Part 17

Beyond this, there was a plot of some sort afoot, so Regnier told Plegg. An attempt had been made to bribe one of the portal watchmen posted to keep unauthorized visitors out of the tunnel, and the briber was one of the Powder Can dive-keepers--not Dargin, but one of his concessionaries, who was also known as “Black Jack.” The watchman had proved incorruptible, and had reported the attempt to Regnier. His story was that he had been offered a certain sum of money if he would find out when Vallory was to be in the tunnel at any shift-changing time, and would use the working telephone to notify the briber beforehand.

Plegg said nothing of this to his chief, but it made him doubly watchful. Also, it made him fertile in excuses to keep Vallory from making any but strictly unannounced visits to Heading Number One. Time was all the first assistant hoped to gain. It was reported that Mr. Grillage’s private car was on its way back from Red Butte, and there was the slender chance that, with the president on the ground again, something might be done to clear the air and quiet the various gathering menaces.

This was the situation at the close of the day when the private Pullman _Athenia_ came in and was shunted to its former position on the spur track. At the moment of its arrival David Vallory was making a tour of the lower camps. Plegg was in the construction yard, and he saw Eben Grillage and his fishing companion leave the car and go up to the Inn together. And after dinner he saw the king of the contractors come back to the car alone. Later still, the first assistant, smoking his pipe on the platform of the office bunk car, saw a woman descending the path from the hotel. Recognizing the big boss’s daughter, Plegg dutifully went across the yard tracks to meet her.

“Thank you, Mr. Plegg,” she said, as he came up. “I imagine I was just about to lose myself. Whereabouts is the _Athenia_?”

“I’ll show you,” he offered, and he led her around an obstructing material train and over to the spur-track, where he helped her up the steps of the private car. As he was lifting his hat to go away she stopped him to ask a question.

“Do you happen to know where Mr. Vallory is?”

Plegg gave such information as he had, or thought he had: the chief was somewhere down the line at one of the lower camps; or at least he had gone down earlier in the evening and he had not come back to supper. The young woman appeared to be satisfied with the answer, and when the porter had admitted her to her father’s car, Plegg went his way, wondering if anything new had developed. The conclusion was negative. Miss Virginia’s question was natural and casual; one that need have no bearing upon the threatening conditions--doubtless had none. But if he could have been a listener at the door of the office compartment in the _Athenia_, he would have known better how much was at stake in the matter of keeping in close touch with his chief’s movements.

Miss Virginia found her father planted in his great chair behind the glass-topped table-desk. The fishing absence was responsible for a huge accumulation of mail, and he was slitting the envelopes with a nimble dexterity curiously at variance with his massive bulk and knotty-knuckled, square-fingered hands.

“Hello, little girl; you down here?” he rumbled; and before she could speak: “I got your wire--two days late. What is it?--something that won’t keep until I have read my mail?” Then, with a chuckling laugh: “Which one is it you’re going to spring on me--Wishart, or the ‘belted earl’?”

“Neither,” she replied succinctly. “I have come to talk business.”

“Oho! business, is it? Well, I guess I’m a business man. Go ahead and open up your samples.”

“The reason why I telegraphed you to come back was because you haven’t kept your promise.”

“Which one?” he inquired, with large indulgence.

“The one you made me when you were sending David out here. You promised me that he wasn’t to be spoiled.”

“Oh, that’s it, is it?”--with another of the deep-chested chuckles. “All right; let’s have it: what do you think you’ve found out?”

“You know, well enough,” she returned coldly. “For a time, I think, Mr. Plegg was able to keep the crooked things hidden from David--as you doubtless instructed him to. But of course David soon found out what is being done, and that it is being done by your orders. And now you are about to make a criminal of him. I don’t see how you can ever look his father in the face.”

Eben Grillage wagged his big head sorrowfully.

“You’re all I’ve got in the world, Vinnie, girl, and there’s mighty little I wouldn’t do for you; but it’s terribly hard to live up to your notions, sometimes. You’ve been a business man’s daughter all your life, and yet you haven’t the faintest idea of what business means.”

“I have a very clear idea of what it means to cheat, to lie, to put human life in jeopardy, and to take a clean, straightforward young man like David Vallory and turn him into a potential murderer.”

“Oh, pshaw!” grunted the king of the contractors. “I suppose somebody has been scaring you about that tunnel and the few cracks it has in the roof. Was it David?”

“No, it wasn’t David; I found out about it myself, before you went away. And the ‘few cracks’ have nearly killed one man, already.”

“Strayer, you mean?--I had David’s report of that. Strayer is a pretty good engineer, and he ought to have known better than to pry a rock loose and let it fall on his own head. Vinnie, I’m getting sore about this thing. That tunnel roof will stand up all right if they’ll only quit monkeying with it and let it alone.”

“I’m not here to argue with you about the tunnel as a tunnel,” said the daughter, with a touch of the true Grillage bluntness. “I merely wish to find out if you’re going to try to patch up that broken promise.”

“What in the name of common sense can I do--more than I have done? I wrote Plegg to keep David on the windward side of the little economies we have to make, and I’m sorry if he hasn’t been able to do it. I’ll haul Plegg over the coals, if that will make you feel any better.”

“Mr. Plegg doubtless did his best, and it wasn’t good enough. David is a graduate engineer and a grown man. He would be singularly stupid if he could be your chief of construction and not know what was going on right under his eyes. But that is not the point now. Are you, or are you not, going to give David authority to do what he, and Mr. Plegg, and every member of your own engineering staff, know ought to be done to that dangerous place in the tunnel--a thing that is endangering the lives of the men every day? That is what I came to ask.”

It was a rare thing for Eben Grillage to refuse his daughter’s demands, even when they were unreasonable; but the habits of a ruthless life-time were too strong to be set aside, even at the bidding of indulgent fatherly affection.

“You are my daughter, Vinnie, but you are just like other women when you get your head set on anything. If I should let you run my business for me, there wouldn’t be any business left after a little while, and we’d both join the bread line. If you’ve made up your mind that David is the man you want, just say so and I’ll take him off the job and set him up in any kind of business you pick out--if you can pick one that measures up to your Utopian notions of honesty. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

She did not answer the question. There was one more arrow in her quiver and she fitted it to the string and drew the bow.

“The tunnel isn’t the only thing, as you know. James Lushing makes it an open boast that he will break you, and you know best what reasons he may have for thinking such a thing possible. Beyond that, David has met him and they have quarreled--fought. I have been told that Lushing’s first blow will be struck at David, to get him out of the way.”

“Who told you any such thing as that?”

“No matter; I have heard it, and I have no reason to doubt the truth of the report. David is so loyal to you that he is the biggest obstacle in Lushing’s way. Everybody knows that Lushing can command the help of any number of desperate characters in Powder Can. It wouldn’t be beyond him to----”

--“To have David killed off out of the way?” supplied the big man, with another chuckle. “If you go much deeper, you’ll be telling me that David is the man, after all. But don’t you worry. When you marry David Vallory, Vinnie, you’ll marry a man. If he is half the scrapper I take him to be, he’ll be well able to take care of himself in any mix-up with Jim Lushing--or with any of Lushing’s paid blacklegs.”

The special pleader’s eyes grew suddenly weary.

“Then you will do nothing about the tunnel?” she asked patiently.

“Not until I have some better reason than a foolish little girl’s notion--no.”

“Hasn’t David told you what he thinks ought to be done?”

“Oh, yes, of course; the hard-rock men got him rattled, right at the start, and he came to me about it, boy-like.”

“And you told him to let it alone?”

“Sure I did. We are going to lose money enough on this job, as it is.”

The fine persistence was broken at last. The daughter of the luxuries--and the ideals--rose and moved toward the door. As she reached the vestibule exit she turned and gazed at the big man filling the great arm-chair, and there was neither anger nor impatience in her eyes; only a profound depth of shocked disappointment and reproach.

“I never knew you _could_ be so hard and pitiless,” she said slowly. “If this is what money and the love of it can do to you----” The swing door of the vestibule yielded under her hand and she went out, leaving the sentence unfinished.

At the car-steps the negro porter had placed his carpeted foot-stool, but Silas Plegg was not there to see the president’s daughter safely across the tracks. It is conceivable that she did not mark the omission. From childhood she had known construction yards and the paraphernalia of the contracting trade, and her father was fond of boasting that she was as self-reliant as any boy.

Picking her way in the gathering dusk around the obstructing cars filled with building material, she came presently to the foot of the path leading up to the Inn. Out of the first clump of scrub pine on the hill trail a woman darted into the path and blocked it. Virginia Grillage stopped short with a little gasp of apprehension. Then she saw who it was.

“You--Judith? were you looking for me?”

“I was. They couldn’t tell me at the hotel, and I was that frightened I thought I’d be choking. Jack Dargin sent me, and the other Jack--Black Jack Runnels, he is--would be killing me if he knew I came. You’ll remember what I was telling you yesterday. David is to be murdered--in the tunnel some way--I don’t know how. They’re to get him in between the shifts; when the day men have come out and before the night men have gone in. Dargin says there’d be a clock of some kind in a box--he said to tell you that, and you’d understand.”

“But David isn’t at the tunnel; he is at one of the lower camps. Mr. Plegg told me so just a few minutes ago.”

“Maybe he was, but he isn’t now; he went up on an engine not ten minutes ago. It was Simmy Backus’s job to get him there--to ’phone him there was a man hurt in the tunnel. He’d fall for that--David would--and he went. I saw the engine when it passed me, going up. What must we do? ’Tis you that would be loving David, Vinnie Grillage, and that I know well, but you’re not the only one: I--I’d die for him this minute!”

For a moment Virginia Grillage, quick-witted and resourceful as any daughter of Eve since the world began, stood shocked and irresolute, fighting desperately for some shreddings of the capability to act which had suddenly deserted her. Then the lost self-control came back with a bound.

“The telephone!” she gasped. “You run back to the hotel, Judith, and find Bert Oswald--tell him what you’ve told me and he’ll know what to do! While you’re doing that, I’ll try to find a ’phone here in the yards. Run!” and she set the example by flying down the path and dodging around the obstructing cars to reach the _Athenia_.

To her utter dismay, she found the private car untenanted. The lights were still on, and the recently opened mail lay on the desk, but the big swing-chair was empty. Twice, and again, she called her father, and when there was no answer she caught up the telephone set from the desk and tried to make somebody hear. But the set was dead; the wires connecting it with the working system had not been restrung since the _Athenia_ had returned from Red Butte.

Next she made frantic and fruitless search for the porter; but the negro, too, had disappeared. Plegg was the alternative now, and she ran breathlessly up the yard to the office bunk car. But this, also, proved to be a hope defeated, or at least deferred. The car was dark when she reached it, and when she tried the door she found it locked. The remaining expedient, the only one that suggested itself, was to run to the Inn railroad station a half-mile distant down the yard, where she knew there was an accessible telephone. It was a lame expedient and she knew it; a thousand things might delay the sending of the message of warning to the tunnel, and time was priceless. Yet she ran, stumbling over the loosely bedded cross-ties, and praying that she might happen upon Plegg or some other member of the staff who would know what to do and how to do it.

She had scarcely begun this new flight when she saw one of the construction locomotives lumbering toward her on the main track. The quick wit was coming to its own again, and she stopped, stripping off her coat and stepping into the cone of the headlight beam so that she could be seen when she waved her signal. The engine was Callahan’s “mogul,” and she gave a little sob of joy when she recognized the good-natured Irishman who leaned from his cab window to ask what she wanted. Callahan was the driver with whom she had ridden oftenest when David Vallory had been showing her over the job.

“I want you and your engine, Mr. Callahan!” she panted. “Will you take orders from me?”

“Sure I will, Miss Vinnie,” was the quick response; and when the fireman had helped her up to the foot-board: “Where will ye be wanting the ould ’Thirty-six to be taking you?”

“To the tunnel--as fast as ever you can go! It’s--it’s life and death!”

Callahan asked no further questions. Miss Virginia was the big boss’s daughter, and her demands were sufficient law and Gospel for any man on the Grillage Company’s pay-rolls. While the fireman was lifting her to his box, the heavy construction machine went slamming out over the yard switches, shrieking its warning to all and sundry, and the race was begun.

Though the track was new and rough, and the detours around the hill cuttings held curves of hazard, Callahan--“Wild Irish,” they called him on the job--slackened speed for nothing. Onward and upward through the gathering darkness roared the big locomotive, vomiting a trail of sparks to mark its crooked climb. Virginia Grillage tried pitifully hard to plan what she should do when the goal should be reached; but the dominant impulse would have nothing to do with cool-headed plannings. David’s life hung in the balance, and David must be warned. She could get no further than this.

So it came about that when the tunnel portal was reached, and Callahan and his firemen were helping her down from the high cab, common sense and clarity of mind fled away, and she was once more only an incoherent and badly frightened young woman. A gang of workmen waited at the tunnel mouth; dimly she realized that this was the night shift, preparing to go in when the day men should come out. One glance showed her that there was no member of the engineering staff with them; no one in authority save the burly Cornish drill-boss.

“Mr. Vallory!” she demanded; “where is he?”

The Cornishman knew the president’s daughter by sight. He pointed into the dark depths of the tunnel. “If ye’ll wait just a minute; it’s time for the shift to be coomin’ out, and he’ll be----” but the remainder of the sentence was lost upon the young woman who had darted into the black depths with neither light nor guide, stumbling blindly over the cross-ties of the spoil-track in her flight, and following the lead of the wide-spaced line of electric bulbs into the grim heart of the mountain.

* * * * *

A scant margin of two minutes after his daughter had halted and boarded a construction engine to be whirled away to the tunnel, Eben Grillage, who had been across to the commissary to put in a call for Plegg, returned to his desk in the _Athenia_ and once more began the reading of his neglected mail. A matter of three-quarters of an hour later, while he was still immersed in his correspondence, the swing-door of the forward corridor flew open as from the impact of a heavy projectile and Silas Plegg staggered into the office compartment. His lips were drawn back and he was shaking like one in an ague fit.

“The roof in Heading Number One!” he jerked out. “It’s down, damn you, do you hear that?--it’s down, and the day shift is behind it!”

Eben Grillage’s heavy face went purple, and for an instant his jaw sagged and he gasped for breath. Then the strong will triumphed for the moment over the failing body and he sprang out of his chair to catch the news-bringer in a grasp that threatened to crush muscle and bone.

“Vallory--where’s David Vallory?” he stormed.

“He’s--he’s in there with the men--and--and that isn’t all: your daughter’s there, too--if she isn’t buried under the slide!”

Slowly the big man’s grasp upon Plegg relaxed and the veins in his forehead swelled to whip-cords. Eben Grillage’s day of reckoning had come. Before the first assistant realized what was happening, the gigantic figure of the contractor-king swayed like a toppling tower and would have fallen with a crash if Plegg had not braced himself and caught it.

XXVI

The Heart of Qojogo

Virginia Grillage, flying into the tunnel depths over the rock-strewn spoil-track, was mercifully spared the introductory horrors of the sudden entombment. An earthquake crash, so close behind her that she was enveloped in a shower of flakings and spallings and stifling dust, a rush of air that was like a tornado to sweep her from her feet, and she stumbled and fell and was blotted out.

When she recovered consciousness there was darkness that could be felt and a silence to match it. She was lying on a pallet of coats; she knew they were coats because the sleeves of one of them were drawn over her; and some one was chafing her hands.

“Is it you, David?” she asked in a voice made small and weak by the horrible stillness.

“Yes; can you tell me how badly you are hurt?”

She grasped his arm and sat up.

“I--I think I’m not hurt at all,” she stammered. Then: “Did the roof come down?”

“It did. We found you half buried in the muck. What under heaven were you doing in here?”

“I came to tell you,” she said simply. “Where are the men?”

“They are all down at the slide, and Regnier is with them. They are trying to find out how effectually we are buried. You are sure you’re not hurt?”

“A little bruised and shaken up, of course, but that is nothing. Will the men be able to dig us out?”

With any other woman he knew as the questioner, David Vallory might have temporized. But he knew Virginia Grillage’s quality and the steel-true fineness of it.

“We shall not be able to dig out from this side,” he said soberly. “We are not equipped for it.”

She shuddered.

“This darkness is very horrible, isn’t it? And the air--it seems so close.”

David did not tell her that there was the best of reasons for the closeness of the air; that the ventilating conduit, and the smaller pipe-line which supplied the air pressure for the drills, were crushed under the avalanche, leaving them in a sealed pocket in the heart of Qojogo.

“You mustn’t let it grip you too hard,” he said, meaning to hearten her if he could. “By this time every camp on the line will have heard the news, and there will be no lack of help.”

She groped in the darkness and found his hand.

“I am not afraid, David--this is no time to be afraid. So you needn’t blink the facts for me. How wide was the bad place in the roof?”

“Twenty feet or more.”

“You say there are plenty of men to help; but you know, and I know, that only a few of them can work at one time in such a narrow place as the tunnel. Tell me plainly: will there be air enough to last until we starve to death? Or shall we be stifled before we have had time to starve?”

“I am not admitting either contingency yet; and you mustn’t. While there is life, there is always hope. But I can’t understand why you came here. What made you think I needed to be told?”

“That much is easily explained,” she said calmly. “There was a plot to murder you, and at the same time to bring about the first of a series of disasters that would smash the Grillage Company. Did you get a telephone message that a man was hurt, and that you were wanted up here?”

“I did. I was at McCulloch’s camp and I took an engine and came up here in a hurry. The accident report was a fake, and I came in to ask Regnier what he knew about it.”

“It was a part of the plot,” she went on evenly. “It was Judith Fallon who came and told me. She had already warned me that there was something threatening, but she did not know what it was. That first time was just before Mr. Strayer was hurt, and all she could tell me then was that James Lushing ‘had it in for you,’ as she put it, and was plotting with a man named Black Jack Runnels.”

“Runnels?” he queried. “Not Dargin?”

“No, it was Runnels; I’m sure of the name. Yesterday she came again. She had heard a little more, but nothing very definite. Then this evening I had been down to the _Athenia_--it came in from Red Butte on the afternoon train, as perhaps you know--and I was on my way back to the Inn. Judith met me on the path; she had been up to the hotel, looking for me.”

“Yes,” he encouraged.

“She was terribly excited and said that the thing, whatever it was, was to be done this evening, at the changing hour of the shifts. She told me that a man named Backus was to call you by ’phone and tell you that there was a man hurt in the tunnel. Then she said that you had already gone up the line; she saw you on an engine that overtook and passed her.”

“I saw a woman running on the Powder Can road, but I didn’t recognize her as Judith,” said David.

“You wouldn’t, of course, with the engine running fast. When she told me that you were already on your way up here, I didn’t know what to do. Then I thought of the telephones, and sent her up to the hotel to find Herbert Oswald and ask him to call you at the tunnel ’phone, while I ran down to the _Athenia_ to get father to ’phone. There was nobody in the _Athenia_; father had gone out somewhere. Then I tried to find Mr. Plegg, but he was gone, too. I didn’t know where to look for another telephone nearer than the Inn railroad station, and I was starting to run down there when I saw Callahan on his engine and made him bring me up here.”

“But surely you saw the night shift getting ready to come in, didn’t you? Do you mean to tell me that that bunch of thick-headed stone-borers let you come in here alone?”

“They were not to blame--not at all. I merely asked if you were in here, and when one of them said you were, I ran.”

“I am too thankful to say what I ought to say, about them and about you--thankful that you are alive,” said David, and his voice trembled a little. “One second, a half-second, later and you would have been fairly under the slide. As it was, we had to dig you out; and--and Vinnie, I hope no human being will ever suffer as I did when we found you. I--I thought you were dead, and that I had killed you!”