahan, in obedience to a signal from his chief, was braking the heavy “mogul” to a stop beside Crawford’s dynamited rock pile. The place was light with flares, the concrete-pouring on the bridge had been resumed, and Crawford came down the staging runway with a broad grin on his boyish face.

“I saw a little of it from the far end of the staging,” he chuckled. “How many of ’em did you get?”

“Not any of them, I hope,” said David Vallory soberly, as he swung down from the engine step. “It was meant for an object-lesson--not a murder. Now talk fast, Crawford: how many of them are there, and who are they?--besides Lushing?”

“Seven in all, besides the boss-devil; and they looked to me like Brewster toughs, or hold-up men, or something of that sort.”

“Armed?”

“Sure!--one of ’em ran me off the staging with a gun.”

“Brewster toughs, you say?--are you sure they are not Powder Can toughs? Lushing would have to take them to Brewster to have them sworn in as deputies--which would account for their coming from down the line.”

“By George--that’s so! I did see a bunch of plug-uglies going down on the stub train yesterday, come to think of it.”

David Vallory turned upon Plegg. “There you are,” he said. And then to Crawford: “We are going back to headquarters now, and maybe they’ll give us a scrap as we go by, and maybe they won’t. If they don’t show up for us, they may come down here and make trouble for you. How about that?”

“I’ll take my chances,” returned the bridge expert cheerfully. “I have my old pump-gun now; it was in the office shack, and I didn’t have sense enough to go and get it before they came up and fell on me. I’ll stand ’em off, all right, if they try to stop the job again.”

“You said one of them came to you at Number One to borrow a monkey-wrench: what did he say?”

“He was just joshing me a few lines while I was looking for the wrench; said I wouldn’t have any bosses to-morrow, because they’d both be in jail. I asked him who he meant by ‘both’, and he said, ‘the big one and the little one.’ I took that to mean you and Mr. Grillage.”

“You probably guessed right; but the man was a liar. We are not going to jail--any of us. And before I forget it: you’ve done a good job to-night, Crawford, and I shall see to it that you get credit where it will do you the most good.”

“I don’t need any credit; it’s all in the day’s work,” laughed the cheerful bridge builder; then, as his chief was turning to climb into Callahan’s cab: “Oh, say--I meant to ask you: have you seen Lushing since you--er--since he went into retirement a few days ago? He’s a plumb sight! You broke his nose; turned it around so it points east when he’s going north. Gee! but he looks fierce!”

“It ought to have been his neck,” was the brittle rejoinder, and then the double-ended train pulled out for the return.

There was no demonstration at the point where the abandoned gasoline car had been demolished, though David had the train stopped and got off with his pick-handle squad to beat the covers. The straight piece of track was on the river bank, with a wooded hill on the left from which a few determined snipers might have wrought havoc with the beaters, but no man was found and no shot was fired.

Plegg spoke of the probabilities as the train proceeded up the valley.

“We are through with them for to-night,” was his prediction. “It is eight miles to Powder Can or the Gap, and only four to Agorda. They’ll go east instead of west.”

“Yes,” David agreed; “now that they know they can’t bluff us. That is what I meant to do; turn the bluff the other way around. I guess we did it.”

The first assistant, isolated in his seat on the fireman’s box, held his peace until the train came to the end of its run in the headquarters yard. But on the way over to the bunk car with his chief, he had a word to add, and added it.

“Now that Crawford has dumped the wheel-barrow and spilled all the garden truck, I can speak of a thing we’ve all known since the story of your manhandling of Lushing drifted into camp. Lushing is peacock-vain; no stage-door johnnie was ever more so. Even when he was here on the work he kept his mustaches curled, his beard trimmed to a hair, and his clothes looking as if he had just stepped out of a tailor’s shop. You’ve spoiled his beauty for all time, and he’d draw and quarter you for it if he could.”

“As a matter of fact, I hit him only once; it was all the chance I had before his gun went off. But I don’t care what I’ve done to his face, Plegg. As I remarked to Crawford, I’m only sorry I didn’t break his neck.”

“Perhaps it would have been safer if you had,” was the quiet suggestion. “As it is, he’ll never forgive you, and he won’t be satisfied with any light revenge. Which brings on more talk. I have a notion that this ‘arrest’ business to-night was pure bunk. I don’t doubt that Lushing had gone through all the forms and had sworn out the warrants. Doubtless, he was going to make a bluff at serving them. But, Vallory, I’ll bet a little round gold dollar with a hole in it that the real play was to make you put up a fight so that you might righteously be killed in resisting an officer of the law.”

Again David said, “I don’t care,” and Plegg went on calmly. “If that is the play, we’ll have to take measures accordingly. You mustn’t run around on the job unless I’m with you. If you will pardon me for saying it, you are not quite quick enough on the draw, as yet; and you haven’t learned to hold the other fellow’s eye while you’re doing it. That is about all the difference there is between living and dying when it comes to a show-down, you know.”

They had boarded the bunk car and were preparing to turn in. David looked up from the boot-unlacing and his eyes were bloodshot.

“Damn your grannying!” he flared out savagely. “When I need a wet nurse I’ll advertise for one!”

A few seconds later he looked up again, to find Plegg chuckling softly.

“What the devil are you laughing at?” he snapped.

The chuckle expanded into the first assistant’s slow, half-cynical smile. “And once, not so many months ago, I was idiotic enough to cherish the notion that you might be too good!” he exclaimed, in mock self-derision. And with that, he rolled himself in his blankets and turned his face from the light.

XXIII

The Killer

On the morning following the raid which had failed to connect, Eben Grillage carried out his promise to side-track business and go a-fishing. David made the necessary arrangements, stocking the _Athenia’s_ larder with provisions from the camp commissary, borrowing a tent and camping outfit from one of the grade subcontractors, and otherwise bestirring himself to expedite the departure of the anglers.

With the _Athenia_ out of its berth and safely on its way to some unannounced destination in the upper Timanyoni, a handicap of a sort was removed; a handicap and a restriction. As David phrased it for Plegg, he had gotten two non-combatants out of the range of the guns and the field was now clear for whatever battle of reprisals might be threatening.

Of the restriction removed he said nothing to Plegg or to any one. There be certain secret curtains of the heart which are not to be drawn aside for alien eyes to view what may lie behind them; and as yet, not even to himself would David admit that he was no longer able to see eye to eye with his father. None the less, it was with a distinct sense of relief that he waved good-by to the pair standing on the rear platform of the private Pullman as Callahan’s “mogul” snaked it out through the yard to make a flying-switch coupling with the outgoing stub train.

It was on this same morning that Plegg reported for the third time his inability to find the man Backus, and the report was made while he and Vallory were climbing the mountain on their way to make an inspecting tour of the western slope activities, including the tunnel drift which was slowly gnawing its way to meet Regnier’s bore from the eastward.

“I’ve had a dozen ‘trusties’ looking for him and they have combed Powder Can and every other mining-camp in a ten-mile radius,” was Plegg’s summing-up of the search. “He has disappeared as completely as if the earth had swallowed him.”

“If we could only be sure that the earth _has_ swallowed him,” growled the one for whom the restrictions had been removed. “But there is another fork to that road, Plegg. Maybe Lushing has him hidden out somewhere. Had you thought of that?”

“Yes; that seemed to be the most reasonable explanation of his disappearance. But in a very short time I discovered that Lushing was also looking for him.”

“You are sure of that?”

“Quite sure. I have it from a number of different sources. He has even gone so far as to offer a reward--not publicly, of course, but the word has been passed among our workmen.”

“Which means that Lushing knows Backus has something to sell. We mustn’t let Lushing beat us to it, Plegg. You haven’t stopped your investigating machine, have you?”

“Not at all. I have even gone Lushing one better and raised his bet on the reward--though you didn’t authorize me to spend any real money.”

“You did right; and I’ll see to it that the money is forthcoming when it is needed.”

Here the matter rested for the time, and the two men spent the entire day on the western slope, tramping over the work on the desert cut-off, visiting the sub-headquarters in Lost Creek basin, and taking the lost motion out of the job wherever it was found. Cartwright, the sub-chief in general charge of the over-mountain work, was making good progress, though he, too, complained bitterly of the obstructing activities of the railroad inspection staff. Lushing, as it appeared, had not yet been over the range since his return from the East, and Cartwright, a nervous little man with a harsh voice and a choleric eye, was explosively profane when he was told the story of the raid that failed.

“Some of us will have to ‘get’ that beggar yet, Vallory!” he rasped. “It’s gone a long way past any business vigilance on his part; he is simply a vindictive scoundrel, and he is making a personal fight upon the entire Grillage outfit. If he shows up on this side of the range, he’d better bring a bodyguard with him; that’s all I’ve got to say!”

On the return from the desert inspection, David and his first assistant had supper at Cartwright’s headquarters on Lost Creek, and afterward crossed the mountain by starlight. Plegg dropped out of the procession of two on the descent to the eastern tunnel entrance, ostensibly to see how Regnier was getting along, but really because the dangerous roof drew him with a mysterious fascination that was always making him go out of his way to take another look at it.

David Vallory kept on down the mountain alone, and in due time, with a number of brief pauses at the various working points, tramped into the Powder Gap yard at an hour not far from midnight. Learning from the yard boss that there had been no new developments during the day, he went across to the bunk car and let himself in. There was a fragrance of good tobacco smoke in the darkened interior, and as he struck a light he was wondering what member of the staff had been making free with Plegg’s carefully hoarded store of “perfectos.”

It was not until after he had snapped the lamp chimney into place, and was turning the wick to its proper height, that he had a shock that sent his hand quickly to the grip of the weapon slung by its shoulder-strap under his coat. Sitting quietly on Plegg’s bunk, and still smoking the cigar which had perfumed the stuffy interior of the little car, was the swarthy, cold-eyed master gambler of Powder Can.

Dargin was the first to break the surcharged silence.

“Been waiting for you,” he said shortly; and then: “You needn’t be feelin’ for that gun. If I’d wanted to croak you, you’d ’ve been dead a whole half-minute ago.”

David Vallory sat down on his own bed, the shock spasm subsiding a little.

“I hope I haven’t kept you waiting very long,” he ventured, not too inhospitably.

“About a half-hour. But I had some smokes in my poke, and the waiting didn’t cut any ice.”

Hastily David passed in review the various reasons why Dargin should come thus to lie in wait for him. There were two and possibly three; all of them warlike if Dargin chose to hold them so: the attempt to abate the man-traps, the attempt to persuade Judith Fallon to leave Powder Can, and for the third, the assumption that Dargin was in a partnership of some sort with Lushing. In the new recklessness which had come to him with the other transformations, he attacked the reasons boldly in their order.

“You’ve got a kick coming, Dargin, if you want to make it,” he began brusquely. “I’m out to wipe your Powder Can speak-easys off the map if I can swing the big stick hard enough.”

“I was onto that a month ago,” was the growling answer. Then, after a deep pull at the fragrant cigar: “I reckon they ought to be wiped out--though that ain’t sayin’ that I wouldn’t take a crack at the man that did it when it came to a show-down.”

“If you think the place ought to be cleaned up, why don’t you do it yourself?” David shot back.

“Huh! Maybe I will, some day--if you don’t beat me to it.”

“But if I should beat you to it, I suppose you’ll come after me with a gun. Is that the way of it?”

The shadow that flitted across the swarthy face of the man on the opposite bunk was scarcely a smile, though possibly it was intended for one.

“I might; but it’d be a heap like takin’ candy from a baby. You ain’t been carryin’ a gun long enough to get the hang of it. You’re a whole lot too slow to make it interestin’.”

“All right,” said David; “we’ll pass that up. The next thing may get a bit nearer to you. Judith Fallon has doubtless told you that she knew me back East, and that we went to school together and were good friends?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But perhaps she hasn’t told you that I have tried to persuade her to break off with you and leave Powder Can?”

“No; she ain’t told me anything like that.”

“Well, it’s so; I did it.”

“What for?”

“For common decency’s sake. If you admit that the mining-camp dives ought to be wiped out, you’ll also have to admit the facts concerning that girl. I know you’ve been befriending her honestly--the only mistake you made was in not putting a bullet through Tom Judson before you turned him loose--but you must know that a man of your stripe can’t befriend any woman without making her pay the penalty.”

“A man of my stripe, eh?--well, I reckon that’s so, too.”

“Then you are not here to pick a quarrel with me over Judith?”

“Hell, no; not in a thousand years!”

“Then what did you come for? Did Lushing send you?”

“Jim Lushing? He can’t send me nowhere. He ain’t got the insides.”

David Vallory had reached the end of his resources. There was apparently nothing for it but to wait patiently until Dargin was ready to disclose the object of the midnight visit; and he seemed to be in no manner of haste.