Chapter III: Part 3

“I didn’t know what a cramped little circle I’d been trotting around in all my life until I came up here,” he wrote. “You have to go up against the real thing in the world fight before you can get your ideas straightened out, and give things their proper relative values. The university did nothing for me in that respect, and the Government job in Florida was a mere anæsthetic. But here I’m doing a man’s work, and carrying a man’s responsibility. I know you won’t take it as a brag if I say to you, Dad, that I’ve grown more in the nine months that I’ve been at Coulee du Sac than I did in the nine years before that. For the first time in my experience I’m beginning to be able to peep out over the edge of things, and to grab hold while the grabbing is good. Incidentally, I’m learning what it means to be loyal to a man who has been loyal to me and mine, and I know it will please you when I say that I’ve been able, now and then, to work off a little of the big debt of gratitude we owe to Mr. Grillage.

“Ordinarily, I should suppose, Mr. Grillage doesn’t trouble himself to keep tab on the many apprentice engineers that he has scattered around on his numerous contracts, but I’ve had more than a hint that he looks my way, now and then. Only yesterday Grimsby was telling me in his sort of bitter way that he guessed the big boss was grooming me for something better than I have now. While I’m well enough satisfied with my present billet, I’m not married to it so that Mr. Grillage couldn’t divorce me. Anyway, here’s hoping.”

It was only a short fortnight after the writing of this home letter that David was summoned to Chicago by a telegram from the king of the contractors, and he went with a light heart, half forecasting another promotion. Also, he was soberly jubilant over the thought that, by some happy conjunction of the lucky planets, he might again be permitted to divide time, at least for one evening, with Virginia Grillage’s retinue of court-payers.

VII

A Reward of Merit

It was after city office hours when David Vallory reached Chicago, arriving in obedience to the telegram from headquarters, and he was preparing to go to a hotel for the night when a brisk young fellow in livery singled him out to ask his name and to tell him that Mr. Grillage’s car had been sent for him. In the waiting automobile, to his unbounded surprise and delight, he found Miss Virginia. The lapse of something over a year had only made her more ravishingly beautiful in David’s eyes, and his welcome was all that he could ask--and more.

“You ought to feel highly honored,” she said, making room for him in the limousine. “I ran away from a houseful of people to come in town for you.” And then, lest he should be too unreasonably happy: “It is _so_ good to be reminded of dear, old, study Middleboro again!”

“I wish to goodness I might remind you of something besides Middleboro,” David complained, laughing; “of myself, for example, or Palm Beach, or--well, in fact, almost anything. Do you realize that it is over a year since we last met?”

“I do, indeed. Also, I realize that you have never, by any chance, written a line or happened to come to Chicago at any time when I’ve been at home. Or perhaps you’ve been here and didn’t think it worth while to let me know.”

“Nothing like it,” said David, matching her mood. “I haven’t been in the city since your father sent me to Coulee du Sac, unless you count the car-changing times when I went home at Christmas. You don’t realize that I have become a workingman since I left the Government service. I have, and I’ve had a laudable ambition to stick to the job and earn my wages honestly.” Then, as the car began threading its way through the traffic to the northward: “Where are you taking me?”

“Home, of course; to The Maples.”

“To the houseful of people? I shall disgrace you.”

“No clothes?” she suggested, with a smile that made him tingle to his finger-tips.

“Absolutely nothing to wear!”

“How shocking! But never mind; I shall tell them all that they are lucky not to have you in overalls and mining-boots--or don’t you wear mining-boots on bridges? However, you needn’t worry; you won’t have any chance to be social, unless it’s at dinner. Father will monopolize you.”

“What is he going to do to me; fire me?”

The limousine had reached the northward lake drive, and the king’s daughter pressed the bell-push for more speed. “Dinner will be waiting,” she explained. Then she answered his question. “It’s a perfectly profound secret, of course, but I really believe you _are_ going to be ‘fired.’”

“That is a nice, comforting thing to be told--just before dinner!” he laughed. “But my obsequies are of no special consequence; tell me about yourself. Is the English lord still hovering upon the horizon?”

“Cumberleigh? What do you know about him?”

“Oh, nothing much; I merely heard last summer that you were going to marry him.”

“When I do, you shall have a handsomely engraved invitation to the wedding--for the sake of the past-and-gone kiddie times in old Middleboro. Won’t that console you?”

“I am consoled speechless. Weddings and funerals always affect me that way, and the Cumberleigh occasion will be both, from my point of view.”

There were some miles of this light-hearted foolishness; brief miles, to be sure, since the big limousine was both powerful and speedy. At the end of the miles the car turned in past the gate lodge of a lakeside estate, an establishment princely in extent, landscaping and architecture; and the gap which a disparity of worldly possessions digs between hope and fruition suddenly yawned wide for David Vallory.

“Why the sphynxian silence?” inquired the princess of the magnificences, gibing amiably at David’s lapse into speechlessness.

“Too much money,” he returned half playfully, waving an arm to include the display of the Grillage fortune. “I was just wondering what it means to you, individually.”

“I have often wondered, myself,” was the half musing rejoinder. “Sometimes I think it means a lot. It grips one that way, now and again. But there are other times when I’m simply obliged to run away from it, just to convince myself that I’m not one of the lay figures in the stage-setting. Can you understand that?”

Her answer gave David another of the ecstatic little thrills. It was not the first time that she had let him see that the quick-witted, clear-sighted girl-child of his boyish adulation had been only overlaid, and not spoiled, by the lavishnesses.

“I think I understand it perfectly,” he assured her. “Money, in and of itself, is nothing. It is only a means to an end.”

The limousine was stopping under the carriage entrance of the great house and they had but a moment more of the comradely isolation. It was the young woman who seized and made use of it.

“I hope you will always remember that, David--and let it be clean money,” she said soberly; and then, with a quick return to the playful mood: “Here we are, just in time for dinner. I shall introduce you to the houseful as my cradle-brother--may I?--and after dinner you may go your way with father and get yourself properly ‘fired.’”

Drawing pretty heavily upon the simplicities, David won through the social preliminaries without calling any marked attention to himself. Miss Virginia’s “houseful” made an even dozen at the rather resplendent dinner-table, and the naïvely inquisitive young wife of an elderly stock-broker, who was David’s elbow companion, and who kept him busy answering childish questions about his profession, saved him from particularizing too curiously as to the others, though he was observant enough to note that none of the many competitors he had had at Palm Beach was among them. At the table dispersal he found himself at once in the clutches of the master of the house.

“Come on into my den and we’ll break away from all this hullaballoo,” growled the king of the man-drivers; and when the coveted privacy was secured: “Pull up a chair and smoke. You’ll find cigars in that sponge-box, or pipes and tobacco on the mantel. How did you leave the bridge?”

“We are working on the closing span, and two months more ought to see the rails down and the trains running over them,” David reported, settling himself in a deep chair with one of the long-stemmed pipes. “Now that the cold weather is over, there is nothing to hold us back.”

“Lose much concrete in the freezing?”

“No; very little. We used your idea of tarpaulin coverings and a perforated steam-pipe and saved practically every yard we put in place. There was some little kicking on the part of the inspectors, but we got by with nearly all of it.”

“Huh!” grunted the big man. “A bunch of inspectors wouldn’t be happy if they couldn’t find something to kick about! That’ll do for the bridge. We’ll call it a back-number for you and pass it up. I’ve been letting you alone at Coulee du Sac; wanted to see what you were going to make of yourself--what you were made of.”

“I hope I haven’t disappointed you too badly,” David ventured.

“You haven’t; if you had, you wouldn’t be here to-night. Now then; are you ready to tackle something a good deal bigger than an assistant’s job on a concrete bridge?”

“I’ll tackle anything you give me; though I’m not asking you to push me any faster or farther than the good of the service will warrant.”

“Don’t you lose any sleep over that,” was the gruff retort. “You’ll never get any plums from me merely because you happen to be Adam Vallory’s son. For that matter, the shoe’s on the other foot. I’m thinking about giving you a hard job--a damned hard job. What do you know about the Nevada Short Line new-alignment project out in the Timanyoni country?”

David shook his head in token that he knew little.

“Practically nothing more than the technical articles in the engineering journals have told me.”

“Well, it’s a right sizable job, and we have the contract. We had a fellow named Lushing out there as chief, but I had to let him go.”

“Incompetent?” said David.

“No; competent as the very devil. But he welshed; let himself be bought up by the railroad company.”

“How was that?”

“Just plain crooked; gave us the double-cross; chummed in with the railroad staff; took favors, and all that. Any time he wanted a special to run down to Brewster for a night off, he got it--and we paid for it.”

Having his recent experience in mind, David Vallory understood perfectly. With a man of the Lushing type in charge as chief constructing engineer there would naturally be no cutting of corners on the hard-and-fast specifications; no saving of money for the Grillage treasury.

“It seems to me that plain business loyalty is one of the things you buy, or ought to buy, with the salaries you pay,” was his disposal of the Lushing case.

“Lushing is a fise-dog, and he has proved it by going over to the railroad engineering staff as chief inspector,” rasped the man-driver. “What do you think about that?--going over to the other side and carrying with him all the information that his job with us had given him?”

David was by this time sufficiently partisan to lose sight of the fact that a discharged man might be excused for taking the first place that might offer.

“It was unprofessional, to say the least,” was his comment.

“There was more to it than that, but we needn’t go into the contemptible whys and wherefores,” Grillage went on, with a portentous frown. “I let him out, and for a month or more we’ve been rocking along without a chief--and with a man against us who knows all the tricks of the trade. I’ve called you in to ask if you think you are big enough to swing the job and hold up our end of the pole. Grimsby says you are.”

David Vallory gasped. It was a tremendous promotion for a young man less than four years out of college, and he was wise enough to discount his lack of experience.

“I am only an apprentice, as you might say, Mr. Grillage, and many a man with my equipment, or more, is still carrying a transit,” he said, after a momentary pause for the breath-catching. “But I’m going to leave it with you. If you think I am equal to it, I can only say that I’ll do my level best not to disappoint you.”

The big man’s laugh was like the creaking of a rusty door-hinge.

“You’re modest, David, and that isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a young fellow in his beginnings. But I’ve been keeping cases on you, and I go a good deal on what Grimsby says. He gives you a good send-off; says you know the engineering game, and can keep your head and handle men. The Timanyoni job won’t ask for much more, unless it’s a little of this loyalty you talk about. If you need an older head, you’ll have Plegg, who’s been first assistant on the job since it began. Plegg has the age and the experience, and you can lean on him for everything but initiative--which is the one thing he hasn’t got. Now we’ll get down to the lay-out,” and he took a huge roll of blue-prints from its case and began a brittle outlining of the realignment project in the Hophra Mountains.

David Vallory, still a trifle dazed by the suddenness and magnitude of the promotion, bent over the drawings and became a sponge to soak up the details. In the construction of the Nevada Short Line over the Hophras in the day of the great gold discoveries, haste had been the watch-word of the builders. With the golden lure ahead to put a premium upon speed, the engineers had eliminated cuts, fills and tunnels, so far as possible, and had made the line climb by a series of reversed curves and heavy grades to the surmounting of the obstacle mountain range at Hophra Pass.

Now, since the Short Line had become an integral part of the far-reaching P. S-W. system, a campaign of distance-shortening and grade-reducing had been inaugurated. There were bridges to be built, hills to be cut through, tunnels to be driven. Powder Can, a mining town nestling in the shadow of the mountains, was the center of the activities, but the work extended for some miles in either direction from the town, with the heaviest of the hill-cutting and tunnel-driving climaxing in the big bore which was to form the needle’s eye for the threading of the mountain range.

Again modestly discounting his lack of experience, David Vallory was doubtful of his ability to plan and carry out such a vast undertaking from its inception. But the trail was already broken for him, and he had only to walk in the technical footsteps of his predecessors. And with a good assistant who had been familiar with the work from the first, this should be comparatively easy.

“I’m your man, Mr. Grillage,” he said, after the maps and plans had been duly considered. “I’ll lean on Plegg, as you suggest, and give you the best there is in me. I’ll say frankly that I don’t believe I’m big enough yet to swing a thing like this as a new proposition. But with the lay-out all made and the work in progress, I ought to be able to pick it up and carry it to the finish.”

“That’s up to you,” said the big man shortly. “You may take this set of blue-prints with you and check yourself into the job on your way to Colorado. Grimsby says you’re good for the engineering end of it, and I’m taking his word for that. But there is another angle that you mustn’t lose sight of. It is a big job, and there were half a dozen bidders. We had to cut mighty close to get in, and any bad breaks on our part are going to shove the profits over to the other side of the books and write ’em down in red ink.”

“There mustn’t be any bad breaks; that’s all there is to that part of it,” said David, with youthful dogmatism.

“That’s the talk. And more than that, we must shave all the foolish frills out of the specifications. You know how that goes, or, if you don’t, Matt Grimsby hasn’t done his duty by you. On a job like this the railroad engineers would have us gold-plate every spike we drive, if they could. You’ve been in the contracting business long enough now to know what I mean.”

David made the sign of assent without prejudice to any of the standards of uprightness and fair play, the undermining of which he was still far from suspecting in his own case.

“I shall be working for the Grillage Engineering Company, first, last and all the time,” he asserted. “The company’s business is my business, and I haven’t any other.”

At this, the contractor-king’s gruffness fell away from him as if it were a displaced mask.

“There spoke your father, David, and a better man never lived. I was only trying you out a while back when I said that you needn’t look for the plums just because you happen to be Adam Vallory’s son. After you get a little farther up the ladder and find that you have to depend on the man or men lower down, you’ll be willing to pay high for a little personal loyalty of the sort that looks an inch or two beyond the next pay-day. I’m putting you right where I’d put a son of my own, if I had one, out yonder in the Timanyoni country, boy--and for the same reason. I want to have somebody on the job that I can bank on and swear by.”

It was the one touch needed to put the fragrant flower of personal relationship upon the juggler-grown tree of promotion. David Vallory was still young enough to take the oath of allegiance without reservations to any master strong enough and generous enough to command his loyalty, and Eben Grillage could have found no surer way to light the fires of blind, unreckoning fealty.

“A little less than a year ago, Mr. Grillage, you loaded me with the heaviest obligation a man can carry. You are adding to it now by giving me a boost big enough to make a much older man light-headed. I’d be a mighty poor sort of a son to Dad if I didn’t----”

“Never mind the obligations,” the master broke in, with a return to the brittle abruptness. “There is an old saying that the quickest way to make an enemy of a man is to do him a favor. If it isn’t working out that way in your case, why, so much the better. Now you may go back to the dinner people, if you want to. I’ve got to dictate a bunch of letters.” And the king of the contractors jabbed his square-ended thumb on a push-button to summon his secretary.

VIII

Out of the Past

Dismissed from the presence of the hard-bitted maker of destinies, David Vallory--not being a devotee of bridge--spent little enough of what was left of the evening in the manner in which he most wished to spend it. But at the end of things, when hope deferred was about to fold its wings and go to bed, Miss Virginia gave her place at the second whist table to the elderly broker’s juvenile wife, and David had the reward which comes to those who only stand and wait.

“Well, have you been dishonorably discharged?” she asked, after they had passed out of earshot of the card players.

“I imagine you know a lot more than I can tell you about it,” he bubbled happily. “I’m to take an early train to-morrow morning and vanish, disappear, fade into the western horizon.”

“Are you sorry--or glad?”

“Both. I’ve had a promotion so whaling big that it makes my head swim. But the place of it is a mighty long jump from Chicago.”

“You didn’t make any use of the nearness of Chicago while you had it at Coulee du Sac,” she cavilled. Then: “Are you starting west without going to see your father and sister?”

“I was with them Christmas, as I told you. And I have a plan which has been simmering while I was waiting for you to get tired of the whist-game. If the living accommodations in the Timanyoni country are at all possible, I shall send for Dad and Lucille a little later in the season.”

“The accommodations are very good. There is a small summer-resort hotel with cottages on the ridge opposite Powder Can.”

“You have been there?” David asked.

“Once; for a few weeks last summer, or rather early in the autumn, when the work was just starting. But won’t that be a rather violent change for your father and sister?--from sleepy old Middleboro to the heart of the Rockies?”

“Possibly. But there are reasons for believing that it will be beneficial all around. Dad isn’t entirely well. His heart was never in the banking business to any great extent, but just the same, the breaking up of all the old routine is hard for him. A complete change will do him no end of good.”

“You said ‘reasons’, and that is only one.”

“There is another. How much do you remember about my sister, Lucille?”

“Only that she is blind, and perfectly angelic, and the most delicately beautiful child that ever breathed.”

“She is all those things yet--only more so. Do you remember Bert Oswald?”

“Oh, yes; quite well. He is a lawyer now, isn’t he?”

“Even so. Worse than that, he is in love with Lucille, and--er--I’m very much afraid she is with him--entirely without realizing it, you know. It’s a pitiful misfortune for both of them. Of course, Lucille can never marry.”

“Why do you say ‘of course’?”

“With her affliction? She doesn’t dream of such a thing! Herbert has been very decent about it. I put him on his guard last summer before I left Middleboro, and he hasn’t spoken--yet. But a day may come when he will speak, and then, as I have told him, there will be trouble and a lot of needless wretchedness. That’s why I want to get Dad and sister away from Middleboro. If they are not where Bert can drop in every few minutes, it will be different.”

For a time the daughter of profitable contracts did not comment on the plan, but when she did there was a touch of her father’s shrewd directness in her manner.

“You are the most frightfully cold-blooded person I’ve ever met,” she told him. “If you had ever been in love yourself you wouldn’t talk so calmly about separating these two. What if Lucille is blind? There have been blind wives, and blind husbands, for that matter, since the beginning of time. You’re hard-hearted.”

“No,” said David; “I am only trying to be the right kind of a brother--as I have tried to be ever since that black day years ago when old Doctor Brown told us that the little sister would never see again. And your argument falls down at the other end, too. You say, if I had ever been in love myself.... That has already happened to me, Virginia.”

Her laugh was deliciously care free. “And you have never told me!” she mocked. “Does she live in Middleboro?--or maybe it’s Florida. Or have you broken all the traditions by keeping faith with a college widow?”

“No, she doesn’t live in Middleboro or in Florida, and I am very certain she has never been a college widow. It’s only a pipe-dream for me as yet, but some day----”

“Some day she will grow tired of waiting and marry somebody else,” was the brisk retort. “Is she pretty?”

“No; that isn’t the word at all.”

“Beautiful, then?”

“So beautiful that I can’t be with her without going fairly dotty.”

Again she laughed derisively.

“You seem to have all the symptoms, and really I didn’t believe it of you, David. You have always seemed so solid and sensible.”

“I am both,” he boasted gravely. Then in a quick shift to safer ground: “You told me once that you enjoyed going out on the work with your father--is there any chance that you may come to the Timanyoni this summer?”

“Maybe. I liked it when I was out there last year--for some things.”

“And for some other things you didn’t? What were they?”

“I’d rather not talk about them. But there was one thing.... Do you know anything about Powder Can?”

“Less than nothing beyond what your father has just told me. He says it’s a mining-camp.”

“It is worse than the usual mining-camp, or it was when I saw it. It is the only place where the workmen can go to spend their pay, and you know what that would mean.”

“I can visualize it pretty well; whiskey, dance-halls and gambling dens, and all that.”

“Yes. We saw little of it at the hotel; the Inn is quite a distance from the town and on the other side of the river. But once I went there with--with a man. I didn’t know where he was taking me--or us; there was a party of us from the hotel, you know; slummers, you’d call us.”

“I don’t know the man, but he ought to have been murdered,” said David.

“Something like that, yes,” she said. “But that wasn’t what I meant to speak about particularly. One of the places where he tried to take us--only we wouldn’t go in--was a dance-hall. There was a girl at the piano; I could see her from where I was standing on the sidewalk. She was beautiful, David, and it made my heart ache to see her in such a place.”

“You should never have seen her,” said David hotly. “I’ve been trying to imagine the kind of man who would take you to such a place as that!”

“He isn’t worth imagining,” she asserted quietly. “But I was speaking of the girl. She was playing for the dancers, you know, and just in the little minute that we were standing there, a big quarryman broke out of the circle and--and put his arm around her neck. It was horrible. She fought like a tiger, but the man was too strong for her. He struck her ... with his fist.”

David shook his head. “Why are you making yourself remember all this? It’s just painful, and it can’t do any good. It was a shame that you had to see it.”

“That is foolish,” she reproved gravely. “We are not living in the Victorian age, David, and the shame wasn’t in my seeing it. The dancing stopped, of course, and the men in our party, or some of them, rushed in and interfered. The girl was carried out; the brute’s blow had knocked her senseless. She was taken home and we did what we could for her. The next day I went to see her.”

“That was like you, Virginia, only----”

“Only what?”

“I won’t say that you ought not to have done it; you know best about that; but----”

“I had to go, David. There was a--a sort of obligation, you know. She was one of our Middleboro girls. I didn’t know her, but I remembered seeing her as a little thing. Perhaps you knew her; her name is Judith Fallon.”

If a bomb had been suddenly exploded under David Vallory he could scarcely have been more completely unnerved and shaken. They were sitting in a window alcove a little apart from the bridge players, and the looped-back curtains dimmed the lights in some measure--for which he was thankful. But Virginia Grillage seemed not to have noticed his gasping start at the mention of Judith’s name, and she went on soberly.

“As I say, I had to go, and I found that things were not quite as bad as they seemed--though they were bad enough. The girl had lately lost her mother, and she was keeping house in a little three-room shack for her father, a mechanic in the Murtrie Mine. I didn’t see him, of course, but from what Judith said I gathered that he had taken to drinking after the mother’s death. You’d say he must have gotten pretty low, to let his daughter earn money by playing the piano in a dance-hall.”

David recalled the John Fallon he had known; a rough-cast, unlettered man, but a skilled mechanic and thrifty.

“I knew him well,” he said; adding: “There was some trouble--family trouble, I think--before the Fallons moved away from Middleboro. I heard something about it when I was home for Christmas.”

“It’s the conditions in Powder Can,” she averred; “and for those the new work on the railroad is responsible--an army of workmen with money to throw away. Judith, and probably her father, are neither better nor worse than other people with their point of view. It isn’t fair to such people to permit the conditions.”

“I quite agree with you,” he rejoined hastily. “I don’t know how much I shall be able to do, as chief of construction, but from what you have been telling me it is evident that this plague spot right at our doors ought to be cleaned up with a strong hand.”

“Does that mean that you are going to reform things out there, David?”

“Whatever needs reforming, yes; if I can.”

“I wish you might say that and mean it, knowing all that it implies,” she returned, half musingly.

“What does it imply?”

The card players were rising, and there was a sputtering rapid-fire of motors in the driveway.

“That,” she said slowly, “is something you must find out for yourself, if you can--and will. Now I must go. People will want to be telling me what an exquisite time they’ve had. You say you are leaving early in the morning? Then I will say good-night and good-by. The hall man will show you your room. Give my love to your father and sister when you write, and don’t, for pity’s sake, drag them away out yonder to the ragged edge of nowhere!”

IX

Silas Plegg

Powder Gap, a hill-studded basin where the Powder River, leaping down from the high watershed of the upper range, gathers itself for the swift rush to its emptying into the Timanyoni forty miles away, lies like a half-closed hand in a gorge of the Hophras, with the upturned fingers and thumb postulating the surrounding majesties of mountain peaks, and the forested hills and ridges figuring as the callouses in the palm.

At the foot of one of the callouses lies the mining hamlet of Powder Can; once, in the day of the early mineral discoveries, a plangent, strident nucleus of excitement, but--in the phrase of its oldest inhabitant--a “has-been” at the time of David Vallory’s advent, with a few deep shafts and winding drifts out of which day-laborers, unenthusiastic successors of the early discoverers and plungers, winched or wheeled a few monthly car-loads of low-grade ore.

In some measure the Nevada Short Line’s track-changing activities had brought a return of the plangencies. Scattered construction camps with their armies of workmen dotted the basin above and below the mining town, and once more saloons and dance-halls and gambling places sprang up and did a thriving business on real pay-roll money. Eben Grillage’s attitude toward these absorbents of the money he paid out for labor had ever been that of the closed eye. To all appeals for the betterment of conditions in the humanitarian field he had a stereotyped reply: “The Grillage Engineering Company is strictly an industrial proposition. It does not undertake to say how its employees shall spend their time or their money when they are off duty.”

On the summit of a ridge diagonally opposite Powder Can the prospective millionaires of the mining-camp had, in the day of magnificent expectations, laid out a suburb for the future city, and in token of their faith in the future had built a log-house hotel with appropriate cottages. For some years after the collapse of the mining boom the hotel had remained closed; but with the nearer approach of the railroad it was reopened, with a few families from Brewster as the groundwork of the guest structure, and some small sprinkling of tourists to come and go during the season.

For a month or more after his arrival in the Hophra basin, David Vallory saw little of Powder Can the town, and still less of the log-built inn on the top of the adjacent ridge. New to every phase of the track-changing project, he had scant time even for eating and sleeping. At a dozen different points on the new location the work was driving at top speed; here and there bridges in process of construction over the swift mountain stream; numerous hill cuttings where great steam-shovels clashed their gears and chains from shift to shift throughout the twenty-four-hour days; prodigious fills growing foot by foot with the dumped spoil from the cuttings; and, last but by no means least, the projected tunnel under Powder Pass which was inching its way from both sides of the mountain in gigantic worm-gnawings through the granite.

During this strenuous preliminary period in which he was striving to gather the multiplicity of working threads into his hands, David lived in the bunk trains and mess tents, getting in touch with the various units of the laboring armies, and absorbing the details as a thirsty dog laps water. To his great satisfaction he found his staff largely composed of young men eager to make a record; eager, also, to pledge fealty to a chief who was himself young enough to be still in the process of winning his spurs. Plegg, the first assistant, was the single exception to the youth of the staff. He was a man of middle age, and at their first meeting David was struck with a vague sense of familiarity; an elusive impression that he had somewhere in the memory files a picture of the senior assistant’s weathered face, with its clipped beard, shrewd eyes and thin-lipped mouth about which a half-cynical smile played so often and so easily as to become almost an added feature.

“Have we ever met before, Mr. Plegg?” he had asked, at that first meeting; and the mildly sardonic smile had immediately fallen into broader lines.

“Once, Mr. Vallory; on a fine June morning nearly a year ago. It was in a Pullman sleeper, back in God’s country; and, if I recall it correctly, I told you you would go far if you were not too good. You are fulfilling my little prophecy very handsomely; and incidentally we are both proving the truth of that old bromide about the extreme narrowness of the world we live in. I’m glad to have you for my chief.”

It was Silas Plegg who did the most toward helping the new chief in the absorbing of the details, and David Vallory early acquired a great and growing respect for the technical gifts of his first assistant. The organization of the engineering staff, and of the rank and file, was fairly geniusful, the hand of a master being evident in every disposition of the huge working army. David weighed and measured, studied and observed; and at the end of the preliminary month was ready to give credit where credit was due.

“Plegg, you are too good an engineer to be anybody’s assistant,” he said, one evening after they had finished a round of the night-shift activities and had returned to the cramped quarters of the small bunk car which they shared together. “Why didn’t Mr. Grillage give you this job after Lushing quit?”

Plegg’s smile was grim.

“If I were really as cynical as you think I am, I might hint that possibly Mr. Grillage had a young man in his eye whom he wished to give a shove up the ladder. But I’ll stand it upon another leg. Mr. Eben Grillage is an excellent judge of men; and he knows me of old.”

David shook his head.

“That ought to be your very best recommendation. What have you ever done to make him pass you up in the promotion scheme?”

“It was something that my ancestors did--if you believe in heredity. They gave me the qualities of a good follower and neglected to include the saving moiety of leadership--that’s all. But speaking of Mr. Grillage; did you know he is on his way out here?”

David had not known it and he said so. “How did you hear?” he asked.

“Such news always travels ahead of a man of Mr. Grillage’s importance in the scheme of things. I heard it from one of the clerks at the Alta Vista Inn. The big boss has wired ahead for a double suite.”

The double suite could mean only one thing, and David’s pulses quickened after the most approved fashion of pulses in such case made and provided.

“He is bringing Miss Virginia with him?” he queried.

“Most likely. She chums with her father a good bit--when she isn’t too busy otherwise. Ever meet her?”

David Vallory admitted the fact affirmative but did not dilate upon it.

“She is a pretty good little engineer, herself,” Plegg went on. “She was out here last fall, and it was whispered around at the Inn that Lushing had the colossal nerve to make love to her.”

“But that wasn’t the reason why he was dropped?” said David, willing to learn something more of the rise and fall of his predecessor.

“Nobody knows; but it may have had some bearing. Mr. Grillage never had much use for Lushing as a man, but he was--and is--a cracking good organizer; a man who could squeeze a profit out of a job on a bid that had driven every other contractor out of the field. It was a fairly open secret around here last fall that Miss Virginia turned him down hard; and after that he began to sell us out to the railroad company. Basing the notion upon the Inn gossip about him and Miss Virginia, our fellows were not slow to charge his treason to pure vindictiveness.”

David Vallory was wiser now than he had been when he began as a working assistant on the Coulee du Sac bridge.

“What did he have to sell, Plegg?” he asked.

Plegg closed one eye and his habitual smile showed his strong, even teeth.

“Little tricks of the trade,” he answered obliquely. “You are the chief on the job now, and if you don’t know what they are, you can say that you don’t, and swear to it.”

“You mean that we are not giving the railroad company a square deal?”

Again Plegg’s reply took the diagonal instead of the direct line.

“We are giving them all they are paying us for. Of course, they are not satisfied; no party of the first part in a contracting deal ever is. And now that Lushing has gone over to their side of the fence, we’ve had trouble on top of trouble. If you’ll take a word of advice from an older man and a subordinate, you’ll stay out of it. In fact, I think that is what Mr. Grillage expects you to do.”

At the moment, David did not attach any special importance to this remark of Plegg’s about Mr. Grillage’s attitude. But if he could have turned the leaves of the book of days backward to the night of his stay at the lakeside mansion of the lavishnesses, the explanation would have synchronized itself quite accurately with his retreat to his room in The Maples and the departure of the last of the bridge-playing dinner guests.

At the door-closing upon the final couple, Miss Virginia had sought her father in his den. By this time the private secretary had been dismissed and the king of the contractors was alone.

“Hello, Vinnie, girl!” he rumbled. “Come to tell the old daddy good-night?”

“Partly,” was the crisp rejoinder. “But mostly it’s about David. You have decided to send him to the Timanyoni, in spite of my little protest?”

Eben Grillage’s laugh resembled nothing so much as the rasping of circular saws, but he meant it to be good-natured. He could hold no other attitude toward the daughter whom David, in his talk with his father, had characterized as the apple of his eye.

“You women are too much for me, Vinnie. You like David, and you want to see him get ahead. But when I hunt out a good place for him, you suddenly take a notion that you don’t want him to have it. What’s the particular reason?”

It was at this point that the young woman had taken a chair at the opposite side of the broad working table where she sat facing her father.

“If I thought I could make you understand,” she said, half musingly. And then: “I do like David and I respect him. It seems such a needless pity to spoil him, don’t you think?”

“What do you mean by spoiling him?”

“You know perfectly well what I mean. He has his own ideas of uprightness and common honesty--or he did have them before he went to work for the company--and they are the right ideas. How long is he going to be able to keep them if you put him in charge of the work in Powder Gap and make him responsible for all the crooked things that are being done?”

“That’s a pretty hard word to fling at your old daddy, Vinnie. Has it reached the point where you can call your father’s business crooked? If I had known that the colleges were going to put that kind of a fad into your head, they wouldn’t have got any of my money--not in a thousand years.”

She shook the head in question despairingly.

“How often must I say that it wasn’t the colleges. It is in the air. A new era is dawning, if we only had eyes to see and ears to hear. As a people we had forgotten that there was such a thing as an American conscience. Some of us are remembering now.”

“Some few impractical college professors and fanatics are making mountains out of molehills!” was the grumbling retort. “You mustn’t be foolish, Vinnie, girl. Competition is the life of trade, and competition means a fight. If we don’t do the other fellow--within reasonable business limits, of course--he’ll do us, and we’ll all go to the poor-farm.”

“We have been over all that before, many times,” said the young woman, with a touch of weariness in her tone. “I don’t ever hope to make you see it as I do--as I can’t help seeing it--but I shouldn’t be your daughter and a Grillage if I refused to make a fight for David.”

For some little time the grizzled giant in the wide-armed chair made no reply. He had picked up a paper-knife and was absently passing it through his thick, square-ended fingers in the manner of one testing the keenness of an edged tool. Finally he said: “Is David the man, Vinnie?”

She did not affect to misunderstand him.

“There isn’t any ‘the man’ yet. I like the grown-up David, partly because he has kept the promise of the little-boy David, and partly because he is so different from the others. He needs an alert, wide-awake sister to look after him much more than he does a wife. Besides, he’s already in love with--some girl.”

The father’s chuckle was good-naturedly derisive.

“That’s sheer girl-talk--the sisterly business, and the other--and it isn’t like you to try to throw dust, Vinnie. We’ll clear the air in that quarter, once for all. I haven’t any objections. David’s a good boy; a good son of a mighty good father. If he inherits some of Adam’s finicky notions, I suppose that can’t be helped. He’s as poor as Job’s turkey, but I can make him a rich man for you if you don’t insist on chucking too many stones in front of the wheels. You can’t marry a poor man, you know; you haven’t been brought up right.”

It was just here that the daughter of profitable contracts showed her first touch of warmth.

“You have some other reason for sending David to the work in Powder Gap,” she said accusingly. “You know you have always made it your boast that you never mix business and sentiment.”

“Maybe this was one time when business and sentiment happened to trot in double harness”--with a grim smile. “If you’re figuring on being a contracting engineer’s wife some time, you’ll have to throw away some of your highbrow college notions and get down to the practical things. One way and another, we’ve been getting in Dutch with the railroad people out yonder on the Short Line. You know that, don’t you?”

“I know there has been quarreling almost from the beginning.”

“Well, Ford, the president of the P. S-W. system, contends that we have a set of crooks in charge out there--this in spite of the fact that some understrapper of his on the ground has hired Lushing, the biggest of the crooks. Ford knows David’s family, and the straight-backed honest old stock there is in the Vallorys. I’m killing two birds with one cartridge. With Adam Vallory’s boy in charge for us at Powder Gap, Ford may rest easier, and maybe he’ll make it a little easier for us. And, by giving David his boost, I’m fixing it so you won’t have to marry a poor man.”

“I’m not talking about marrying; I’m talking about the soul of a man,” was the quick retort. “It is in your hands to keep David Vallory true to his ideals, or to make him like other men who have one conscience for their personal relations and another for business. David is more loyal to you than your own son would be, if you had one; after what you did for his father last summer he would go through fire and water for you. It isn’t right or just for you to use so fine a thing as his gratitude and make it the means of his undoing!”

Again the big man in the opposite chair fell silent. When he spoke again it was to say:

“You’re all wrong, Vinnie, girl; wrong and a little bit wrought up. You are carried away by your own impossible notions of the golden-rule in business, and all that--things that you know about only by hearsay. You won’t take it amiss if the old daddy has his notions, too, will you? Just the same, we’re chums, little girl, and we won’t fight about a little thing like that. I’ll see to it that David doesn’t have to stick his fingers into the tar-barrel, if that’s what you want. Now run along to bed.”

The upshot of this heart-to-heart talk between the father and daughter had been a letter to Silas Plegg, which followed David Vallory so promptly in his westward flight as to be in the first assistant’s hands when he made his introductory round over the big job with the new chief. It was a letter to be read, remembered, and burned; but if David Vallory could have seen it, it would have explained Plegg’s attitude, and many other things which grew more and more puzzling as time went on.

X

The Miry Clay

Having himself so recently made the journey from Chicago to the Timanyoni, David Vallory knew that he could count upon at least two clear days in which to gather up the loose ends and otherwise to prepare his huge working machine for a critical inspection by the president of the company. To that end he called a conference of the members of his staff and applied the spur. The big boss was coming, and it was up to them to show him the machine in perfect working order. If there were any loose ends, now was the time to tie them in.

“There’s only one thing that I’d like to see changed,” said Crawford, the grading expert who had charge of the line building on the lower end of the cut-off; “that is this crazy practice of paying off every two weeks instead of once a month. I count on at least a ten per cent reduction in my gangs for two or three days after every second Saturday--which is about the length of time it takes the high-rollers to get rid of their money in the Powder Can dives.”

“Leaks of that kind are precisely what we are trying to find and stop,” the new chief broke in. “Any suggestions?”

There were several made by different members of the staff, but they were all variations upon the same theme, namely, some method by which the too-frequent pay-days might be abolished.

“I’m afraid the twice-a-month basis will have to stand,” was David Vallory’s decision. “I talked that matter out with Mr. Grillage before I left Chicago. He is opposed to the fortnightly pay-day, but he has been forced to establish it on all of his contracts because other companies have adopted it, and if we don’t keep step we lose our men.”

“Zat Powder Can--she is one blot on zee face of zee eart’!” spat out Regnier, the fiery little French-Canadian engineer who was handling the gangs in the rock cuttings.

David Vallory nodded. “I’m new to this country,” he admitted. “Are there no laws by which these man-trappers can be put out of business?”

It was Plegg who made answer to this.

“The sheriff’s writs don’t run this far from the nearest court-house. What is everybody’s business is nobody’s business. Besides, the man-traps and the construction camps have gone hand-in-hand ever since the beginning of time.”

“There is no reason why they should continue to do so to the end of time,” David cut in. “If the Powder Can lawlessness is holding us back, we must clean it up.”

Plegg shook his head. “That’s easier said than done. The town is on its own, and it gets its revenue chiefly from our pay-rolls. The mines, with the single exception of the Murtrie, don’t amount to anything.”

“Maybe the railroad people would help us out,” suggested Altman, the smooth-faced, young-looking mining engineer who was directing the granite boring in the east-end tunnel heading. “Somebody told me once that nearly all of the town is built on land leased from the railroad company.”

“I’ll look into this Powder Can business, myself,” said David, as the conference broke up. “The thing that’s biting us just now is the need to show Mr. Grillage a clean slate when he comes. He knows good work when he sees it, and I don’t want to have to begin making excuses the minute he lights down in Powder Gap. Go to it and key things up to concert pitch.”

With the great machine grinding merrily under this new impetus, David Vallory did look cursorily into the Powder Can situation, stealing time from the strenuous activities to make inquiries as to what might be done. Up to this time, when the doing of something began to urge itself baldly as an industrial necessity, he had been postponing action in this particular field, excusing himself upon what seemed to be the perfectly justifiable plea that the mining-camp man-traps and their curbing or abolition were matters outside of the line of his duties; a view which he knew to be in strict accordance with that of the president of his company. It was not that he meant to adopt the policy of the blind eye in principle. His promise to Virginia Grillage forbade that. But the excuses had opened the door to postponement.

Such were the surface indications of the vein of reluctance; but deeper down there was another reason for the postponement. Not at any time since his arrival had David forgotten that Judith Fallon was most probably still living in Powder Can. If he should chance to meet her--which was not at all unlikely--the entire question of his responsibilities--a question which the lapse of time, and the growing hope that he might one day win the love of Virginia Grillage, had pushed into the background--would be reopened.