Chapter IV: Part 4

As a result of his inquiries he soon found that there would be little use in making an appeal to the law. As Plegg had pointed out, the Powder Gap region was far enough distant from civilization to be a law unto itself. But there was the hope that he might be able to make such representations to the railroad people, who were the lessors of the land upon which the town was built, as might induce them to intervene on the side of law and order. Being thus brought face to face with the thorny duty, he enlisted Plegg; and after the mess-tent supper they crossed the basin together to make such a survey of the conditions as would enable them to present the demoralizing facts in their reality to the railroad company.

With one of the fortnightly pay-days less than thirty-six hours in the past there was ample evidence of the malignance of the social and industrial ulcer. The wide-open resorts were packed with throngs of the Grillage workmen, and the harvesting of the hard-earned dollars was in full swing.

“We’ll see it all while we’re about it,” said David; and with Plegg at his elbow he pushed his way through one of the crowded bar-rooms to a den at the rear where a faro-game was running, with the circle of sitters backed by eager gamblers who reached over the shoulders of the chair circle to place their bets. Outside in the bar there was noise enough, but here the strained silence was broken only by the clicking of the counters, the heavy breathing of the men, and the silken whisper of the cards as the dealer ran them from his box. David let his gaze sweep the table circle and come to rest upon the forbidding features of the man who was running the cards; a swarthy, heavy-faced giant with Indian-like hair, drooping mustaches that only half veiled a mouth of utter ruthlessness, and eyes that were at the moment as dead as the pallor showing beneath the Mexican-darkness of his skin.

“‘Black Jack’ Dargin,” Plegg whispered in Vallory’s ear. “He owns and runs this place, and does his own dealing, but he has another sort of dive a little farther up the street.”

David Vallory’s jaw was set when they had worked their way out to the open air.

“It isn’t even a square game!” he gritted. “What I don’t know about faro would fill a book, but any sober man with eyes in his head could see that that scoundrel was running a stacked deck! Who is this Dargin?”

“You’ve seen,” said Plegg shortly. “In a way, he’s the boss of this camp; has a reputation as a ‘killer’ and he has traded on it until he has everybody ‘buffaloed.’ He is the only faro dealer I’ve ever seen who would consent to run a game without a ‘lookout.’ He makes a brag of it; says all he needs is a boy to sell the chips. The woman is the only human being in this camp who has ever made him take a stand-off.”

“The woman?” said David.

“Yes; I keep forgetting that you’re new. She is another example of Dargin’s cave-man methods. When the work began here in the Gap last September, Dargin was about the first man on the ground for the shekel harvest. He opened this place and a dance-hall, killed a man or two to get himself properly dreaded, and began to rake in the easy money. About that time the woman dropped in.”

“God pity her, whoever she is,” was David’s comment.

“It was a curious case,” Plegg went on, as they walked together up a street blatant with the roistering crowds. “Shortly after the dissipations had caught their stride a young plunger from somewhere back east turned up here and took rooms in the Hophra House. As nearly as I could learn at the time, the young ass was rich--or at least a rich man’s son--and he had been stung on a Powder Can mining scheme. He came here to see what he’d been let in for, and he didn’t have any better sense than to bring his wife along--to such a wolf-den as this!”

“Go on,” said David, with some dim premonition warning him that, instead, he should have told Plegg to stop.

“I don’t know all the ins and outs of it; or just how much or how little the woman was to blame. But the upshot of the matter was that one day, right in the face and eyes of the whole camp, as you might say, Black Jack backed this young fool up against a wall, stuck a gun into his face, and gave him a quick choice between passing out there and then, or buying his life and a chance to vanish by giving up all claims to his wife.”

“Good heavens!” the listener ejaculated. “Cave-man is right!”

“One of the laws of the jungle that Kipling didn’t mention,” was the first assistant’s terse summing-up. “Dargin saw something that he wanted, and that was his way of reaching out and taking it. But now comes the queer part of it. The young plunger disappeared between two days, and everybody looked to see the woman take up with Dargin. But that isn’t what happened. She stayed on at the Hophra House for a few days and then sent for her father, a poor devil of a machinist who seemed to be trying to drink himself to death. Either she or Dargin got him a job at the Murtrie mine, and the two of them set up housekeeping in one of the mine shacks.”

“Dargin and the woman, you mean?”

“No! the woman and her father. And that’s the way it has been ever since. Making all due allowances for the time and place, Dargin’s relations with the woman are the only half-way decent ones he has. The old man was drunk half the time, so Dargin gave the girl a job playing the piano in his dance-hall--by way of giving her a chance to earn an honest living, you’d say. That seems to be as far as it has gone, except that one day last fall a tipsy ‘hard-rock’ man tried to take liberties with the girl at the piano, and when she fought him, struck her. He skipped out, across the range, but Black Jack caught up with him and shot him.”

David Vallory’s premonition of coming tragedy had been fulfilled long before Plegg reached this point in his story, but if there had been any doubt as to the woman’s identity the incident of the “hard-rock” man would have dispelled it. Oddly enough, the filling-out of Judith Fallon’s story did not seem to lessen his own feeling of moral obligation; on the contrary, it increased it. More than ever, as it appeared, it was needful that Judith should be taken quickly out of the false position into which her relations, innocent or otherwise, with the man-killer had placed her.

By this time their progress up the single street of the town had brought them to another of the resorts; a dance-hall, this, also with its bar-room annex. There was little room on the dancing-floor for spectators, and they did not try to enter. But enough could be seen from the bar to determine the character of the place.

“This is Dargin’s other place,” said Plegg. “It’s the least tough of any of the Powder Can joints, and the money is made over the bar. If a man gets too well ‘lit up’ he is thrown out. Most of the women you see in there are the miners’ wives and daughters. It hurts us chiefly because it attracts men who would neither gamble nor drink if they didn’t start in here on a sort of social plane.”

David nodded and was turning away when a hand was laid on his arm and he wheeled quickly.

“Judith!” he gasped. Then, as Plegg stood aside and pretended not to see or hear; “My God!”

“Yes,” she said, “’tis ‘Judith’ now, and never ‘Glory’ any more. What brings you here, Davie?”

“You--partly,” he blurted out. “Put something on and come outside. I want to talk to you.”

“No,” she refused bluntly; and then, to temper the bluntness: “’Tis no good it can do now, Davie, and ’twould do you harm. There be tongues to wag, even in Powder Can, and you’re the chief on the big job.”

“But I must see you and talk with you!” he insisted.

“’Twill do no good,” she repeated. “I’ve made my bed, Davie, and I’ve got to lie on it.”

The bar-room throng was jostling them as they stood, and David saw the bartender marking them through half-closed eyes. He fancied there was crafty suspicion in the look, but at the moment he was thinking chiefly of the obligation that he must not shirk.

“I shall come again, in daytime,” he said. “You are living on the Murtrie claim?”

“You must not!” she forbade quickly. “’Twould be--it might be as much as your life’s worth! Nor must you stay here talking to me. Go now, or the Plegg man will be asking questions that you can’t answer!” And with that she slipped aside and lost herself in the throng on the dancing-floor.

David Vallory was gravely silent on the remainder of the round of investigation; and Plegg, knowing that something sobering had happened at Dargin’s dance-hall, respected his chief’s mood. But on the way back to the construction camp the silence was broken by David himself.

“You saw the woman I was talking to in that place across from the Murtrie ore yard?”

“Yes, I saw her.”

“Do you know who she is?”

Plegg nodded. “She is the one I was talking about.”

“I know it. And the hound who brought her here? I believe you didn’t mention his name.”

“It was Hudson--no, that isn’t quite it--Judson; Thomas Judson.”

To the astonishment of the reticent, self-contained first assistant, David Vallory lifted his clenched hands to the stars and swore savagely. But as Plegg had respected his chief’s former silence, so now he respected the wrathful outburst. Farther along, when they were crossing the tracks in the material yard, David offered niggard explanation.

“I knew the woman, back home, Plegg; I grew up with her. If ever a man needed killing, Tom Judson is that man.”

“They were not married?” said Plegg.

“I have no reason to believe that they were. But that doesn’t excuse Judson.”

“Of course not; it makes it worse--if he was the original sinner.”

“He was,” said David; “but he was not the only one.” And with that he shut his mouth like a trap and did not open it again until they reached the steps of their bunk car. Then he said shortly: “I am going up to Brady’s Cut. You needn’t leave the lamp burning for me when you turn in; I don’t know when I’ll get back.”

In naming the place to which he was going, David gave the first assistant only the outward husk of the kernel of truth. As he tramped his stumbling course over the unevenly spaced cross-ties of the construction track in the general direction of Brady’s, he was thinking little enough of the work at the cutting or of anything connected with the affairs of the Grillage Engineering Company. Taking their revenge for a long period of banishment into a limbo of things conveniently pushed aside, the thoughts that had once harassed him into something like a congestive chill of moral remorse assailed him afresh.

The woman he had unconsciously led up to the brink of the chasm had not only gone over; she had sunk to a depth perilously near the bottom. There could be no doubt of what the end would be. For some inscrutable reason of his own, Dargin, “the killer,” was according her such a measure of respect as his cave-man attributes were capable of entertaining for anything in the shape of a woman. But that was the most that could be said. Poor Gloriana! What a bitter price she was paying! And with what portion of that price must he, David Vallory, in justice charge himself?

Reaching the approach to Brady’s Cut, a huge gash torn through the side of one of the rounded basin hills, David turned to his left and climbed steadily until he attained the sparse growth of trees crowning the hill at the edge of the great cutting. Below him the ordered pandemonium of industry was in full stride. Under the light of masthead arcs, two mammoth steam-shovels rattled and clanked, the sharp staccato of their exhaust pipes echoing from the surrounding heights like the cachinnations of some invisible and mocking giant of the immensities. Between the shovels rooting like prehistoric monsters into the banks on either hand, a grunting locomotive pushed its train of dump-cars for the spoil, moving them so accurately that the circling shovel buckets to right and left never failed of an empty hopper into which to drop the three-ton torrent of mingled clay and broken stone.

David Vallory cast himself down at the edge of the cutting with his back to one of the little trees. The chattering clamor of the industries floated up to him on a thin nimbus of coal smoke; but when the senses are turned inward the near and the actual lose their appeal. Once more the fair structure of David’s imaginings was preparing to topple--a structure that he had thought Judith’s disappearance from Middleboro, leaving no trace, gave him leave to rear. But now their paths had crossed again; she was here, almost within rifle-shot of the tree against which he was leaning. And in a day or two Virginia Grillage would come. Was it mere chance, or an avenging fate, that was about to place him at the converging point of a great happiness and an equally great reckoning with a past that could never be recalled?

It was far past midnight when he got up and shook himself as one awaking from a troubled dream. Down on the construction track he saw a train of flat-cars bringing the two-o’clock shifts to relieve the gangs which had gone on in the early evening. Above the mechanical clamor in the cutting at his feet he could hear the upcoming men singing raucously.

“Bellow it out--it’s little enough you have to trouble you!” he grated, apostrophizing the singing workmen. Then he turned his steps toward the distant material yard, avoiding the approaching train, and closing sullen ears to the noisy human atoms who had no troubles.

XI

Bridge Number Two

Since he was now able to argue from a personal knowledge of the Powder Can facts, David Vallory was ready to go to the railroad officials with a plea for intervention and relief. But with his own president’s visit impending he was unwilling to absent himself for the needful trip to the railroad headquarters in Brewster. In this small dilemma a bit of gossip trickling in over the construction line wire from Agorda, the point at which the new grade diverged from the old, offered an alternative. There was a right-of-way claim to be adjusted at Agorda, and the gossiping wire said that the Short Line’s legal representative had come up from Brewster on the morning train to settle with the claimants.

Seizing the opportunity, David Vallory boarded an empty material train backing out of the Powder Gap yards and in due time was set down at the desolate little junction station at the foot of Mount Latigo. There was a private car standing on one of the side-tracks, and inquiry at the telegraph office developed the fact that the right-of-way claimants had already had their day in court, and Mr. Jolly was in his car, waiting for the afternoon train to come along and tow him back to Brewster.

Walking down the tracks to the occupied siding, David presented himself at the door of the private car and was welcomed effusively by a round-bodied little gentleman with a face like a full moon.

“Vallory, hah!--do I get the name right?--always want to get a man’s name right--demned awkward to find that you’ve been calling Smith Jones, when his name is Smith,” bubbled the welcomer. “Sit down--sit down, Mr. Vallory, and be at home. Of the Grillage Engineering Company, you say? Big job you’ve got on your hands here--tre-mendous job! How’s it coming along?”

David Vallory braced himself as one stepping out of shelter into a blustering March wind. Gusty talkers had always been his pet aversion, and he seemed to have encountered the original of the type. By taking persevering advantage of the lulls between the gusts he contrived to explain his errand. The Powder Can situation was thus and so. The Grillage company had no jurisdiction, and he understood that the Short Line company, in its capacity as owner of the town site, might possibly be able to intervene on the side of law and order. How about it?

“Why, hah! my dear Mr. Vallory! what do you take us for?” cackled the gusty one. “We’re not an eleemosynary institution, any more than you are! Why, hah! bless your heart, if we should go into the moral-issue business in these mountains we’d last as a railroad corporation just about as long as it would take an indignant State legislature to repeal our charter!”

“I must have stated the case clumsily, Mr. Jolly; I’m not asking you to do more than any respectable landlord ought to be willing to do,” David persisted firmly. “Your property in Powder Can is being put to uses which were never contemplated when the leases were signed. A public nuisance harmful to your neighbors has developed, and you ought to be willing to help abate it.”

“Nothing to be done, I assure you, my dear young man. Those Powder Can leases are mere matters of form, to enable us to hold what land we may need for railroad purposes after the new line is opened. I’m not sure, but I think the consideration was the usual one dollar, or something of that sort. We can’t police Powder Can for you.”

“All right; we’ll drop the moral argument and take up another,” said David, stubbornly. “The railroad company has set a time limit on the completion of this new line. The Powder Can nuisance is delaying the work.”

“That, hah! is up to your people, Mr. Vallory. The contract provides for forfeitures if you don’t come within the time limit, and a bonus if you better it. You can’t stand it on that leg.”

It was just here that David lost his temper.

“I’m not making any charges, Mr. Jolly, but an unprejudiced outsider might take the view that the railroad company, or some of its officials, are profiting by the continued existence of a wide-open town where our men are robbed.”

Instantly the moon-like face of the railroad attorney became a blank.

“No; I shouldn’t make any such charge as that, if I were you,” he barked. And then, abruptly: “Have you taken this matter up with your own president? Or are you going it alone?”

“There is no reason why I should take it up with Mr. Grillage. He holds me responsible for the work, and for the conditions under which we are working.”

“That’s all very well,” snapped the lawyer. “But if you are ever tempted to make that charge you speak of, Mr. Vallory, you’d better think twice. The natural counter-charge would be that your own officials have a much better chance for a Powder Can rake-off than ours have. Like yourself, I’m making no accusations; but I’ll say this: when you see Mr. Eben Grillage next, you ask him plainly what he wants you to do about this Powder Can business. If he tells you to clean it up, maybe our people can be induced to help.” Then, as if some secret spring had been touched, the full-moon face lightened up and the gusty joviality slipped into place again: “But, hah! that’s enough of these disagreeable topics. You’re my guest, Mr. Vallory: you’ll stop and take a noon bite with me, won’t you? I’ve, hah! got a fairly good cook on the car.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not positively, no.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m listening.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XII

Under the High Stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why should they make life miserable for you?”

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

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

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

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

“What a question!”

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

“Mr. Lushing, you mean?”

“The same.”

“Have you met him yet?”

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

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

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

“What happened a little while ago?”

“You came.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Will the queer thing bear repeating?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wicked things?” she suggested.

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

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

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

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

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

The appeal in her tone sobered him suddenly.

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

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

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

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

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

From this their talk slipped back to the big job and its askings and drawbacks, and so led up to the moral cancer whose lights they could see twinkling in the distance at the foot of Gold Hill. David spoke of the demoralizing effects of the cancer upon his working force, and told of his futile effort to enlist the railroad people on the side of reform.

“Mr. Ford would do something, if he knew,” the young woman suggested, naming the president of the P. S-W. system.

“I believe he would; but it is like climbing a ladder a mile high to get to him. From what Jolly said, I gathered that the Brewster officials are absolutely indifferent, and to get at Mr. Ford I’d have to go over their heads.”

“You have been in the mining-camp?” she asked.

“Once, only, after dark. Some day you are going to tell me the name of the man who took your slumming party there last fall and I’ll go and beat him up.”

“Never mind the man. Did you see Judith Fallon?”

“Yes; but only for a moment. I tried to get a chance to talk to her, but she wouldn’t have it.”

“She is still living with her father?”

“Yes.”

“You needn’t be afraid to tell me all of it, David.”

At that he repeated Plegg’s short account of the manner in which Judith Fallon had come to Powder Can, and its near-tragic outcome.

“How terrible!” she said. “I remember Tom Judson, just vaguely, as a handsome little kiddie with light curly hair and the bluest of blue eyes. And he’s grown up into _that_!”

“Yes; and he didn’t take long about it, either,” said David. “Long before he was expelled from college he was Middleboro’s most shining example of depravity.”

“But this other man; Dargin, did you call him? Isn’t Judith worse off than if she had no protector at all?”

“God knows,” said David, solemnly. “Except for the single fact that he seems to have some respect for her, he is the crudest of crude brutes, according to Plegg’s story. It’s going to be mighty hard to run him out of Powder Can.”

“Are you going to try to run him out?”

“It’s up to me, I guess. The railroad people won’t do anything, and the place has got to be cleaned up. This job of ours demands it. But see here; can’t we keep this talk from stumbling into the sink-holes? Tell me how long you are going to be content to stay away from the luxuries?”

“I told you there were times when I hated the luxuries. You must be awfully good to me if you don’t want me to run away to the lavishnesses that I use and despise in the same breath. I shall put on a khaki skirt and leggings, and you’ll have to show me everything that is going on. Have you seen father?”

“No, not yet.”

“Mercy me! I was to tell you to report to him at the car down in the railroad yard if I saw you first. I’m afraid I haven’t been a very obedient call-boy.”

David got out of his chair reluctantly.

“I’m trying to realize that you are sending me away--and that just as we were beginning to get down to the real heart of things. May I come back after your father is through with me? It is so soul-satisfying not to have to divide time with half a dozen other men.”

“The ‘other men,’ as you call them, will probably be here after a while; or some of them, at least,” she laughed. “And that reminds me; what have you done about sending for your father and sister? Nothing, I hope.”

“Oh, but I have; I have done precisely what you said I ought not to do. They are coming, and they will be here next week. I have taken one of the hotel cottages for them.”

“That was downright cruel, and you need to be punished,” she retorted brightly. “And you will be, too; you see if I’m not a true prophet.” Then: “I think you needn’t come back this evening. I shall probably be in bed and asleep long before father lets you escape. Now don’t you wish you hadn’t sent for your father and Lucille?”

XIII

Altman’s Nerves

If David Vallory were reluctant to leave the hotel and make his way down the wooded ridge to the gridironing of tracks in the railroad yard, it was only because his duty was shortening the evening with Virginia. Without being unduly puffed up with a sense of his own efficiency, he felt sure that his work would show for itself and that there was no reason why he should hesitate to spread the results before the president.

Not knowing where Mr. Grillage’s car had been placed, it took him some few minutes to find it in the crowded material yard, which was not too well lighted by the widely spaced masthead electrics. When he did find it, on the single unobstructed spur-track, the nearest electric showed him the figure of a man dropping from the car step to become quickly lost in the shadows of the surrounding material trains. In the brief glimpse David recognized the alert poise and swinging stride of his first assistant; but since neither jealousy nor suspicion had any part in the Vallory make-up, the recognition evoked no wondering query as to why Plegg had anticipated him in calling upon Eben Grillage.

A moment later the porter had admitted him and was standing aside to let him pass through the vestibule to the open compartment in the rear of the luxurious car. At the heavy, glass-topped desk he found the contractor magnate sitting alone, with the inevitable black and shapeless cigar clamped between his teeth.

“Hello, David--come in!” was the brusque greeting; and then with a grim chuckle: “By George! I was beginning to think you were lost out completely.”

“I was up at the tunnel when your train got in,” David explained, judiciously slurring over the interval which had elapsed since the early-evening hour of the arrival.

“And when you crawled out of the tunnel you found your way to the hotel and promptly forgot all about the old duffer who has to dig down into his jeans for the pay-roll money,” laughed the man-driver in jovial humor. “It’s all right, my boy; I was young once, myself. How goes the job?”

“I think you will find it moving along all right,” David ventured. Then he said a good word for the first assistant. “Plegg had things in fine shape when I took hold; good organization, good distribution, and no friction. All that was needed was a little pace-setting.”

“And you’ve been setting the pace, eh? How about the railroad inspectors?--are they giving you much trouble?”

“All we need, though as a general thing they don’t say much to me personally; they go to Plegg. One of them--Strayer--took me into his confidence a bit to-day. He professes to believe that we are deliberately burking the railroad company and threw out a hint to the effect that the railroad Executive Board might take some action.”

“Did you get back at him?”

“I did; there hasn’t been a single instance where we’ve failed to make good when they have called us down, and I told him so. Strayer is acting chief of the inspection staff in Lushing’s absence. I haven’t seen Lushing yet. They tell me he has gone East.”

“I can add something to that,” said Lushing’s former employer, with a sour smile. “He went to New York to appear before the Executive Board of his railroad--at his own request. We’ll hear from him a little later.”