Chapter II: Part 2

“It isn’t that,” the father hastened to say, “it’s just that, up to to-day, you’ve never had to shoulder a man’s load. Perhaps I am foolishly apprehensive, but the way in which you spoke just now of our obligation--your obligation--to Eben Grillage.... I don’t know how to express it, but it made me feel as I have sometimes felt before; that if anything which you might conceive to be a duty were pushing you, you’d shut your eyes and go to any length.”

David laughed and shook his head. “Some day, Dad, you’ll wake up and find that I’m a man grown; or I hope you will. Just the same, we do owe Mr. Grillage a lot more than we can ever pay, and if it ever comes in my way to chop the debt down a bit, you may be sure I’ll sharpen my axe. Now, if you are not too wretchedly tired and worn out, suppose we turn in and make our plans before we sleep. I told Lucille that we’d most likely be late coming home and she won’t be sitting up for us. To-morrow morning you’re going to turn the winding up of this thing over to me and let me save what I can. That is what Mr. Grillage said I must do, and it is what I mean to do.”

Deep into the night father and son sat together in the private room in the rear, poring over the books and bank paper and setting things in order for the speedy beaching of the outworn business ship. But it was not until after they had left the bank and were walking home that David won his final point.

“You shall do as you think best, David,” the father conceded, closing an argument which had begun at the very outset of the planning. “If it were left to me, I should probably be too easy with the bank’s debtors, as I’ve always been. You may retain Oswald, if you think best; only don’t let him be too hard on the borrowers who are in difficulties.”

The following day saw the beginning of the end for the oldest banking institution in the county. At nine o’clock in the morning the cue leading to Winkle’s wicket was formed again; but in an hour or two the tide showed signs of turning. At Oswald’s suggestion the Vallorys had posted a notice in the bank window to the effect that Middleboro Security was going out of business, and inviting all who had claims upon the bank to present them and get their money. Coincidently with the posting of this notice, a rumor, starting from nobody knew just where, began to pass from lip to lip among the anxious depositors. It was to the effect that Eben Grillage, well known in the town and currently spoken of by his former townsmen as a multimillionaire, was backing Adam Vallory. The result was almost magical. First one and then another dropped out of the line in front of Winkle’s window; and by noon many of those who had already withdrawn their savings were coming back to furnish an object-lesson in the mutability of human nature by begging Adam Vallory to stay in business and reinstate them as depositors.

Early in the afternoon David persuaded his father to go home, and himself took the chair at the president’s desk, with Herbert Oswald at his elbow. By evening a good beginning had been made and the tangle was simplifying itself.

“Time is the thing we need to save,” said David, as he and the young lawyer went together to the St. Nicholas for their belated dinner. “Dad is needing a rest, and I’ve got to strike out and do something for myself; something better than making maps in a Government surveying office. Naturally, I can’t go until after things are wound up properly here, and Dad and Lucille are provided for in some fashion. How long do you think it is going to take?”

Oswald reserved his answer until after they had found their places in the café and had given their dinner order.

“As to the time, it will probably ask for more than you will care to give to it,” he predicted; “that is, if you mean to stay and see it through. But that isn’t at all necessary. We can shake you loose in a few days, after we have closed the bank doors and have brought matters down to a routine settlement with debtors and creditors. I can handle that part of it myself, as the bank’s counsel.”

In accordance with this outline of Oswald’s, David Vallory stood by for the few days, taking his father’s place in the bank and doing what he could to hasten the beaching of the Security ship. The end of that phase of it came when the last depositor had chequed out his account, and Winkle had closed his wicket for the final time. Only the deferred collections remained, and these were turned over to Oswald.

In the evening of this climaxing day, David and the young attorney were once more dining together in Vignaux’s café. The strain was off, and for the first time since his home-coming, David was free to begin the consideration of his own future. It was Oswald who gave the table talk its start in the proper direction.

“You are footloose at last, David, and I can imagine that you are mighty glad of it,” was the way the start was given. “It has been a new experience for you, and you have certainly buckled down to it like a man.”

David’s smile was boyishly complacent. “Sure I have; there was no reason why I shouldn’t. Isn’t that what a man’s son is for, in the last analysis?”

“Yes, but----”

“But what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A good many sons don’t seem to see it in that light; and in your case--well, I’ve known you a long time, David, and I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“‘Faithful are the wounds of a friend,’” David quoted, with a return of the good-natured smile. “What have I done to make you think small of me? Or is it something that I haven’t done?”

“Neither,” was the thoughtful reply. “It’s just--oh, well; I guess it is because we were boys together, and I couldn’t seem to realize that you have grown up.”

“You and Dad are the limit. Do you realize it now?”

“Y-yes; to some extent. I’ve been watching you through this business whirl. You’ve done well; splendidly well. But it was the fighting of the untrained soldier.”

“Of course it was. What I didn’t know of the actual details of the business would have filled a library.”

“That isn’t what I meant; I guess I can’t express myself clearly enough to make you understand just what it is that I do mean. It sizes itself up something like this: you’re so wholesome and straightforward and decent, David----”

“Break it off,” laughed David; “you make me blush!”

“That’s it,” said the keen-eyed young fellow across the table; “you do blush. Which is the proof of the pudding. But I mustn’t devil you when you’re tired; tired and more or less discouraged.”

“Discouraged? Not a bit of it. Why should I be discouraged?”

“Most fellows would be, in your shoes. You’ve had every reason to believe that you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth--or at least, a triple-plated one.”

“I? Not in a thousand years!” grinned the son whose light was of a proper filial brightness. “I’ve known all along that the Middleboro Security would have to be wound up some time. Dad is all the fine things you can say of him, Bert, but he wasn’t cut out for a successful banker. He knows it as well as anybody.”

Oswald looked up questioningly. “You haven’t any twinges of your own, Dave? It used to be the town’s idea that you’d some day come back and marry Judith Fallon and settle down to be Vallory Number Two in the banking business.”

“Marry Judith? What put that idea into the town’s head--or yours?”

“You did,” said Oswald gravely.

“Great Scott! Can’t a man be just ordinarily chummy with a girl he’s known all his life without having the gossips of a country-town tie a tin can to him?”

“With a number of them, yes; but with one, no.”

“Bosh!” said David.

“No, it isn’t ‘bosh.’ You’ve specialized on Judith; I’ve seen it myself. Candidly, David, I’ve tried to shut my eyes to it, partly because I hoped it might die out. Judith’s a good girl, and in her own class she is the prettiest thing that was ever turned loose in a world of more or less squashy young men. But I can’t seem to see her calling herself Mrs. Vallory.”

“You needn’t try.”

Oswald’s eyebrows went up. “She has turned you down?”

“Bert, if this place wasn’t so public I should blow up! Good Lord, man! there has never been anything sentimental between Judith and me!--nothing on top of earth more than a bit of jolly good-comradeship!”

Being already up, Oswald’s eyebrows stayed in that position.

“On your part, perhaps; but how about Judith? Listen, David: within the past month I’ve heard half a dozen times that you and Judith were to be married as soon as you got yourself relocated in some more habitable place than a Florida swamp. You may howl all you want to about country-town gossip, but----”

This time David Vallory interrupted with a twist of the square jaw that took Oswald swiftly back to a day long remembered in Middleboro school annals when David had plunged, head down, into battle with the leader of the “factory gang” and had for all time vindicated the superiority of “town-side” brain over mere brawn.

“Drop it, Herbert,” he said quietly; and then: “Let’s get back on the main track again. You were saying that the town expected me to come back and follow in Dad’s footsteps. There’s nothing doing. In another way, I’m as incompetent as he is. Money-handling doesn’t appeal to me; it never has appealed to me. I’d rather go out as a transit-man on some building job worth while than to be the president of the biggest bank in the State. It’s all in the way a man happens to be built.”

“You are beginning at the bottom in your profession, though, aren’t you?”

“Of course; any man worth his salt begins that way. And that brings us down to the finances again. Have you carried the figuring far enough along to be able to guess at what will be left after all the bills are paid?”

Oswald shook his head. “Your father hasn’t taken either of us fully into his confidence,” he averred. “He insists that we must try to realize on the assets so as to have a hundred thousand dollars left to pay a personal debt which doesn’t appear on the bank’s books. If we subtract even half of that amount from the most favorable outcome at present in sight, there will be nothing of any account left for him and your sister.”

“It will be enough; with what I may be able to add to it,” said David, neither affirming nor denying the lawyer’s hint that he was not entirely in his father’s confidence.

“You are going away to look for a job?” Oswald asked.

“As it happens, I don’t have to look for one. I leave for Chicago on the eleven-fifteen to-night, and my job is waiting for me.”

“Fine!” was the friendly approval. “Is it a secret?”

“Not at all. I’m going to work for the Grillage Engineering Company; an assistant engineer’s billet on a bridge construction job up in Wisconsin. There is a reason why I shouldn’t take the job, and a still stronger reason why I can’t refuse.”

“That’s capital!” said Oswald, ignoring the qualifying part of the announcement. “You are lucky--or I guess you are. They say Mr. Eben Grillage can dig his profit out of the shrewdest contract that was ever drawn and never turn a hair. But as an engineer in the field, you won’t have anything to do with that part of it.”

David glanced up quickly with a little frown coming and going between the honest eyes.

“Again I’ll have to ask you to break it off, Bert. Mr. Grillage is my father’s friend.”

“Of course he is; I forgot for the moment,” was the placative reply. “I shouldn’t have repeated the gossip--which is only gossip, after all. I suppose you remember his daughter Vinnie, as a little girl, don’t you?”

“Very well, indeed,” said David, with his eyes on his plate.

“She has grown up to be a raving, tearing, heart-smashing beauty,” the lawyer went on, entirely unmindful of the sudden change in his table-mate. “I met her in Indianapolis last summer when I was there on a business trip. She was stopping with friends, and she gave me exactly five minutes by the watch--which was all the time she could spare; all the time a dozen other fellows would let her spare. Somebody told me she was, or is, going to marry an English title.”

“That is gossip, too,” said David, still looking down.

“I suppose so. You can hear all sorts of things if you’ll only hold your ears open. Finished your dinner? If you have, let’s go and smoke.”

At this, David Vallory came to life again.

“No; I can’t take the time, Bert. I must go out home and pack my trunk. And I’m going to ask a favor of you. Will you be at the train to see me off.”

“Surest thing in the world,” said the young lawyer; and after David had gone he sauntered out to the office-lobby and bought a cigar with thoughtful deliberation, recalling, now that he had time to do so, David’s cryptic remark about the reasons--still unexplained--for and against his new employment.

V

Gloriana

David Vallory had not been strictly truthful in pleading the journey preparations as an excuse for leaving Oswald at the dinner-table. It still wanted three hours of train time; and, as a matter of fact, his trunk, packed in Florida for the hurried flight northward, had not since been unpacked. But on no account would he have given Oswald the real reason for his early defection.

That reason began to define itself when, at the corner beyond the St. Nicholas, he turned to the left and walked rapidly in a direction precisely opposite to that in which the home suburb lay. Down to the railroad yards and across the tracks he fared, turning presently from the main street into another which led to a region called “Judsontown,” taking its name from the Judson Foundries and housing the major portion of Judson’s workmen.

At the gate of a cottage a trifle larger and more commodious than its neighbors on either hand, David turned in and walked up the slag-paved path to the porch. There was a light turned low in one room of the cottage, but no other signs of life. But at his approach there was a rustle of modish skirts on the porch and a vision appeared; the vision taking the form of a strikingly handsome young woman, round limbed, scarlet-lipped, with midnight eyes and hair. The light from the near-by street lamp framed her in the porch opening for David as he swung up the path, and it was a picture to stir the blood in the veins of an anchorite.

“Gloriana!” he said, taking both of her hands, and giving her the name she had given herself as soon as she was old enough to hate the one her parents had given her.

“Davie! you’ve come at last, have you?” she breathed. “’Tis long ago I’d given you up. A week you’ve been back, and but for the papers I’d never have known it!”

“Don’t scold me, Glo,” he begged. “If you could only know how busy I’ve been. This is the first spare minute I’ve had in the week, honestly. Where are your father and mother?”

“They’ve gone up-town to the movie. You’ll be coming in?”

“Just for a little while.”

She led the way into the cottage, into the room of the dimmed light. It was exactly as David remembered it from a time when he had often been made at home in it; the big-figured red carpet, the marble-topped center table with the family Bible, the family photograph album, and a crocheted mat in the middle for the foot of an ornate parlor lamp with a crimson shade. Also, there were the same stiff-backed chairs and the same sofa upholstered in green rep. In one corner was the young woman’s piano. John Fallon was a foreman in the Judson Foundries and could well afford to buy his daughter a piano, if he chose. David sat down on one of the uncomfortable chairs.

“Turn up the light and let me see you, Glo,” he said, and when she did it: “Jove! but you picked the right name for yourself years ago when we were kiddies! The movie stars have nothing on you--not one of them.”

“Flatterer!” she laughed, and if there were a faint suggestion of the “h” after the “t’s” he did not mind. Her Irish accent had always seemed to harmonize perfectly with her rich, “black-Irish” beauty. Then: “The two years have been making you into a man, Davie. ’Twas in your letters when I’d be reading them. Don’t be propping yourself on that chair; come over here and be yourself.”

He went to sit beside her on the green sofa and was straightway conscious that he had stepped within a strange aura. Pointedly and of set purpose he began to talk of commonplace things; Middleboro things that had happened during his absence. But the subtle distraction persisted, coming like a veil between the thought and the words until he scarcely knew at times what he was saying. It was a new experience. What he had told Oswald was the simple truth; in the old days he and Judith Fallon had been more like two boys together than a boy and girl, and the frank comradeship had carried over from childhood to manhood and womanhood; or it had up to now. But now he could see and feel nothing but her superb physical beauty. Once, as a college Freshman, he had permitted himself to be ridiculed into gulping down a drink of whiskey. “It was like this,” he found himself saying aloud, and the girl beside him laughed.

“What’s come over you, Davie?” she said. “Half the time you’re talking nonsense--just nonsense. But for knowing how you hate it, I might think you’d been drinking!”

“I have,” he returned soberly, suddenly realizing. Then: “Glo, you ought to pick out some decent young fellow and get married.”

She laughed at this, but the black eyes were hard.

“Why would I want to be getting married?” she demanded.

“Don’t you?”

“I thought I did--two years ago.”

“You were too young then,” he decided gravely. “But now it is time. You--you’re a living threat, as you are. Don’t you know it?”

“And what would I be threatening, then?”

“The peace of mind of every man who comes near you. You may not know it, Glo, but you are the kind of woman for whom men, ever since the world began, have been throwing everything worth while into the discard; truth, honor, loyalty--anything they had to fling away.”

“Would you just be finding that out, Davie?”

“You--you’re different in some way, Glo; or else I am. What have you been doing to yourself in these two years?”

“What should I be doing? Is a girl to be waiting always for something that’s never going to happen?”

A cold horror seized him, but he tried to shake it off; tried to recall the Gloriana he had grown up with; a frank, outspoken daughter of the people, strong to attract, but also strong to resist. The “town-side” boys had jeered him for companying with John Fallon’s daughter, a “factory-side” girl, but then, as now, he was wont to go his own way when he was convinced that the way was straight and honest. The way had been straight, he told himself, because the girl was straight. But now----

“Glo, I meant what I said a few minutes ago; you ought to get married. Some wise person has said that all men and women can be divided into two classes: those who need not marry unless they choose to, and those who must. You are one of those who must. It’s your harbor of safety.”

Her low laugh was like an invitation to a sensuous dance.

“Since when have you turned preacher, Davie?” she mocked. “What’s got into you to-night? Put your head down here and let me comb it, the way I used to when you wore knee stockings.”

“No,” he refused.

She leaned toward him and slipped a round arm across his shoulders. He reached up and disengaged it gently.

“No,” he said again. “You shouldn’t do things like that, Glo. You used to do them once, and it didn’t matter. But now you are not the same.”

This time her laugh had an edge to it.

“The fishes have nothing on you for the cold blood, Davie. But you’re like all the men. After you’ve made what you like out of a girl, you slap her in the face.”

Vaguely he understood that she was accusing him of something.

“I’m wishing for nothing but your happiness, Glo; can’t you understand that? I’ve never wished for anything else.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she said:

“’Tis to a convent I should have gone, Davie, instead of to the public--to run with boys, and with you. ’Twas you taught me things a girl shouldn’t know.”

“I?” said David, still more horror-stricken.

“’Tis so. I was a woman grown whilst you were yet but a boy. You didn’t know. If your lady mother had lived she might have told you more about girls and women. I was loving you, Davie, long before ever you put a razor to your face.”

For the first time in his life David the man found it easeful and fitting to curse David the boy. “Warm-hearted,” he had called Judith in those other days, and thought no more of it. But now ... he had been as one who tosses a careless match aside and passes on, only to turn and find a forest ablaze.

“Tell me what you care to, Glo,” he said gravely.

“’Tis an old story, I’m thinking. Whilst I could be writing to you and knowing you’d be coming back from the college the bad heart of me kept still. But when you went to that place in Florida the bad heart was empty--empty for a man. The man came, Davie; I’m thinking he always comes.”

David had to moisten his lips before he could say: “Who was it, Glo?”

“’Twas young Tommy Judson.”

“God!” said David. The exclamation was half prayer and half execration. He knew Judson; all Middleboro knew him as the country town’s most faithful imitation of gilded youth and its degeneracy. After a time he said: “Somebody ought to kill him, Glo; I ought to kill him.”

“’Tis little good that would do now. He’s gone away, and my father would be getting a raise in his pay, little knowing why he got it.”

Though the windows were open to the summer night breeze David felt as if he were suffocating. Springing to his feet he began to pace the narrow limits of the little sitting-room.

“Glo,” he said chokingly, “this is the most awful thing I’ve ever had to face. I came here to-night just as I used to come years ago. I meant to tell you that I had found the girl that I hoped some day to marry. And now you tell me that I led you up to the edge and left you where the next man who came along could push you over.”

“No, Davie, dear; I’m not blaming you,” came from the green-covered sofa.

“But I am blaming myself.” He stopped abruptly before her. “Let me see your face, Glory: have you been trying to tell me that I ought to marry you?”

She would not look up. “And you with another girl in your heart? I’m not that wicked, Davie.”

“Then at least you must let me talk to you as we used to talk in the other days; straight from the shoulder. I was wiser than I knew, a little while ago, Glory, when I said that your safety was in marriage. Can’t you forget and start afresh? There are plenty of young fellows here in your part of town who would never ask you to turn back a single leaf of your life book for them; can’t you marry one of them and make him a good wife, Glory?”

She shook her head. “I can not,” she said shortly.

He drew out his watch and held its dial to the lamp light. It was time to be gone.

“I must go; I am leaving town to-night, and the kindest thing I can hope for you is that you’ll never see my face again. It doesn’t help matters any, but if you have suffered, I shall suffer, too. You have put a mark on me that I shall carry to my grave.”

She got up without a word and walked with him to the door and down the slag-paved path to the gate. But at the moment of parting, when he was again seeking vainly for some word of heartening, she flung her arms around his neck and kissed him twice, thrice.

“_That’s_ why I can’t marry another man!” she panted; and before he could reply she had darted up the path and into the cottage and had slammed the door.

It was an older and soberer David who tramped slowly back through the factory district and across the railroad tracks to the better lighted main street of the town. Conscience is definable only in terms, not of the common, but of the individual human factor. For the David Vallorys there are no compromises. He either was, or was not, Judith Fallon’s keeper. Had he been responsible for her development up to a certain point, the danger point, and had then been blind enough or thoughtless enough to cast her adrift? One responsibility he could not shirk: from a time reaching deeply into their childish years his influence over her had been stronger than that of any one else, her parents not excepted. How was he to know that her yielding to him had been chiefly sexual, and that unconsciously he had walked in her path instead of leading her to walk in his? But even so, was he wholly blameless?

These soul-searching questions kept even step with him on the way to the hill suburb, and they made the home leave-taking, a little later, thoughtfully abstracted. It was his promise to his sister to come home for Christmas, if he could leave his work, that reminded him of another responsibility; and all the way down to the railroad station he was hoping that Herbert Oswald would not forget his agreement to be at the train.

Oswald had not forgotten. He was waiting at the station entrance, and together they walked out upon the platform. The Chicago express was bulletined fifteen minutes late, and David was thankful for the brief extension of time. There was a thing to be said to Oswald, and, finding no way in which to lead up to it, he plunged bluntly.

“Bert, there is something that I want to say--that I’ve got to say--before I leave. You’ve been a mighty good friend to us in this shake-up, and we shall always owe you a lot more than we can pay. But I’m obliged to be a sort of dog in the manger, right here at the last. I have a sister, and she is blind.”

“Well?” said Oswald, and his voice was a bit thick.

“You know what I ought to say; what I want to say, and can’t. Lucille isn’t like other girls; she can’t be. And yet she is just as human as other girls. You mustn’t go to the house so often, Bert. If you do, there’ll be an explosion some day, and you’ll never get over being sorry.”

“I don’t know exactly what you mean,” was the low-spoken reply.

“Then I shall have to tell you in so many words, brutal as it may sound. With her affliction, Lucille can’t marry, and she--oh, dammit all--you know what I mean!”

“Do I?” queried the young lawyer, in the same thick voice. “Perhaps I do, and perhaps I don’t. You might make it a little plainer, if you care to.”

The belated train had evidently made up some of its lost time; it was whistling for Middleboro and the roar of its coming was already filling the air of the calm summer night with thunderous murmurings.

“I will make it plainer. The little sister has taken you on as a friend. But at the same time you are the only man outside of the family who has ever taken the trouble to make her life more bearable. Let it stop at that, Bert; for God’s sake, let it stop at that if you don’t want to break her heart!”

The train was in; the conductor was calling “All aboard!” and the Pullman porter had opened his vestibule. Oswald crossed the platform with David Vallory in sober silence, but at the hand-gripping instant he found his tongue.

“You may go to your job and rest easy, David. I’m the last man on God’s green earth who will ever do anything to break your sister’s heart. Good-by--and let me hear from you.”

VI

The Henchman

The great concrete railroad bridge at Coulee du Sac was nearing completion, and for David Vallory, who had spent a summer, an autumn, and the better part of a winter on the work, the closing scenes of his brief summer stop-over in Middleboro had withdrawn into a past already taking on the characteristics of remoteness.

In their general aspect the bridge-building weeks and months had been uneventful, or, at least, unexciting; long working days made short by a keen interest in his chosen profession; the good will, early won, of his associates on the engineering staff; clipped words of approval now and then--progress markers, these--from his chief, Grimsby, a saturnine man-driver who cracked the whip oftener than he praised, and who seemed to enjoy to the fullest extent the confidence of the boss of bosses, Eben Grillage.

Only once in the nine months had David taken time off; a scant three days in December, two of them travel-spoiled, and the one in between--Christmas Day, it was--spent with his father and sister in the Middleboro home. Partly he went to keep his conditional promise to the blind one; but underlying the fraternal motive there was another. Twice during the previous summer he had written to Judith Fallon, conceiving it to be no less than a binding duty. There had been no reply, but the second letter had been returned to him with the postal legend, “No such person at the address given,” stamped upon the envelope. His twenty-four-hour Christmas stay in Middleboro gave him little chance to make inquiries; but few inquiries were needed. The Fallons had sold their cottage in Judsontown and moved away, leaving no word by which they could be traced. Also, there was a story, not vouched for by David’s informant, that there had been trouble of some sort in the Foundries offices, with a big Irish foreman smashing his way into Mr. Thomas Judson’s private room and assaulting its occupant.

With this new barb to rankle, David went back to his work at Coulee du Sac saddened and depressed, and grievously weighted with the sense of responsibility. He found no difficulty in believing the story of the explosion in the Judson offices, and was well able to supply the missing details. Fallon’s quarrel was the deadliest a father could have, and the only wonder was that he had not committed a murder.

During his nine months’ isolation at Coulee du Sac, David had met the Vallory benefactor only a few times; and the benefactor’s daughter not at all. For the lack of the social opportunity he was grateful rather than sorry. In the light of the Judith Fallon tragedy he was beginning to question his right to make love to Virginia Grillage, even if the magic circle could be broken into; or if not to question the right, to realize the immense and humiliating barrier which must always exist between a man with a tragedy in his past and a woman to whom that past should be as a pane of glass. And the height of the barrier was not lessened by the thought that, in the last analysis, he was culpable only to the extent of having been bat-blind to the temperamental abysses yawning for the Judith Fallons. A great love might condone the blindness, but no pure-minded woman could ever be made to believe that it was total.

As to Virginia’s whereabouts during the three-quarters of a year, David had learned something from Eben Grillage, himself. She had spent the summer with a party of friends in the Rockies--the farther Rockies--touring and resting at a small resort hotel known only to the elect; she had spent the shooting season with other friends in the Adirondacks; and she had gone to Florida late in the season to escape the Northern winter.

So much for the slightly wider horizons. In the working-day field, David had been given the most convincing proof that he had not been merely placed and forgotten. There had been offerings of ample opportunity to show what was in him, with pay-roll advances to fit; and on a March day when Grimsby, the saturnine chief of construction, called him into the bridge office for a conference, he was given fresh assurances that he had been accepted as a post-graduate member of the staff.

“You are a rising young man in the profession, Vallory, and if you keep on as you’ve begun, you’ll come out at the top of the heap,” was the complimentary phrase with which the conference began. “You are not like most of the young fellows I’ve had to hammer into shape; you don’t go around firing off the proposition that you know it all.”

“I should hope not,” said David. “That sort of thing is the best possible evidence that a man needs to go to school again.”

“Meaning that we’re all learning all the time?--that’s the idea, exactly,” said the chief brusquely. “Take it in the use--the modern use--of reinforced concrete, for example: we are all children going to school in that field. What we don’t know about it would fill a library.”

“You are right,” David admitted. “I’m learning something new about it every day.”

“And just because we are still in the apprentice stage, I imagine we go pretty wide on the side of safety,” Grimsby went on. “That’s natural; we’re afraid to take our own figures after we’ve made them. Now this ‘mix’ we’re using on this bridge; I’ll venture the cement content could be cut down twenty per cent and still leave an ample margin of safety. What?” Then, with an abrupt break: “Sit down and have a cigar.”

David found a three-legged stool and nodded acquiescence to the general postulate that the use of concrete as a substitute for masonry was as yet but a babe in arms.

“The quality of the cement is another disputed point,” Grimsby argued. “There isn’t the least doubt in my mind that we are altogether too finical about that. We’ve set up a code of theoretical standards; such and such a degree of fineness, such and such a chemical analysis, and all that; and yet, after the job’s done, you can’t tell where the tested stuff ends and the untested begins. Isn’t that so?”

“I couldn’t prove that it isn’t,” said David.

“All right; neither can I. But on this very point we’re continually having trouble with the railroad people, as you know. We may admit cheerfully that we don’t know quite all there is to be known about concrete; but neither do the railroad company’s engineers. Their inspectors on this bridge are a bunch of cranks; that is the sort of fault-finders that the ‘party of the first part’ always hires to put on the job to watch the contractors. If we lived up to the specifications as they’d like to make us, the Grillage Engineering Company would come out about a mile deep in the hole.”

Again David Vallory acquiesced. From time to time he had had troubles of his own with the watch-dog inspectors representing the railroad company for which the bridge was being constructed.

“You younger fellows are fresh from the laboratories, and you have the latest word in the testing experiments,” said Grimsby. “That’s why I’ve called you in for a conference. You’ve been following the cement tests made in our field laboratory, haven’t you?”

“Most of them; yes.”

“Well, you haven’t seen anything wrong with the stuff, so far, have you?”

“Never.”

The bearded chief nodded. “That’s the talk,” he said; then he made his frontal attack without further preface. “You are loyal to your salt, aren’t you, Vallory? If what they tell me about you and Mr. Grillage is true, you ought to be.”

“I hope I am,” returned the loyalist, a little at a loss to prefigure what was coming next. Then he added: “My family owes Mr. Grillage a greater debt than we can ever hope to pay, if that is what you mean.”

“So I’ve understood. Now we can get down to the nub of the thing. You’ve heard that the railroad company has hired a new chief engineer, haven’t you?”

“Mr. Esher? Yes; I met him day before yesterday when he was going over the work.”

“Esher is his name, and he’s the prize crank of the lot. He has just thrown out that last shipment of cement on us; says it doesn’t test up to standard in the railroad lab. It’s all poppy-cock, of course. Some little-boy chemist on the railroad pay-roll has made a blunder--that’s all there is to it. Now then; have you been keeping in touch with your college?”

“Fairly well; yes.”

“Stand in with the professors in the college cement lab.?”

“Yes; I know them all.”

“Good men, are they?--men whose word you’d take in settling a dispute?”

“In proof tests, you mean? Certainly; I’d accept them without question.”

“Good. Here’s what we’re up against. This shipment of cement that I’m talking about is the material Shubrick was to have used in the under-water work on Pier Four. We can’t afford to throw it away, and to save it we’ll have to do a little juggling; but I want you to satisfy yourself fully beforehand. Take samples of the cement, just as it stands, and send them to your college for analysis. We’ll keep Shubrick supplied out of the reserve stock until you get your answer. Better get the samples off to-day.”

Now all this was purely routine, and David, who had thus been honored by the confidence of his chief, went about it as a part of the day’s work. The samples were duly taken and forwarded to the university, with a personal letter explaining the reason for the requested analysis. An unbiased opinion was desired, and the letter-writer ventured to hope that it might be given promptly.

In a few days the answer came, and it was entirely satisfactory. The samples which had been submitted tested fully up to standard, and the college authorities were at a loss to understand why any question should have been raised as to the quality of the material. David Vallory showed the letter to Grimsby, and was rewarded by the hard-featured chief’s nearest approach to a smile.

“Now for the needful bit of juggling,” was Grimsby’s comment. “The railroad people have us by the neck because we have to ship everything in over their line. But we’ll fool ’em, Vallory. Luckily, the cement mill isn’t on their line. We’ll send the condemned shipment out to-night, as if we were returning it to the mill. To-morrow morning you can slip out on the passenger train and overtake the freight, say at Little River, on the F. S. & A., where we are building the power dam for the paper mill.”

David Vallory was staring out of the office window with a small frown wrinkling between his honest gray eyes. He could forecast what was coming, and while the cause seemed to be righteous enough, the expedient to which he was to resort bore all the earmarks of crookedness.

“And then?” he queried.

“Then you can take a few laborers off the dam--I’ll give you an order to Bullock authorizing it--shift the cement into other cars, and fire it back here. When it comes in, it’ll figure as a new shipment, and you’ll have to doctor the railroad way-bills a bit to make them fit.”

It was the first time in his working experience that David had been asked to carry out a piece of deliberate trickery, though there had been other occasions when he had helped to throw dust into the eyes of the too-critical railroad inspectors. Quite naturally, his point of view in these smaller deceptions had been that of the men who figured with him as Eben Grillage’s paid henchmen; but this cement “juggling,” as Grimsby had baldly named it, had all the characteristics of a crime.

“It’s a rotten shame that we have to get down to such methods!” he protested. “Let me go to Mr. Esher with the result of these university tests and Professor Luthe’s letter. Taking them together they ought to convince him that we’re not trying to put a spoiled batch of cement across on him.”

Grimsby’s smile was too well guarded to betray his real meaning.

“Esher would turn you down cold. It’s his business to stand by his own laboratory, of course, and he’ll do it. I didn’t ask you to get this college analysis with any hope of convincing Esher with it; I merely wanted you to be satisfied in your own mind. You see what we’re up against. If we have to throw away that shipment of Portland, it will mean a good chunk of loss for the Grillage Engineering Company. You said you owed the big boss something; now’s the time to prove that you weren’t talking through your hat.”

Thus appealed to, David stifled his qualms; and the next day he carried out his instructions faithfully and to the letter. The condemned material was overhauled at Little River and was shunted into the Engineering Company’s own construction yard at the dam. Here it was shifted to other cars by Bullock’s laborers, and the juggling process was brought into play. To the F. S. & A. agent at Little River, David merely stated a fact. He was shipping three car-loads of cement from the company’s yard at the dam to the bridge at Coulee du Sac. Would the agent way-bill them accordingly?

“Ship cement in one day and out the next, do you?” grinned the railroad man. “Didn’t I see the yard crew shoving these three cars over to the dam yesterday?”

“These are not the same cars,” said David, and he produced the yard boss’s memorandum to prove it.

The half-truth, which was wholly an untruth so far as the inner fact was concerned, succeeded. The cars were billed, and in due course they reached Coulee du Sac as a new shipment. Just what was to be gained by the juggling, when the railroad inspectors would be certain to sample the cement and test it, with probably the same results as those they had reached before, was not very clear to David Vallory. But one night, a little farther along, he was given a shock of enlightenment.

The shock was administered by his bunk-shack mate, the engineer in charge of the under-water work in the caissons; Shubrick by name, and by training a man who had grown accustomed to many shifts and tricks in that branch of engineering which is fullest of fatalities. To Shubrick David Vallory was freeing his mind on the general subject of over-critical inspection.

“These railroad watchers are getting on my nerves more and more, all the time!” he complained. “They act as if they think we are a bunch of crooks, needing only half a chance to scamp this job so that it will fall into the river with the first train that passes over it. Do they worry you on the under-water work as much as they do us on the concreting?”

Shubrick grinned ferociously.

“I’d shut off the air and drown a few of them if they did. Just the same, David, they’re onto their job all right. You needn’t make any mistake about that.”

“You say that as if you thought we needed watching. Do you think so?”

This time Shubrick’s grin took a sardonic twist.

“When you are a few years older, you’ll know a heap more, David. Why, good Lord, man! are you nourishing the idea that this contracting company is doing business on a philanthropic basis?”

David Vallory shook his head. “You’ll have to diagram it for me, I guess. We may not be any too honest; I’ve seen some things done that I’ve wished we didn’t have to do. But that isn’t an admission that we’re a gang of thieves, to be watched and harried from one day’s end to another.”

“It’s a fight,” said the older man cynically. “The other fellows tie us up with a lot of specifications that they know perfectly well would ruin us if we should live up to them; and, on our side, we live up to just as few of them as the law will allow. The honor system may work in college, but it doesn’t get by to any marked extent in business. As far as that goes, you, yourself, are not as innocent as you look, David. You worked that little cement juggle the other day to the queen’s taste.”

“You heard about that?” said David, and it was a mark of the short distance he had traveled on the road to equivocation that he flushed when he said it.

“Everybody knows about it--everybody but the railroad people. You played it mighty fine. What’s puzzling me is the railroad way-bill part of it. How on top of earth did you contrive to get those way-bills doctored on the F. S. & A. at Little River? Did you buy the agent?”

The flush deepened under David Vallory’s eyes. The misleading explanation he had made to induce the railroad agent to bill the condemned cement as a mill shipment to be transferred from the work on the dam to that on the Coulee du Sac bridge was the least defensible part of the transaction, or so it seemed to him.

“The less said about that part of it will be the soonest mended,” he returned gruffly.

“Well, it was a neat little trick all the way round,” the under-water boss commented. “If Congdon hadn’t fallen down in the first place, we wouldn’t have had to work it.”

This was new ground to David Vallory and he said as much. “What did Congdon have to do with it?” he asked.

Shubrick relighted his pipe, and after a puff or two: “Do you mean to tell me that you don’t know?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t ask.”

Again the under-water engineer sucked slowly at his pipe. “There is one of two things, David,” he remarked, after the pause: “you are either a good bit deeper than I’ve been giving you credit for being--or else you’re too innocent to be running loose without a guardian. Didn’t Grimsby tell you how it all got balled up in the beginning?”

“He told me that some railroad chemist had blundered in making the tests.”

Shubrick’s laugh was soundless. “It was our man Congdon who did the blundering. After he had made the tests in our own lab., he was ass enough not to see to it that the railroad chemist didn’t get a whack at the stuff.”

“Are you trying to tell me that the cement wasn’t up to standard?” demanded Grimsby’s accessory.

“If you need to be told. It’s a ‘second,’ all right enough; it sets unevenly, and is otherwise off color; but nobody will ever know the difference after it’s in place in the bottom of the river.”

For a moment the air of the small bunk shack became stifling and David Vallory got up and went to stand in the doorway. When he turned back to Shubrick it was to say: “Then the whole thing was a frame-up, was it?--to enable us to work off a cheaper grade of Portland in a place where it couldn’t show up?”

“Of course it was. We have to play even when we can.”

“But I had that shipment analyzed myself. I sent samples of it to the university.”

“Then you took your samples from the wrong sacks, that’s all. I’m using the stuff in the caisson, and I guess I know what I’m talking about. It’s punk.”

“If that is so, why haven’t the railroad people found it out in a second test?”

“That’s easy. This time Congdon was right on the job and saw to it that they got the proper kind of samples. You needn’t look so horrified; the bridge isn’t going to tumble down.”

But more important things than bridges were tumbling down in David Vallory’s heart and mind at that moment. When a young man has grown up in an ethical atmosphere the first broad step toward the unethical is apt to be subversive of a good many preconceived ideas and standards. After a time he said:

“Shubrick, the frame-up wasn’t altogether on the railroad people. Part of it was on me.”

“That’s easy, too,” said the older man. “Grimsby was merely trying to provide you with a good, stout _alibi_; to leave you a nice, respectable hole to crawl out of in case there should be any future to the thing. But if you’re really stirred up about it, you are foolish. Things like that are done every day. We are fighting for our own hand. The Golden Rule is pretty to look at, but it doesn’t hold water in business.”

“You’re taking the ground that we are dealing with a condition and not with principles of right and wrong?”

“Precisely. A man has got to be loyal to something, Vallory: I’m loyal to my bread and butter; so, too, in the long run, are you, and ninety-nine other men out of a hundred. Possibly it digs a little deeper with you. Haven’t I heard you say that you’d willingly go a mile or so out of your way where Mr. Grillage’s interests are concerned?--that it was up to you to take long shifts or hard ones, or anything else that came up?”

“You have.”

“There it is, then. No man living has ever been able to draw the line absolute between ethical right and wrong and lay it down as a mathematical axiom. I’ll put it up to you. If you are a fanatical crank your duty is plain. You know the inside of this cement deal, and you can show it up if you feel like it and make it cost the Grillage Engineering Company a pot of money. But you are not going to do any such asinine and ungrateful thing--you know you’re not. What you’ll do will be to tell yourself that the particular grade of Portland used is strictly a matter of opinion between our staff and the railroad’s, and let it go at that.”

It is altogether improbable that Warner Shubrick regarded himself as in any sense an _advocatus diaboli_; and it might be even farther afield to suppose that Grimsby had given him a hint to safeguard the cement fraud by trying to justify it for his shack-mate. None the less, the seed was sown and a new point of view was opened for David Vallory. Given time to wear itself out, the natural indignation arising upon the discovery that he had been used as a tool in Grimsby’s small plot became gradually transmuted into something quite different. Shubrick, in declaring that a man must be loyal to something, labeled a solvent which has dissolved much fine gold in the human laboratory. The transition from loyalty to an ideal to loyalty to a cause is not so violent as it may seem. Hence, it need not be written down as a miracle that, in proportion as the ideals withdrew, there grew up in David Vallory a blind determination to be loyal, first, to his salt.

It was in a letter to his father, written at the end of this same month of March, that the newer viewpoint got itself set forth in words.