Part 8

Wishing nothing less than to be entertained by a verbal March wind, David Vallory pleaded a press of work, escaped, and was fortunate enough to catch the loaded material train as it was starting up the new line. He was soberly depressed, not so much by the lawyer’s attitude, which he had partially discounted before the interview, as by the seed which had been planted by Jolly’s retort to his own small outburst of temper. The thought that his employer and the Vallory benefactor could be profiting, however indirectly, by sharing with the Powder Can pirates was grossly incredible--a thought to be cast down and indignantly trodden upon. Yet it is the fashion of planted seeds to germinate quite irrespective of the wishes of the soil into which they have been thrust. David Vallory could not help recalling the brief reference made to Powder Can as the contractor-king was threshing out the details with him on the eve of his outsetting: “A tough mining-camp, running wide-open; but that’s no affair of yours,” was the curt phrase in which Eben Grillage had dismissed it.

It was on Crawford’s section of the new work that David roused himself out of the depressive reverie. The material train was rounding a long curve on the approach to Bridge Number Two, and the engineer checked its speed to slow for the crossing of the little river on the temporary trestle just beyond the bridge-building activities. Dropping from the moving train a few hundred yards from the bridge location, David was immediately pounced upon by the square-shouldered young athlete who was driving the work on Bridge Number Two.

“By George! Mr. Vallory--you’re like an angel sent from heaven!” was the athlete’s enthusiastic welcome. “Bittner has just ’phoned from down the line that Strayer, of the railroad inspecting force, is on his way up here in a gas-car. Will you flag him when he comes along and hold him for a few minutes until I can get back to the bridge?”

David, thinking pointedly of his late encounter with the railroad attorney, nodded abstractedly. “Yes, I’ll stop Strayer, if you want me to. But what’s the object--what are you trying to cover up?”

“N-nothing,” Crawford explained hurriedly. “I just want to make sure that those concrete fellows are carrying out instructions. Strayer’s got an eye like a hawk, and if so much as a single piece of reinforcing steel happens to be an inch out of line, he’ll see it and report that we’re not living up to the specifications.”

“I see,” said David; “go to it,” and he sat down on a projecting cross-tie end to wait for the railroad inspector’s gas-velocipede to come in sight.

From the cross-tie waiting-place on the inner side of the long curve the bridge under construction was in plain view. It was a single short arch spanning the stream; the false-work and wooden forming were in place, and from the aërial spout of the distributing tower a continuous trickle of concrete was pouring into the box-like forms. David Vallory’s half-absent gaze followed Crawford’s retreating figure. When it reached the bridge the distance-softened grind of the concrete mixer and hoist stopped abruptly, and the absent-minded onlooker a few hundred yards down the line saw Crawford climb to the bridge-head and wave his arms.

The precise object of what followed was not clearly apparent to a man thinking soberly of something else. Other figures, silhouetted against the sky-line, appeared, crawling out upon the forms. When they erected themselves they seemed to be tamping the concrete into place. The young chiefs conclusion was the most obvious one that offered. “Humph!” he muttered, “he’s been letting his ‘mix’ go too dry, and he’s ramming it so the water will come up. Strayer would jump him for that, of course.”

It was a measure of the distance that one Matthew Grimsby had led David along the road to “salt” loyalty that he made no mental note to “jump” Crawford himself for the forbidden practice of ramming dry concrete into bridge forms; and when the motor-driven inspection car appeared at the farther end of the curve he got up to flag it. As it chanced, the big, bearded engineer who was driving the car was no less ready to stop than David was to have him stop. With the brakes locked he sprang out and fired his battery.

“I was hoping I’d find you somewhere this side of the Gap,” he rasped. “There’s no use talking, Vallory, you fellows have got to hew closer to the line or you’ll hear something drop. If you think, because Lushing happens to be away, you can put something across on us every day or two, you’ve got another guess coming.”

“I’ve met you before, Strayer,” said David, with his slow smile. “I worked with a round half-dozen of you all last summer and fall in Wisconsin. What’s gone wrong now?”

“That fill at Havercamp’s. The specifications call for solid work on the fills. Your man is burying unbroken chunks of clay in that embankment as big as he can pick up with his steam-hog. The first heavy snow that melts back of that fill will make it look like a toboggan slide!”

“We’ll look into the Havercamp fill,” said David mildly. “Anything else?”

“Yes; the cutting just below Havercamp’s, where they’re getting the spoil for the fill. I asked the foreman just now if he considered that the lower side of the cutting was worked back to the required angle. He said that he did, and it was; but when I put my instrument on it, I found that there is still a good six-foot slice to come off. It won’t do, Vallory; you’ve got to quit this business of cost-shaving at every twist and turn that offers.”

“We are not in the contracting business for our health,” was David Vallory’s good-natured retort; “I admit it. When you find anything wrong, we correct it, don’t we? And you’re here to find the wrong things, aren’t you? If we should toe the mark all the time, you’d be out of a job. I’ll look after the cutting. What next?”

“Next I’ll have a squint at this bridge of Crawford’s. When you fellows take to pouring concrete, you need to have a man standing over you day and night. If you’re headed my way, get on the car and I’ll give you a ride.”

David Vallory accepted the invitation, climbing into the second seat of the three-wheeled car. At the approach to the temporary wooden trestle over which the construction track ran, the car was halted and they crossed to the new structure.

The machinery was grinding again by this time and David Vallory stood aside while the railroad engineer went carefully over the job. The big, bearded inspector took nothing for granted. The “mix” was examined, samples of the cement were taken, a handful of the sand was put into a bottle with water, shaken, and allowed to settle to determine its purity. On the work itself nothing escaped him; he even counted the steel reinforcing bars whose ends stuck up out of the rising tide of soft concrete, checking the number against the figures in his field-notes.

“Something radically wrong here,” he grinned, when the final item had been checked. “It’s the first time I haven’t found Jimmy Crawford trying to put something over on me. What’s the matter, Jimmy--got religion?”

“Sure!” said Crawford, with a sly wink for his chief. “Didn’t you know Mr. Vallory holds revival meetings in his bunk car every little while? You ought to come up some night and we’ll convert you.”

“I’m going up, right now,” Strayer announced; and it was thus that David got a motor-car ride all the way to the Gap, the railroad watch-dog enlivening the journey with additional criticisms as they went along.

It was after they had reached the headquarters camp, and David had invited the railroad man into his office bunk car for an intermission smoke, that the bluff inspector dipped abruptly into the personalities.

“I like you, Vallory,” he said, “and I’ve been wondering for a solid month how you ever came to tie up with this Grillage outfit. Would you mind telling me?”

“Not in the least. Mr. Grillage and my father are old friends; they were schoolmates.”

“That stops me dead,” was Strayer’s rejoinder. “I shan’t say any of the things I was going to say.”

“It needn’t stop you,” was David’s surrejoinder.

“But it does. Under such conditions you have personal relations with Father Eben; you can’t help having them. And that reminds me, he is in Brewster now, on his way up here. Did you know he was coming?”

“Yes; I heard of it through the hotel people.”

“He’s got his daughter with him. Did you know that?”

“Not positively, no.”

“Leaving her father entirely out of it, she’s a mighty fine young woman,” said Strayer. “I met her when she was here last September. She didn’t seem to think that a railroad inspecting engineer was merely a new kind of dog to be kicked off the door-step.”

“Neither do I,” David asserted. “You think we are a bunch of crooks on our side, and we know you want to get something for nothing on yours. There needn’t be anything personal about it.”

The big man’s grin bared a marvelously fine set of teeth.

“You _are_ crooks, Vallory; so crooked that it would break a snake’s back to try to keep up with you. If Eben Grillage wasn’t your father’s friend, I’d say that he ought to have a middle name beginning with the letter ‘S’ for----”

“But he is my father’s friend--and mine,” interrupted David, with a little of the emphasis belligerent on the verb.

“Sure! I’ll quit. And to make up for the implied slam, I’ll give you a little pointer, Vallory. This business of systematically dodging specifications has about run its course, and it’s going to get you in bad. Our people have been taking it rather easy and contenting themselves with checking you up in spots and making you make good. Do you get me?”

“I’m listening.”

“All right. That was the way it ran along at first. But now it’s beginning to be whispered around in our headquarters that the Grillage company is out for blood on this contract; that no amount of inspection can keep you from skinning us alive--which the same you are doing. That isn’t a healthy state of affairs, and it ought to be cured before the whisper spreads, let us say, to the Executive Board in New York. Are you on?”

“No,” David challenged stubbornly. Then he fell back upon the seller’s time-worn argument: “You are getting all you pay for, and more.”

“Enough said,” laughed Strayer, getting up to go. “No offense meant, and none taken, I hope. But you say Mr. Grillage is your friend, and--well, it’s just a word to the wise, that’s all. So long, till I see you again.”

Somewhat later in the day, returning from a trip to Brady’s Cut, David paused on the sheltered side of the office bunk car to light his pipe. A window was open, and he heard voices within; the voices, namely, of young Jimmy Crawford and Silas Plegg. Crawford had come to camp for a missing detail drawing of some part of Bridge Number Two, and Plegg was getting it for him out of the blueprint locker.

“A close squeak,” Crawford was saying. “If Bittner hadn’t been thoughtful enough to ’phone, I’d have been caught red-handed. I lost my head for a minute and ran down the track to flag Strayer, meaning to choke the big stiff if I couldn’t think of any other way of keeping him off. Just then the material train came along and the boss dropped off right at my feet. He was a Godsend, and I used him, got him to stay and flag Strayer while I ran back and got busy.”

Then Plegg’s voice: “Did you tell Mr. Vallory what you were going to do?”

“Not hardly!” was Crawford’s laughing denial; “not after the song and dance you gave us fellows a while back, just after the boss came on the job. I just told him that Strayer was coming, and that I’d like to have him hindered until I could make sure everything was ship-shape for an inspection. He seemed to be thinking pretty hard about something else, but he was good-natured enough to sit down on a tie-end and wait for Strayer.”

David’s pipe was alight and he moved away. What he had overheard merely confirmed his former assumption that Crawford had been tamping dry concrete to make it appear wet, and he thought no more of it. But if his match had gone out and he had been obliged to light another on the windless side of the bunk car....

Plegg seemed to be having trouble in the search for the missing drawing, and Crawford rattled on.

“When I got back to the bridge I turned the whole gang loose on the stage-setting. It was some swift job, believe me, and I didn’t know what minute Strayer’s car’d come chugging around the curve. I’ve got so I keep a bunch of short steels handy, and we stuck ’em up in the concrete to look as if they grew there. Strayer counted ’em when he came, as he always does, and they checked out right, of course. But say, Plegg, if he’d touched one of the dummies it would have tumbled over! The concrete had been running a bit thin, and it was all we could do to make the short pieces stand up long enough to be counted. As it was, two or three of ’em fell down just as Strayer and the boss were climbing to their places in the inspection car. That’s why I say it was a close squeak.”

This, then, was what David missed by not having to light a second match. Instead of a practically harmless ramming of dry concrete, Crawford had been covering up another item of the cost-cutting. One of the commonest economies in concrete construction is the scanting of the steel which binds the mass together and adds its strength to that of the cement. The contract specifications called for a stated number of these bars in Bridge Number Two. Following the Grillage practice, certain of these bars had been left out--to save their cost. Crawford had made his dummy bars figure as permanences for Strayer, and the trick was turned.

But of all this David Vallory knew nothing; and since his pipe was now drawing freely, he mounted to the cab of one of the construction locomotives to have himself conveyed to the tunnel mouth on the eastern slope of the great mountain.

XII

Under the High Stars

It was in the evening of the day in which David Vallory had been twice told that his president was on the way to Powder Gap that the stub train forming the connecting link between the main line and the construction headquarters came in with a private Pullman for a trailer. David was four miles away, in the eastern heading of the big tunnel, at the moment, but the service telephone line quickly transmitted the news of the big boss’s arrival. An hour farther along, after a hurried supper in the mess-tent at Brady’s cut, David took a short path across the basin and climbed the forested ridge to the Alta Vista Inn.

He had his reward for the haste, the primitive meal, and the rapid climb when he came in sight of the Inn and its rustic porches. The radiant daughter of profit-gaining contracts was there in visible presence; David singled her out instantly among the people lounging on the westward-facing porch. She stood at the railing, leaning against one of the rough tree-trunk porch pillars and gazing out upon the sunset which was painting itself in colorings known only to the high altitudes. David drew near, treading softly. It was a lover’s fancy that the glories of the sunset were reflected in the starry eyes, in the ripe lips parted a little as if in the rapture of the vision, and in the warm tintings of neck and cheek.

When he finally stood beside her she gave him her hand without loosing her eye-hold upon the crimson-shot glories.

“Isn’t it perfectly exquisite!” she breathed, accepting the fact of his presence quite as if their parting in the lakeside mansion had been but the day before.

“The sunset? Naturally; they are built that way out here. But you mustn’t expect me to rhapsodize over the scenery when I can look at you.”

“Please don’t be frivolous,” she chided. “There are plenty of others to say the silly things; and besides, it isn’t your--it isn’t in character. Stand here and enjoy this with me while it lasts, and then we’ll go somewhere and talk.”

David acquiesced willingly enough, and after the sunset had faded, and they had found chairs in the corner farthest removed from the chattering groups of summer people, he told her of his few weeks of strenuous work, enlarging in boyish enthusiasm upon the magnitude of the job and the possibilities of man-sized growth it offered to those who were driving it.

“And you haven’t had any trouble?” she interrogated, after the story was told.

“Not what you would call trouble; no. Of course, the railroad inspectors make life miserable for us when they can, but that is all in the day’s work. It amuses them and keeps them out of mischief, and it doesn’t hurt us.”

“Why should they make life miserable for you?”

“You ask me that?--and you the only daughter of the king of the contractors?” he laughed. “That is what they are hired for; to find fault, and to get us to give them something for nothing if they can.”

At this point it pleased Miss Virginia to play the part of the innocent and the uninformed.

“How should I know anything about it?” she queried. “Could you explain it so that a woman could understand?”

“I can explain it so that this one woman I’m talking to can understand. Have you ever happened to read a contract and specifications?”

“What a question!”

“I didn’t suppose you had. They are like the Congressional Record--nobody reads them unless it’s a necessity. But they are fearfully and wonderfully constructed. One of the clauses in the regulation form reads something like this: ‘The engineer of the party of the first part’--that’s the railroad company in the present instance--‘reserves the right to pass upon all work and material, and to reject either if found, in his judgment, to be unsatisfactory.’ Mark the wording and you’ll notice that it leaves an open door wide enough to drive a locomotive through. And up here we have a man against us who would like to hitch a whole train of cars to the locomotive.”

“Mr. Lushing, you mean?”

“The same.”

“Have you met him yet?”

“Not yet; he hasn’t been on the job in person since I came. I understand he has gone East. But he has left some pretty able fault-finders to represent him, I can assure you. If there is anything in the category of crime that they don’t accuse us of committing, it is something they have temporarily forgotten. But you mustn’t make me talk shop all the time. I’m sure it bores you, only you are too good-natured to say so.”

“A man’s work, if it is at all worth while, ought not to bore anybody. It is your life, isn’t it?”

“It was, up to just a little while ago.”

“What happened a little while ago?”

“You came.”

“That is another of the sayings that doesn’t fit,” she warned him.

“All right; we’ll talk about something else. How long can you stay?”

“I don’t know. Father is calling it his vacation, and threatens to go trout-fishing in the mountains.”

“That will be fine. If I didn’t have to watch Lushing’s outfit so closely, I’d like to go with him.”

She looked up quickly. “Have you ever had a real vacation, David?”

“I suppose not; not in your sense of the word. I was out on field work during the four college summers. I’m saving up for my honeymoon.”

“I thought you said that was only a dream; a ‘pipe-dream,’ you called it, didn’t you?”

“I did; and it is. I was only joking. The only thing I can talk seriously about is the big job. And you are not interested especially in that--or are you? Plegg said one day when we were speaking of you that you were a pretty good little engineer. I’m quoting him literally. He meant it as a compliment.”

“Mr. Plegg,” she said, with a touch of abstraction which the mention of the first assistant’s name seemed to evoke. “Do you like him?”

“Immensely; though he always gives me the feeling that there are nooks and corners in him that he never allows anybody to explore. I met him first a year ago. It was in the Pullman, when I was going home from Florida. He had the upper berth in my section, and we scraped an acquaintance of a sort just as the train was pulling into Middleboro, though neither of us learned the other’s name. I remembered him chiefly on account of his sardonic smile, and a queer thing he said to me.”

“Will the queer thing bear repeating?”

“To you, yes. He made a running commentary on my face--like one of those street-corner physiognomists, you know; eyes, nose, jaw, and so on, and said I’d probably go far in my profession if I wasn’t too good.”

“What an exceedingly odd thing for a stranger to say to you!”

“Wasn’t it? But he was so genial about it that I couldn’t take offense.”

“What did he mean by not being ‘too good’?” she questioned gravely.

“I didn’t know at the time, but I’ve found out since. I grew up with a good many old-fashioned notions, I guess, and I’m not sure that I haven’t got some of them yet. One of them that I’ve been trying to modify was the belief that a man might set up his own standards and live by them.”

“I have that same belief now,” asserted the daughter of the luxuries. “Why are you trying to modify it? Isn’t it reasonable?”

“It is reasonable enough, and it is right and proper that you should have it. It is your woman’s privilege to believe the best of everything. But the man has to take the world as he finds it.” Thus far he was merely skirting judiciously upon the safer edges of the generalizations. But the next moment he found himself yielding to the temptation which so easily besets the average man--to confide in a woman. “I’ll tell you, Virginia; I’ve done things in the past year that I would never have dreamed of doing in my callow days; things that would make my father gasp if he knew about them.”

“Wicked things?” she suggested.

“There was a time when I should have called them wicked, without a shadow of doubt. But that was before I had come to realize that business--all kinds of business--is a sort of war; a fight in which, if you don’t ‘get’ the other fellow, he’ll get you.”

“You are all wrong--hideously wrong!” she broke out in a sudden passion of vehemence. “I don’t mean in the statement of fact--that is only too true. But in your own attitude. It is the first of the downward steps: if you take that step deliberately, there is no reason why you should stop at anything!”

There was only soft starlight on the sheltered porch, and David could smile in safety. The little outburst of generous indignation carried him swiftly back to the childhood days, reviving his memory picture of a hot-hearted little girl whose anger had always flamed fiercely at any spectacle of wrong or oppression, and whose defending of stray kittens and homeless dogs had more than once made him fight in blind boyish rage--not for the dogs and kittens, but for her.

“You haven’t changed much, inside, since we were babies together, and I’m glad of it,” he said, after the momentary pause ushered in by the indignant protest. “It is good of you not to make me always think of you as the grown-up Miss Virginia--the little sister of the luxuries.”

“There are times, David, when I hate the luxuries--knowing so well the source of so many of them,” she declared; and then: “Are you trying to tell me that you have thrown all of the ideals overboard?”

The appeal in her tone sobered him suddenly.

“No, I hope not, Virginia. What I’ve been saying applies only to business; the business conscience, if you want to call it that. I have plenty of the other kind left. And it’s giving me a lot of trouble.”

“Is the trouble like the professional things you were talking about a few minutes ago?--explainable to this woman?”

“No; at least, not yet. It is a question of duty, and how much duty. It is as if you had incurred a debt and didn’t know the amount of it. You’d be willing to pay, perhaps, if you only knew how much to pay.”

“That sounds entrancingly interesting,” she said. And then: “To whom do you owe the debt, David?”

“I’m not sure that I owe it to any one; or if there really is a debt. I shall have to think it out, and when I know, I’ll tell you.”