Chapter VI: Part 6

In any descent to Avernus it is not often given to the wayfarer to recognize the point at which he first begins to go down-hill. In the removal of the careful Altman from the eastern tunnel boring and the substituting of the reckless, devil-may-care Regnier, David Vallory had succeeded in persuading himself that he had merely checked off an item in the day’s work, and was far enough from suspecting that the item figured as another milestone in the downward inclining path.

But certain results followed in due course, and a growth, not in grace. For one of the results, David, being a shrewd-eyed master of his trade, soon began to discover many of the things that Plegg was trying to hide from him--the dishonesties large and small by which unscrupulous Business seeks to increase the margin or profit; to discover them and pass by on the other side with closed eyes. Another result was his changed and changing attitude toward the Powder Can nuisance. From regarding the wide-open mining-camp chiefly as a moral menace, he was beginning to look upon it more as an obstacle to progress--his own industrial progress on the job. It was sapping the strength of his working force, and therefore--in spite of the contractor-king’s injunction, which he took to be another of the little kindnesses designed to make things easier for him--it was to be abolished.

In the field of the discovered dishonesties and the closed eye, effect succeeded to cause with due celerity. The conditions on a well-systematized undertaking like the line-shortening project are fairly telepathic. Almost immediately it began to be whispered about among the gang bosses and the men that the new chief was bent upon making a record; the first assistant said so, and the first assistant ought to know. This being the fact, the bridle might be taken off--always with due regard for the railroad watch-dogs, and for a decent concealment from a chief who, for the look of the thing, must be in a position to say that he knew nothing whatever of cast-off bridles and the substitution of loose halters therefor.

When David Vallory began to realize that his lowering of the standards was taken as an ell for an inch by his subordinates and the rank and file, it may be supposed that he was frankly appalled. But momentum counts for something. And back of the push on the downward slide there was always the debt of obligation owed to Eben Grillage. The king of the contractors might be all that men said he was; a hard bargain driver and a cold-blooded buccaneer of business. But at the same time he was Virginia’s father and the savior of the Vallory good name.

If these were the inner wrestlings, David had as yet shared them with no one. Outwardly, at least on the social side, he was measuring up to a rather exacting standard set by Miss Virginia. Days in which he took her on the construction locomotives and put her in touch with the throbbings of the feverish heart of the activities were intermingled with summer evenings on the Alta Vista porches. For some cause as yet unexplained, the coming of his father and sister was delayed; and for some other cause, into which his infatuation forbade him to inquire, no one of Virginia Grillage’s retinue of suitors had thus far intruded upon the scene.

“And still you are not entirely happy,” she laughed, one evening, when he spoke of the comforting dearth of the suitors.

“What makes you think I’m not happy?” he shot back.

“I can tell. You have something on your mind.”

He made an attempt to turn her aside from the topic of the mind-burdens.

“Haven’t I had you to myself for days and days? I don’t know what more a man could ask.”

“Oh, that!” she mocked. “But, just the same, you’re not happy.” Then she added, apparently as an after-thought: “And neither am I.”

“Don’t tell me it is because you are missing the others,” he pleaded, still intent upon warding off the more personal personalities.

“I am missing them dreadfully; especially Lord Cumberleigh and little Freddy Wishart. But mostly it’s your ingratitude.”

“My ingratitude?”

“That is what I said. In the kiddie days you used to tell me everything. But now you are shutting me out. You lead me along just so far, but beyond that I find myself talking to another David, one that I know less and less every day.”

For a time he was silent. Then he said: “You are altogether right--as you always are, Vinnie. There _is_ another David; a man that I am trying mighty hard to get acquainted with, myself. I don’t know him well enough yet to introduce him to you.”

“That sounds almost uncanny. Is it meant to be?”

“It is uncanny. I can’t account for it--or him--or wholly approve him. This other David isn’t always a pleasant person to meet. Part of the time I seem to recognize him in a vague sort of way, and then again he becomes a total stranger; a man of moods and impulses and perfectly barbarous leanings.”

“I know,” she said quietly. “I’ve seen him now and then. I saw him to-day when we were down at the Cross Gulch bridge. The foreman had apparently been doing something that you had told him not to do. You didn’t rave at him, but for a second or two the other David looked out through your eyes.”

“How do you account for it--or him?”

“How should I be able to account for it--or him--if you can’t? Of course, there are always general principles. If a watch has been keeping good time and begins to go wrong, it is a sign that some one has been tinkering with the works, isn’t it?”

“And you would suggest that some one has been tinkering with my works?”

“I know that you are different--and that I am sorry.”

“Have I been different this evening?”

“Yes, part of the time.”

“There is some little cause for the added grouch just now. I’ve been neglecting a plain duty. Did you notice the thinness of the gangs working on the lower section when we were down there to-day?”

“Not particularly.”

“They were thin. Yesterday was pay-day, and a lot of those hand-to-mouth ‘wops’ are blowing themselves in Powder Can. When I first came here I saw that that mining-camp would have to be cleaned up, but I’ve been putting it off. Out of the goodness of his heart, your father tells me to let it alone; he’d rather take his losses than to have me shoulder another load, I suppose. But the thing has reached the limit. I’m going after it with a sharp stick.”

On this particular evening they were sitting on the western porch, a bit withdrawn, as usual, from the groups of idling summer people. At the end of the porch a low-branching fir grew so close to the building that its nearer twigs, swayed by the gentle breeze sliding down from the heights of Qojogo, made little tapping sounds to break the silence of the mountain night. Under the low-hanging branches of the fir the big St. Bernard belonging to the hotel proprietor was curled up; at least David Vallory thought it was the dog--had reason to think so since it was the St. Bernard’s nightly sleeping-place.

“Something ought to be done,” was the young woman’s agreement with the sharp-stick suggestion. “How will you go about it?”

It was at this conjuncture that the sleeping dog stirred uneasily, but David Vallory did not look aside.

“A man named Dargin is the head and front of things over there. If he were run out, the smaller fellows could be handled without much trouble. I’ve been hesitating between two methods of getting at Dargin. I suppose the simplest plan would be to walk over there some day and tell him that he can have twenty-four hours in which to settle up his affairs and vanish.”

Miss Virginia’s exclamation was a little shriek. “The idea!” she said. “Do you suppose he would go away for anything like that?”

“He would if it were properly backed up; if I should tell him, for example, that if I had the job to do over, I’d do it with a gun.”

“Mercy me! This is the ‘other David’ with a vengeance! Do you really mean it?”

“Why shouldn’t I mean it? If the argument of force is the only one that would appeal to him----”

“But you’d be killed! I’ve heard the most awful stories of this man. He wouldn’t give you the slightest chance. Promise me that you won’t do any such recklessly foolish thing!”

“I shan’t, if you don’t want me to; though it’s much the simpler way to go about it. The other way is to write a personal letter to President Ford of the railroad company. I don’t know him, but my father does, and he is a good man--a clean man. I am practically certain that if he knew the conditions he’d use the railroad company’s power to clean up the camp--the power given it by the land leases. But that is enough about the job and me and my little insanities. I must hike back down the hill to my blankets. I know you’d be yawning if you were not too polite.”

She got up to walk with him to the porch steps, and at the good-night moment he said: “Where are you going to let me take you to-morrow?”

“Before I pick the place I’m going to ask you once more why you have been so persistently refusing to take me to the big tunnel. Don’t you know that I simply adore tunnels?”

Now David had his own good reasons for not having taken Eben Grillage’s quick-witted daughter into the big bore where Regnier was driving his hard-rock crews. Day by day the dangerous ‘fault’ was scattering its warnings in chips and spallings of fresh rock thrown down from the disintegrating roof--evidences which Regnier was careful to remove before they should attract the attention of the railroad inspectors.

“A tunnel in process of construction isn’t a good place in which to entertain inquisitive little girls,” David evaded. “And this particular tunnel is wet and mucky.”

“That isn’t the reason why you haven’t taken me there,” she asserted calmly.

“How do you know it isn’t?”

“Because I was in the tunnel this afternoon. You had been making so many foolish excuses that my curiosity was aroused. I took advantage of your absence at the other end of things and made Mr. Plegg take me. He didn’t want to; he was just as gruff and impossible as he dared to be to the big boss’s daughter. But I made him do it.”

It is easily conceivable that David felt cold chills racing up and down his spine at the bare thought of what might have happened during this unauthorized visit--this, be it remarked, though he fancied he had settled it definitely with himself that nothing was going to happen.

“That was altogether wrong!” he said, in his best workmanlike manner. “Don’t you know you shouldn’t break discipline that way?”

“Poof!” she retorted. “That is what Cumberleigh would call ‘putting on side’. It’s a pity if I have to ask permission when I wish to go somewhere--and of you!”

He shook his head in despair.

“You are not a bit less wilful than you used to be in the old Middleboro days. But, really, Vinnie, you mustn’t go into the tunnel again. It’s--it’s no place for visitors, or at least for women visitors.”

“You have a reason for saying that, and it isn’t any of those you’ve been giving me,” she flashed back.

“Do you think so?” He had not yet reached the point at which he could lie to her deliberately.

“I know it. You haven’t any scruples about letting me get mucky and grimy on any other part of the work; you have rather enjoyed telling me that my face needed washing.”

“Never, unless it did,” he laughed, hoping to find some way of diverting the talk from the unwelcome tunnel channel. But Miss Virginia, with an end in view, was not of those who may be easily turned aside.

“Then there was Mr. Silas Plegg,” she went on. “I have had a good many escorts, first and last--and some of them unwilling, no doubt--but Mr. Plegg capped the climax. He was as nervous as a cat after we got inside, and if I didn’t know him so well, I should say he acted as if he were afraid of something.”

“He was,” Plegg’s chief confirmed grimly. “I have given positive orders that no one, other than those connected with the working shifts, be admitted to the tunnel headings. Plegg knew he would be in for a bawling-out when I should find out what he’d done.”

The young woman’s smile was a mocking little grimace.

“It wasn’t at all that kind of ‘afraid’; it seemed to me more like just plain scare. While we were watching the drills, Mr. Regnier pulled him aside and spoke to him. They probably thought the drills were making such a clatter that I couldn’t hear what they said; but I _did_ hear.”

“Cuss-words?” David suggested. He was still trying to maintain the good-naturedly playful attitude.

She nodded vigorously. “Perfectly hair-raising!” she assured him. “Mr. Regnier said, ‘Why in the’--a long string of sizzling things--‘do you bring her here? Have you not of the senses the--blinkety-blank-blank--smallest portion?’

“I couldn’t hear what excuse Mr. Plegg made, but it was evidently not a very good one, for Mr. Regnier broke loose again: ‘_Sacre bleu!_ you are prip-pare to get yourself deeslike. _Hein!_ you shall chase her out of here so queek as _le bon Dieu_ will let you!’ You spoke of discipline a minute ago. I shouldn’t think you’d allow one of the under-assistants to talk that way to your second in command. It’s disgraceful.”

Answering the disciplinary gibe, David sought once more to stave off the tunnel climax--if so be the breaker of discipline were working toward a climax. But again Miss Virginia proved herself a true inheritor of the Grillage obstinacies and persistences.

“There is something the matter with that tunnel, David, and I want to know what it is,” she urged gravely.

He told a half-truth merely because no plausible or practicable falsehood suggested itself at the moment.

“It is a bit dangerous--in one place.”

“But if it is dangerous for me it is dangerous for the workmen. Why don’t you timber the bad place?”

He laughed. “What do you know about timbering tunnels?”

“You forget that I’ve been eating the bread of the construction camps all my life.”

“That’s so; I had forgotten.” In their excursions together over the job it had given him a glow of superecstasy to find that she was familiar with many of the details of her father’s trade--and his own; details which would have been purest Greek to most women. Silas Plegg’s commendation was amply borne out by the fact; she was, indeed, “a pretty good little engineer, herself.” None the less his lips were sealed in the matter of tunnel-timbering--or the lack of it. He could not tell her that, for the sake of her father’s profit account, the weak roof must not be timbered. Hence, he temporized.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have called it dangerous; it isn’t so bad as you may be imagining. Timbering is an obstruction to the work, and we always get along without it if we can.” Then, resolute to shelve the subject so high that it couldn’t be reached again: “What has become of your father? I haven’t seen him for two or three days.”

“He is down at the car to-night. But he hasn’t been well.”

“Not well? I can’t think of him as not being well. He always looks to me as if he’d never known what it was to be sick.”

“He hasn’t known very often, and for that reason he never takes any care of himself. But something over a year ago he scared me silly; he had a touch of apoplexy. The doctors told me, but they wouldn’t tell him. He got well in almost no time, but since, I’ve been trying to make him take things easy. That was one reason why I insisted on coming out here with him this summer.”

“He needs a complete rest,” said David.

“Yes; and maybe he’ll get one when your father comes. By the way--when are they coming--your father and Lucille?”

“See how association with you makes me forget things!” he jested. “I knew I had something to tell you. They will be here to-morrow. I had a letter this morning.”

“Are you ready for them?” she asked.

“They are to have that cottage over there under the pines, and they can take their meals here in the hotel.”

It was a perfect summer night, with the stars burning like beacon-lights in the inverted bowl of the heavens, a crescent moon hanging low over the saw-tooth outline of Qojogo, and the elevated backgrounds sweeping in the blackest of shadow to the high horizons.

“The sublime majesty of it!” said the young woman softly, commenting on the grandeurs. “And to think that Lucille won’t be able to see it when she comes! It’s heart-breaking, David!”

“I think--I hope--the little sister doesn’t miss what she hasn’t had since she was four years old,” he returned, matching her low tone.

“I know; though it seems as if she must. But you are making her miss some of the things she needn’t miss, David.”

“I have been a poor plotter,” he confessed. “I’ll admit that in getting them out here I was confidently counting upon breaking it off for Oswald. But it seems that I have only made matters worse. The letter that I spoke of was from Herbert. He has taken a partner in his law business and is giving himself a vacation. He says Dad’s health is still poor and it is hardly right for him to travel with the care of Lucille; so he, Bert, is coming along. I suppose I shall be obliged to read the riot act to him again.”

Miss Virginia was standing on the lowest porch step and she drew herself up in combative protest.

“You will do nothing of the sort,” she declared, with a touch of her father’s peremptory manner. “If you do, I shall let Lord Cumberleigh and Freddy Wishart know what a perfectly gorgeous place this is in which to spend a summer vacation. Good-night; it’s late and I’m going in.”

When David had descended the hill to his bunk car headquarters he found that Plegg had not yet come in. But Jean Marie François Regnier was there, dark-faced, and with the Gallic temper coruscating.

“Thees devil of hard-rock men!” he sputtered. “They ’ave not so moch as the courage of a mice! They say to me, ‘You s’all timber thees bad place or shoot it down, or bygod we s’all strike.’ _Sacr-r-re!_”

As once before, in a similar crisis, David Vallory sat on the edge of his bunk to take off his lace-boots.

“I’ll think about it, Regnier” he said slowly. “You tell your men that you’ve put it up to me. I’ll see you to-morrow.”

After Regnier had gone, David went on mechanically with his bed-time preparations. Then, as if at the bidding of a sudden impulse, he hurriedly put the boots and his coat on again and went out to the rear platform of the small car.

When he saw that the lights were still on in Mr. Grillage’s Pullman he dropped from the step and went across the tracks to present himself at the porter-guarded door of the _Athenia_.

XVIII

In Loco Parentis

Admitted to the office compartment of the private car, David Vallory found its occupant preparing to go up to the hotel; but at the swing of the corridor door Eben Grillage sat down again in the capacious swing-chair at his desk and relighted the stub of his cigar.

“Come in, David,” he growled not unkindly; and before Vallory could speak: “Vinnie ’phoned down a few minutes ago to tell me that you’re looking for your father to-morrow. That sounds mighty good to me. We’ll have another chance to renew our youth. You don’t appreciate how much that means; you’re too young. But some day you will.”

David drew up one of the wicker chairs and sat down. The abrupt dip into the purely friendly relations side-tracked his errand, temporarily; but it also gave him time to gather himself for the plunge into the weightier matter.

“Yes,” he assented; “I had a letter this morning. There will be three of them; Dad and my sister and Bert Oswald.”

“You don’t mean John Oswald’s boy?”

“Yes, that is the one. Bert is a lawyer now, in business for himself in Middleboro.”

Eben Grillage wagged his head as one incredulous, and the massive features were relaxed in a reminiscent smile.

“Well, well; the idea of that little red-headed, blue-eyed chap of Oswald’s growing up to be a man and a lawyer! How time does skip along!” Then: “What’s he coming out here for? We don’t need any lawyers on this job--not yet, I hope.”

“Bert says the trip is a vacation excursion for him,” David replied, suppressing Oswald’s true motive. Then he began on his own errand. “I came over here to bother you for a bit of advice on something that I’ve changed my mind about half a dozen times or more. It’s that weak place in the roof of heading Number One that Plegg wrote you about before I came on the job.”

“Well, what about it?”

“At first I was willing to discount all the nervous stories. I spent one entire summer in hard-rock work, and I know how prone the drill crews are to cry ‘wolf’ when they drive through something a little different. But latterly I’ve been a little anxious myself.”

“I shouldn’t worry, if I were you,” said the big man, with the lenient indulgence of a master for a neophyte. “There’s a good old saying, David, that you ought always to remember: Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you. I’ve had a look at that tunnel roof, myself. You needn’t lose any sleep over it.”

“It looks a bit bad to me,” David made bold to say. “And now Regnier tells me that the men have gone from complaining to making threats.”

“Threats?--what kind of threats?”

“They say if we don’t timber, or shoot the bad roof down, they’ll strike on us; which will be giving open notice to the railroad people that there is something wrong.”

David Vallory did not know that, under conditions similar to those he was presenting, the king of the contractors was wont to explode in volcanic wrath, consigning everybody remotely implicated to the scrap-heap of the nerveless and the yellow-streaked. Nor did he know that he was especially favored when his chief consented to argue the matter with him.

“It has always been that way with the hard-rock crews,” the master maintained; “they’re not happy if they don’t have something to kick about. As to the threat; Lushing and his inspectors know--or ought to know--all that anybody can tell them about that ‘fault’. It’s their business to find out.”

David felt that he was losing ground, but he tried once more.

“It has always seemed better to me to be safe than sorry,” he ventured; and he was going on to make the same suggestion that Plegg had made, about taking the matter up with the railroad company for a new contract, when the exponent of modern business success broke in.

“‘Safety first’ is a good idea, but it has been run into the ground, like a lot of other good things, David. You were telling me that your college vacations were spent working for the railroads, and there you would naturally get the safety idea rubbed into you good and hard. I’ve seen railroad engineers spend thousands of dollars--of other people’s money--on precautions that will never be tested while the world stands. When you are working for your own pocketbook it’s different.”

“Yet I suppose we ought not to take too many chances,” David constrained himself to say.

“That is where you are wrong,” was the prompt contradiction. “All business is a taking of chances. The merchant who buys a stock of goods in spring that he hopes to sell in the fall is taking a chance. The lawyer who expects to charge a fat fee if he wins his cause is taking a chance. The farmer who plows and plants is taking a mighty long chance on what the season and the weather will do to him. Don’t you see how it runs through everything a man can do?”

“Yes, but----”

“Take our own job here and look at the hamperings. I’m talking to you now as Adam Vallory’s boy and not as a hired man. We were ground to the limit on the bidding; and at every turn the railroad people are trying to get more than they bargained for--something for nothing. It’s all right; that’s their part of it, you’ll say. But in addition to all this we’ve got Jim Lushing against us; a man who will stoop to any kind of low, disreputable trickery to do us up. You may say it’s dog eat dog, and so it is. But it’s business.”

David took a leaf from his father’s book and proffered it, not too confidently.

“Dad was always so strong on the ethics of a thing,” he began; but Eben Grillage interrupted with a good-natured laugh.

“Your father is a white-haired old angel; and he is just about as completely out of touch with the modern business world as the other angels are. There are no theoretical ethics in business, David. If you don’t fight for your own hand, you go to the wall, every time. That is one reason why I offered you a job. I didn’t want to see Adam Vallory’s boy settle down in the old Middleboro Security and become a fossilized back-number before he could grow a beard.”

Here it was, deep in the personalities again, and David Vallory would have been either more or less than human if he could have disentangled himself from the purely friendly relation.

“You have been mighty good to me--good to all of us,” he broke out gratefully. “If I’ve said too much about that tunnel roof----”

“Just you forget the tunnel roof and let it go. It has stood up all right since we drove through it, and you know what it would cost to shoot it down and plug the hole. I want to see you succeed, David, and you can’t do it if you are always worrying about the other fellow’s side of things. I only wish I had a boy like you of my own.”

“You have something vastly better,” said the model son, with a smile.

“Vinnie, you mean? Sometimes I think so; and then, again, I’m sort of worried. When it comes right down to the jumping-off place, I’m afraid she isn’t going to pick out a sure-enough man. Look at the crowd she runs with! Half of ’em are after my money, and the other half haven’t got brains enough to fry, or sand enough in ’em to keep the wheels from slipping.”

David was far enough beyond the tunnel and all other troubles now to be able to laugh happily. It was reasonably evident that any obstacles which might lie in his way in the sentimental race were not such as might be raised by a purse-proud father, and once again his heart warmed toward the benefactor and foster-father who was so generously overlooking the master-and-man hamperings.

“Virginia is your own daughter, Mr. Grillage; you needn’t be alarmed about her,” he put in loyally.

“I know; but she’s got a raft of high-flown notions about ethical culture--whatever that is--and the brotherhood of man, and ‘tainted money’, and all that--you probably know the whole rigmarole. And when Vinnie sets her head on anything you couldn’t switch her with a hundred-and-fifty-ton crane and a five-yard steam-shovel put together. I tell her what she needs is to marry a man who is in the thick of the business fight for himself--and for her. Then she’d learn a few practical, every-day facts.”

David Vallory felt that it would be almost a breach of confidence--the confidence that had been growing up day by day between Virginia and himself--if he should let the talk dig any deeper into the personalities in Virginia’s direction. So he spoke again of his father’s coming, and of his hope that the change of scene and climate might prove beneficial.

“We’ll make it beneficial,” declared the big man, with a return to the genially masterful mood; and after a few minutes more of the friendly talk, David took his leave, warming himself once again at the fires of henchman loyalty. Who was he to set up the standards of his own narrow convincements against the wisdom and experience of a man whose success was equalled only by his generosity and princely liberality? And beyond this, had not Eben Grillage as good as said that his consent was already gained if his daughter’s choice should fall upon a man who was _not_ of the great army of idlers?

Other phases of the talk emphasized themselves for the young chief of construction after he had seen the big boss striding sturdily up the steep path toward the ridge-top hotel. In no uncertain sense his father’s benefactor had shown himself willing to be a second father to the son, supplying, from his wider experience of men and things, the lacks of a too-narrow upbringing. In an upflash of the newer partisanship, David could smile at his own compunctions. In a world of shrewd battlings one might easily theorize too much. But deep down under this generalization the new loyalty, born first of worthy gratitude, was digging a channel for itself; the channel leading now to blind fealty. The problem was no longer a question of right and wrong in the abstract. It was resolving itself into a grim determination to hew doggedly to the line--the line being the success, in a financial sense, of the Grillage Engineering Company.

With this determination in the saddle, David Vallory did not return to his bunk car. A locomotive was about to make the run up to the tunnel with a supply of freshly blacksmithed drill-bits, and he boarded it. The night breeze, slipping down from the peaks of the higher range, was like a draft of invigorating wine. The moon had gone down, but the carbide flares and electric arcs illuminating the scene in the huge cuttings made the men and machines stand out in harsh relief. Above the clatter of the locomotive the rapid, intermittent volley-fire of the steam-shovels rose like the snortings of strange monsters; and against the inky background of the western mountain a single electric star marked the mouth of the tunnel.

At the portal David dropped from the step of the engine and made his way, unaccompanied, into the heart of the mountain. The thread of incandescent bulbs starred the blackness, each illuminating its little circle of the underworld. The distant clamor of the drills ceased shortly after David reached the spot where the threatening roof was sprinkling its daily warnings. Posturing solely as the cool-headed engineer and technician, he would have decided at once that the danger signals were growing more portentous--did so decide in the inner depths of him. The overhead rock had an appearance not unlike that of a slaking lime bed, checked and crisscrossed in every direction with fine seams and cracks.

While he was still examining the roof and telling himself that this was only one of the many chances that had to be taken in the battle for success, a man came out of the half-lighted darkness of the farther depths and spoke to him. It was Silas Plegg.

“Getting your goat so that you can’t sleep nights, is it?” said the first assistant, with his teeth-baring smile.

David ignored the reference to his responsibilities and asked a question.

“Any more strike talk among the men?”

“A little; yes.”

“What do you think about this roof by this time? I know what you thought a few days ago.”

Plegg shook his head.

“It’s not up to me to do the thinking. What do you think?”

“Frankly, Plegg, I don’t know what to say. Just before you came up I was thinking that if I were called in here as an outsider and asked to give an opinion I’d say it was a risk--a damned bad risk. But as a Grillage man, I’ve come around to your point of view on the necessities. We’ve got to trust to luck and bully it through.”

“Yes; if the devil doesn’t take too good care of his own.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that it doesn’t lie with us any more to keep this thing quiet.”

“What? Have the inspectors caught on?”

“Since we haven’t had a bunch of them jumping onto us, I infer not. But there is at least one warm enemy of yours who knows about it.”

“Who is it?”

“Black Jack Dargin.”

David flew into a rage for the second time that day.

“Can’t I get a positive order obeyed any more on this job?” he rasped. “How many times have I got to say that nobody from the outside is to be allowed in this tunnel?”

“Dargin hasn’t been here,” said Plegg evenly. “But he has had one of his steerers working here as a mucker.” A pause, and then, in the same even tone: “I guess you’ll have to give up your idea of running Black Jack off the lot. It isn’t worth while, anyway.”

David Vallory was still angry. “I’ll be shot if I’ll give it up!” he snapped. “I’ve got a string to pull that will clean those Powder Can dives off the map, and I’ll pull it to-night before I sleep!”

“And take the risk of Dargin’s giving this thing away?”

“I’m not considering risks just now! If that tin-horn gambler thinks he can put something over on us, let him try it.”

Plegg turned aside and stooped as if to examine a joint in the pressure pipe which led the air from the compressor-plant at the portal to the drills in the heading. When he straightened up it was to say, “Have you seen Lushing?”

“No.”

“He is here at the front again; so Altman told me this afternoon.”

“Which means that from now on we’re to have him around under foot!” gritted the angry one.

Plegg glanced back into the depths where the _chug-chug_ of the drills had ceased.

“We’d better be moving out; they’re getting ready to fire a round of shots,” he offered; and after they were in the open air and the muffled reverberations of the dynamite had come rolling out to jar upon the midnight silence: “Lushing will do more than get under foot. He is spiteful, and when he gets ready to hit out, we’ll all know about it. I’m only hoping that he and Dargin won’t get together and compare notes.”

They had started to walk down to the approach track where the waiting locomotive was standing before David made his comment on the Lushing vindictiveness.

“Plegg,” he said grittingly, “you know, and I know, the particular reason why Lushing wants to stick a knife into us. It’s running in my mind that somebody ought to put him out of the game. And if he strikes me just right, I’m the man to do it!”

XIX

The Ultimatum

On the day succeeding David Vallory’s midnight visit to the tunnel the guest list of the Alta Vista Inn had a number of additions. Upon the arrival of the stub train from Agorda, David met the three for whose coming Oswald’s letter had prepared him, and even in the moment of welcomings saw his difficulties take on added thorninesses. Oswald, his face set in lines of frowning determination, was evidently anticipating reproaches, or something sharper; but when David saw his sister, and marked her quick little groping for Oswald’s hands in the descent from the car-steps, his heart smote him and he said neither more, nor less, than was meet.

A mountain motor hack was at the service of the Alta Vista group for the drive to the top of the ridge, and with the transfer in process, David had time to observe the other arrivals. One was a well-groomed young man with sleepy eyes and a bored expression, and on one of the numerous traveling-bags obstructing the foot space in the car David read the initials “F. W.” Another of the newcomers was a rather solemn-faced person in clothes of English cut; he, also, looked bored, and the monocle which he occasionally fitted to an eye with grimaces provocative of subdued mirth in the other passengers, gave him the appearance of a weary owl contemplating sad and depressive surroundings with a single eye. David, sitting with his father and pointing out the various phases of the big job as the car climbed the ridge, needed no additional tags to enable him to identify the pair on the opposite seat. Of Miss Virginia’s retinue at least two, Mr. Frederic Wishart and the Englishman, Cumberleigh, had discovered her retreat.

In the hotel dining-room, where he secured a table for his own party, David ate his heart out under an outward mask of the welcomer’s cheerfulness when he saw Virginia making merry with the owlish Englishman and the son of the multimillionaire breakfast-food king at a table four removes distant. Gone for him were the joyous excursions over the work in the company of a khaki-clad maiden whose interest in the technical activities had been scarcely second to his own. Gone, likewise, were the ecstatic evenings in the secluded porch nook, shadowed by the wall-tapping fir-tree, with no one to interfere and none to distract.

“Yes, we are getting along fairly well,” David was saying, continuing the talk with his father and Oswald and wrenching himself forcibly aside from the heart-consuming spectacle four tables away. “If nothing unforeseen happens, the through trains ought to be running over the new line before snow flies.”

“Accidents, you mean?” queried the sweet-voiced one who sat in darkness.

“Accidents or other hamperings. Of course, on a job as big as this there is always a chance for the unexpected.” And he went on to enumerate some of the hamperings which might cause delay, carefully avoiding, however, any mention of tunnels and caving roofs therein.

Later, the table talk was led to other topics. David wished to know how they had fared on the long journey from Middleboro; he spoke of the satisfaction it gave him to have the family united again; melting a little in the glow of his own galvanized warmth, he was even hypocritical enough to descant upon the good luck which had enabled Oswald to join the vacation party.

After dinner business intruded. Plegg came up to secure his chief’s decision upon certain foundations which were being sunk for one of the bridges, and David had to go with him to the bunk-car office to consult the blue-prints. When he was free to return to the Inn he found his family scattered. Eben Grillage had swooped down upon the friend of his youth and had spirited him away; and it was only after some little search on the porches that David discovered his sister and Oswald.

Coming up behind them unnoticed, he went away again without intruding upon them. The after-glow of another of the gorgeous sunsets was spreading itself in the western heavens, and Oswald was describing it for the blind girl. It was the low-spoken admission of the blind one that made David forbear to break in. “You think I am missing it, Herbert, but that is not so. Sometimes it seems as if I could see things through your eyes better than if I had my own.”

On another of the porches David had a glimpse of Virginia and the two newcomers, and a dull fire of resentment was kindled. The daughter of the luxuries was evidently in her gayest mood, and if there were any lingering regret for the change from the technicalities and the duet evenings in the shadow of the fir-tree her manner did not betray it. David turned away when he saw her holding a match to light Wishart’s cigarette. The most infatuated of lovers may be permitted a pang of disappointment at the discovery that he has apparently been useful only as a convenient fill-in.

Having the social--and sentimental--nerve centers thus painfully cauterized, David was fain to fall back upon the job and its requirements. There need be no lack of occupation. He knew that Plegg would be hard at work checking the estimate for the month; and there was always the overseeing round of the night shifts, which one or the other of them usually made before turning in. But there was another urge which fitted in better with the mood of the moment. Plegg’s news, that Lushing was back at the head of the inspection staff, and that Dargin was the possessor of the tunnel secret, had not yet been acted upon. In some less morose frame of mind, David Vallory might have thought twice before yielding to a sudden impulse to carry the war into the enemy’s country. As it was, he turned his back upon the hotel and a short half-hour later was entering the single street of the mining-camp.

The impulse which had sent him across the basin was not very definite in its promptings. In accordance with the minatory promise made to Plegg, he had written to the president of the railroad company, asking that some drastic action be taken in the matter of the nuisances. Something might come of this, in time, but meanwhile Dargin must be prevented from using his weapon. How to go about the preventing presented a rather difficult problem. Things which seem measurably easy of accomplishment at a distance are apt to take on new and difficult aspects in the face-to-face encounter, and as David made his way toward the Dargin lair where he had once looked on with Plegg, he was still undecided as to the manner in which the gambler should be approached.

As he soon found out, an approach of any sort at the moment was plainly impossible. The bi-monthly Grillage pay-day was still a fresh memory and the town and its resorts were filled with the money-scattering workmen. The Dargin place was packed to the doors, and David had some trouble in wedging himself into the gambling room at the rear of the bar. Here the impossibility of getting speech with Dargin became apparent. The master gambler was dealing at the faro table, and his isolation for the time being was safely assured and secure.

As David was shouldering his way back to the street entrance for a breath of clean air a man in the bar-room throng touched him upon the shoulder, calling him by name. It was a prompting of the morose demon in possession that made him turn and stare at the questioner half-angrily before he made answer. The man was well-dressed, something below the middle height, and rather heavy set, dark, and with a closely cropped brown beard. The mouth outlined beneath the tightly curled mustaches was full-lipped and gross, and the bulging eyes, with a hint of a hard drinker in them, evenly matched the sensuous lips.

“Vallory is my name, yes,” David admitted, and the bare admission was a challenge.

“Mine is Lushing,” was the curt announcement. “I suppose you have heard of me before this?”

David did not say whether he had or had not. An antagonism of a sort that he had never before experienced was laying hold upon him so fiercely that he scarcely dared trust himself to speak. This was the man who had been audacious enough to make love to Virginia, and who was now boasting that he would break the Grillage Engineering Company.

“You were looking for me?” David said.

Lushing bit the end of a cigar and struck a match.

“Yes; I’ve been wanting to get hold of you,” he rapped out, between puffs. “I want to have a talk with you. It’s too noisy here; let’s go back to one of Jack’s private rooms.”

If David Vallory hesitated it was only because the feeling of antagonism was growing by leaps and bounds, and he was afraid to be alone with the man--afraid for Lushing, not for himself.

“Is it business?” he inquired curtly. Then he added: “I’m waiting to see Dargin.”

“Yes, it’s business. And if you’re waiting for Jack, you’ll wait a long time. When he sits in at the game, he stays to see it out. Let’s get out of this mess.”

David reluctantly followed his guide to one of a series of small card-rooms back of the bar. Lushing snapped the electric light switch as one who knew his surroundings intimately, and sat down at the card-table.

“What’ll you drink?” he demanded brusquely.

“Nothing at all; I’m not thirsty.”

Lushing pressed the bell-push for himself, and when the bar-man came, ordered a whiskey-sour. “Won’t you change your mind?” he suggested, after the drink had been served; and when David shook his head: “All right; every man to his own taste. Here goes,” and he drained his glass.

More and more David was wishing himself well out of it. There could be nothing but enmity between him and this loose-lipped man across the card-table, and the savage prompting to precipitate an open conflict was becoming ungovernable.

“If you’ll say what you wish to say,” he grated. “My time is pretty strictly limited.”

“Not if you’re waiting for Jack Dargin,” said Lushing. “But perhaps you want to get back to the hotel.” Then he added in a tone which seemed to be intentionally insulting: “They tell me you are one of Eben Grillage’s pets.”

David’s anger flamed alive like a flash of dry powder, but he was telling himself in many repetitions that his time had not yet come.

“We shall get along faster, and perhaps farther, if you will cut out the personalities,” he said sourly.

“I was only repeating what I have heard. You are young to be at the head of a job of this size, and people have a way of explaining such things to suit themselves.”

“I might go into the repeating business myself, if I cared to,” David was beginning; but Lushing cut him off with a short laugh.

“I know; some of them have told you that I have a personal quarrel with Grillage, and perhaps some others have hinted that I wanted to marry into the company and got kicked out for my impudence. We’ll let that go. What was, is ancient history, and we’re dealing with the here and now. Your company is as crooked as a dog’s hind leg, and if you don’t know it, you ought to. Its days on this job are numbered.”

“Threats are the cheapest things in the world,” said David.

“You will find that this is more than a threat. You are a new man in the field, and I’ve nothing against you--as yet. What I wanted to see you for was to say to you that you’d better go while the sledding is good.”

“You are advising me to discharge myself?”

“That’s it--quit--throw up the job--climb out while you can get out with a whole skin.”

“But why?”

“Because if you don’t, you’ll be shown up with the other pirates and sneak thieves.”

David glanced again at the flushed face and bibulous eyes. It was evident that the drink tossed off while the bar-man waited was only the latest of a series which had been begun much earlier in the day.

“You are in no condition to talk business with me or with any one,” he said bluntly. “Some other time, perhaps, when you are entirely sober----”

Lushing brought his fist down upon the card-table with an oath.

“No, young fellow; you’ll hear what I’ve got to say now, and then you may take it straight to the fish-eyed old buccaneer you’re working for. Grillage hasn’t a dollar in this world that he has made honestly, and you may tell him I say so. Also, you may tell him that I’m going to make it my business to hound him to his finish. When all the crooked deals he has worked off on this job are shown up, he’ll be lucky if he can stay out of the pen. On top of all that, you may tell him that his daughter will see the day when she’ll beg me on her knees to let up--and I won’t do it!”

David was upon his feet and his eyes were blazing.

“You’ve said enough, and more than enough!” he broke out in hot wrath. “If you were not too drunk to be held accountable, I’d cram your words down your neck for that insult to Miss Grillage! Past that, I’ll say, once for all, that Mr. Grillage is more than my employer; he is my friend and my father’s friend. Go to it when you’re ready, and I shall know how to get back at you.”

At this, Lushing whipped an automatic pistol from his pocket and laid it upon the table, covering it with his hand.

“You make any bad breaks and I’ll drill you,” he said viciously. “Take that for a back-sight any time you feel tempted to beat me up. When a man of your size comes at me, I shoot first and shoot quick. I’m out to get your crooked company and the man who owns it. You say you’ll fight for him, and that puts you on the black list. I’m fair enough to give you a tip, and I’ve given it to you. If you don’t get off this job quick and fade away, you’ll wake up some fine morning to find yourself dead.”

What little calm judgment David Vallory still retained was telling him to go away; that there was nothing to be gained by staying and listening to Lushing’s threats. But by this time he was well out of reach of any of the calm voices.

“You’re taking it for granted that I’m unarmed, and you are right,” he flashed back. “I don’t care for your gun. You’ve laid the law down for me, and now I’ll lay a little of it down for you. Your inspectors will be welcome on the job anywhere and at any time, but as for yourself, you’ll stay away from it. If you show up in any camp of mine, you want to bring that gun along with you, for I shall take care to have one of my own, and I’ll use it!”

Lushing picked up the weapon and let it lie in his palm.

“Did the little Grillage tell you to kill me off out of the way?” he leered.

That was the final straw. David Vallory flung himself across the card-table in a mad-bull charge, carrying the table with him in his eagerness to close with his antagonist. For a few breathless seconds the battle was obstructed. David’s rush had borne Lushing backward, tilting the chair in which he was sitting until it brought up against the wall and was crushed under his weight and David’s and that of the overturned table. Too furious to fight coolly, David tried to snatch the wreck of the broken chair out of the way so that he could get at the man entangled in it and held down by the tipped table. One good punch he got in, or thought he did, and then there was a stunning crash, a fleeting whiff of powder smoke, and the light went out.

XX

In the Ore Shed

When David came to his senses he found himself lying on bare ground in the dark. There seemed to be a weight like that of an elephant’s knee pressing upon his chest, and it was with the greatest difficulty that he could get his breath. Somewhere near at hand he could hear sounds as of a woman sobbing. Next he realized vaguely that his boots had been taken off. Groping aimlessly in the dark, his hand found the woman. She was kneeling beside him, and at his touch the sobs became a choking cry.

“Davie, dear; is it yourself that’s alive?” The voice seemed to come from an immense distance, but he heard it and recognized it.

“You, Judith?”--then, jerkily: “What’s--happened--to me?”

“’Tis killed dead you are!” she whimpered.

“Nothing like it.” The words were coming a bit easier now and he did not have to stop and gasp between each pair of them. Also, he was beginning to remember some of the events precedent. “Did--did the house fall down on me?” he asked.

“Jim Lushing--the black curse be upon him!--he shot you; didn’t you know that?”

“I don’t remember. Whereabouts am I hit?”

“I wouldn’t be knowing that at all, Davie; I’m just this minute here. The shed watchman came and told me that Lushing had killed you in Jack’s place down the street. ’Twas scared they were to have you found dead in that place, so they carried you here.”

“Scared?” said David.