Chapter VII: Part 7

“For what your men might do; there’s a many of them in town, and they’d have wrecked the place. Where is it hurting you, Davie, dear?”

“I feel as if somebody had given me the heart punch--I believe that’s what the ring-fighters call it. But it’s letting up a bit now. Where am I?”

“In the Murtrie ore shed. They’d be putting it up to Mike Drogheen, the watchman, to say he’d shot you--taking you for an ore thief.”

“And paying him well for it, I suppose.” He was groping carefully for the wound and found only a rip in the left breast of the brown duck shooting-coat. There was no blood; only a tremendous soreness. He raised himself and sat up. “If we only had a light of some sort,” he muttered.

“Wait,” she said, and ran away to come back within the minute with the watchman’s lantern. “Poor old Mike’s hiding beyond in the blacksmith shop, scared trembling at the lie he’s thinking he’s got to tell. Don’t sit up, Davie; you might be bleeding to death.”

David was groping again, and this time, out of the ripped pocket of the brown coat he fished an engineer’s field-note book. Then he knew why there was no blood, and why the body area behind the pocket was as painful as if it had been beaten with a hammer. Lushing’s shot had been a glancing one, and the thick note-book had turned it aside. There was little left of the book save the perforated leather cover and a mass of torn leaves.

“The fellows who carried me off must have been pretty badly rattled, not to have found out that I wasn’t even scratched,” he commented.

“’Tis no wonder. When Mike brought me here, the doctor himself would have said you were dead. There was no breath in you at all, and your heart had stopped entirely.”

“What became of Lushing?”

“’Tis little I know, or care--the black dog! Mike says they told him you’d half killed him.”

“I think I meant to,” said David soberly. “And after this, I suppose I’ll have to kill him--or let him kill me. But that’s a future. He knows what he’s got to do if he wants to keep on living. Where are my boots?”

She found the boots with the help of the lantern and gave them to him. He put them on, though the effort, and the lacing of them, made him grit his teeth and swear.

“What did they want to take my boots off for?” he growled.

“Don’t you know?” she asked. “’Tis that way in the camps. They wouldn’t be letting anybody die with his boots on, if they could help it.”

“Rotten superstition!” he complained, and swore again.

The woman heard wonderingly.

“’Tis you that have changed, Davie, till I’d hardly be knowing you,” she said.

“Yes; I’ve changed. And so have you, Judith. Are you living with Dargin?”

“I am not!”

“But from what they tell me, you might as well be. You’ve taken help from him.”

“And if I have; ’tis nothing I’ve taken that an honest woman might not take.”

“You’re telling me the truth?”

“I am. When did I ever lie to you, Davie?”

“Never,” he conceded. But the main question was yet untouched. “I know how you came here to Powder Can--Plegg told me,” he went on bluntly. “It’s no place for you, here in Powder Can. You know that, don’t you?”

“Where would I be going, then?”

David held his head in his hands and tried to think. With the return of his faculties the spirit of morose disheartenment and impatient resentment which had brought him to the mining-camp, and had been the chief factor in precipitating the quarrel with Lushing, was reasserting itself. Since the bitter moods grow by what they feed upon, he could see nothing in just perspective. What a fool’s Paradise he had been living in since the Grillage private car had come to anchor in the construction yard! He had been crying for the moon, and the moon had been kind enough to shine for him--when there was no one else to shine upon. But now there were others....

“I don’t know,” he said abstractedly, in answer to her question as to where she should go. “It’s a pretty tough old world, Judith.” Then, suddenly: “Are you still blaming me?”

“For what would I be blaming you?”

“For chasing around with you in the old days and giving you the idea that I was going to marry you some time?”

“That’s all past and gone, Davie, dear.”

“Past and gone, maybe, but that doesn’t let me out. I know you’ve got your father, but I can’t help feeling more or less responsible for you. It has worried me a lot.”

“You shouldn’t be worrying.”

“I can’t help it. Last year, after I went to Wisconsin, I had a sort of plan worked out, and I wrote you twice before I found out that you’d left Middleboro. What you need--what you’ve always needed, Judith--is something that you could put your whole heart into, like--well, like music. My notion was that you could go to some good conservatory and study, and I was ready to help you. Is it too late to consider something of that kind now?”

She shook her head. “’Tis much too late, Davie.”

“You mean that you’re tied up with this man Dargin?”

“We’ll leave Jack Dargin be. There’s the old father; he’s not what he used to be, Davie; what with mother dying, and me----”

“I know,” he interposed hastily. “Plegg told me about that, too. But here’s more trouble, Judith. This man Dargin is your friend, or at least I’m trying to believe that he has befriended you, and I’ve got to chase him and his bunch out of Powder Can. I came over here to-night to tell him so. That muddles things still worse.”

“You’d better be letting Powder Can alone.”

“No, I can’t do that; it’s cutting too much out of the efficiency record on the job. I can’t fight Lushing and his outfit, and a booze joint as well. And right there, you break in. From what you’ve admitted, a lick at Jack Dargin is going to hurt you worse than it will him. And I don’t want to hurt you, Judith.”

“You shouldn’t be thinking so much about me.”

“Yes, I should; you need somebody to think about you. I wish you’d consider that notion of mine. You could take your father with you. He is too good a workman to be throwing himself away in a mine repair shop. He can get a better job anywhere he goes. I could get Mr. Grillage to help a bit in that direction. He knows everybody, everywhere.”

“He’d be wanting to know why,” she objected.

“What if he does? I’ll tell him why.”

“Tell him that you’re trying to help a poor girl back to her feet?--and you wanting to marry his daughter?”

“Who told you I wanted to marry his daughter?”

“There’s little goes on in the camps that we don’t hear in Powder Can. There’s never a man of yours to come over here without having his say about you and the daughter of the man you’d be working for. ’Tis well I know it was Vinnie Grillage you were telling me about that night at home when you were leaving. I’d not be messing up your life and hers, Davie.”

He forced a sour smile. “My part of it is already messed up. Vinnie has been good to me--chiefly because we were kiddies together, long before I knew you, Judith. But that’s all there is to it. There are two other entries now, and I’m out of the race. Does that make it any easier for you to think of my plan?”

“It does not!” she flashed out, almost vindictively, he thought.

Since there seemed to be nothing more to be said, he got upon his feet, scarcely realizing that the girl stooped and put her arms around him and half lifted him. For a few seconds the dimly lighted interior of the ore shed spun around in dizzying circles, and the bullet bruise throbbed like a whirlwind of hammer blows. But he found he could breathe better standing.

“I must get back to camp,” he said. “Have you any idea what time it is?”

“’Tis early yet.” Then, anxiously: “You couldn’t be walking all that way, Davie!”

“Yes, I can; I’ll be all right in a few minutes more. Can you show me the way out of this place? I don’t want to go through the town unless I have to.”

She did not show him; she led him, with a strong arm under his to steady him. At the wagon gate at the rear of the ore yard he would have sent her home, but she would not go. “’Tis not fit you are to be going alone,” she said; and in spite of his urgings she went on with him, choosing a path that skirted the shoulder of the hill and left the town to the right. In sober silence they walked on until half of the distance between Powder Can and the construction camp lay behind them. Then David Vallory made his urgings mandatory.

“You must go back,” he insisted. “I’m quite all right, now. If Dargin should hear of this----”

“What is it Jack Dargin can do to you?” she interrupted shortly.

“It is something about the work; something that he knows. If he should tell Lushing----”

She interrupted again. “What has Jack got against you that would make him be giving you away to Jim Lushing?”

“I told you a little while ago. I’m trying to wipe him and his man-traps off the map, and he doubtless knows it.”

“Jack Dargin would only be respecting you the more for that. Sure, it’s himself that knows how bad Powder Camp would be needing a cleaning up.”

“But, good heavens, girl! Dargin is the head and front of the lawlessness himself!”

“’Tis so; but that makes no difference. You can’t tell what’s in the heart of a man, Davie--and I know Jack Dargin; that side of him that not you, nor any one else knows. He’d fight you; maybe he’d kill you. But he’d respect you the more.”

There was a grim humor in the paradox, but David Vallory was not in the mood to appreciate it.

“He’ll be gunning for me; and so will Lushing. But I don’t care; I’ll fight the whole outfit, if I have to. I was fool enough to go into that dive to-night unarmed, but that won’t happen again. Lushing had pulled a gun on me; that was one reason why I jumped him. The next time----”

“’Tis little you’d know about the shooting, Davie.”

“What I don’t know I can learn. Now you are going straight back home from here ... no, not another step with me. Good-night--Glory--and--God bless you!”

Once again, if David Vallory could have had a small modicum of the gift of omniscience; could have detached his astral body, let us say, to send it back over the road he had just traversed; there would have been revelations, puzzling, perhaps, but still not without interest to one fighting against the powers of darkness. At the side of the road the detached messenger would have found a woman, crumpled in a forlorn heap on the cold ground, and sobbing as if her heart would break. Still farther back, in the mining-camp itself, the astral David might have looked into a shabbily luxurious upper room where a curious confirmation of Judith Fallon’s prediction touching the contradictory motives which may lie side by side in the human heart was staging itself.

After the fight in the card-room and its supposed tragical outcome, the down-stairs game-room had been hastily closed. As on the night of Plegg’s eavesdropping, the upper room held two occupants, and they were the same two whose voices had reached the first assistant through the partly opened gallery window. And, as before, the lop-shouldered man was the bearer of news.

“By cripes! I guess I know what I’m talking about?” he snarled. “I’ve just come from there. He’s gone, I tell you; lit out--skipped. The watchman swears he don’t know nothin’ about it--didn’t go near the shed after they took him there.”

The master gambler, again with his hands in his pockets, and again tilting gently in the wooden-seated chair, nodded his approval. “I’m glad of it,” he said.

“The hell you are! And him tryin’ to butt in on your game and run you out?”

“That’s what I said”--curtly.

“And you ain’t goin’ to use that dope that you pulled out o’ me at the end of a gun?”

“Not in a thousand years, Simmy. Haven’t you been with me long enough to know that I’m no damn’ worm to crawl up a man’s leg and bite him to death? You say the young duck’s alive and has made his get-away. That’s all right. If he comes at me like a two-fisted man, maybe I’ll send him word that he’d better come heeled. But that’s all.”

“You won’t take the dope and do him up the way I was tellin’ you?”

“Nothing doing.”

“Well, then, by cripes! I know somebody that will take it--and pay good money for it!” shrilled the disappointed one.

“Grillage, you mean?”

“No; I tried him, and what do I get? He tells that big, black nigger porter of his to put me out of the car. I’ll show him--him and Vallory at the same clatter!”

The master gambler got up, as if to signify that he had heard enough.

“Better look out that you don’t get stepped on--like other worms--Simmy,” he warned; and then, reaching for the hanging lamp over the table to turn it out: “Get a crawl on you; I’m going to shut up shop.”

XXI

The Other David

When David Vallory, plodding doggedly, reached the construction camp upon his return from Powder Can, he found Herbert Oswald waiting for him at the steps of the office bunk car.

“Everybody had gone to bed in the hotel, and I thought I’d straggle down to see if I could find your headquarters,” was the way in which the young lawyer accounted for himself. “If you are tired and want to turn in, you are at liberty to shoo me away.”

“No,” said David crisply. “Come on in.”

Oswald groped his way into the dark interior of the car at the heels of his crusty welcomer and found a seat on Plegg’s unoccupied bunk while David was lighting a lamp. At the blowing-out of the match, the lamp-lighter stood staring gloomily down upon his late-in-the-evening visitor.

“I know pretty well what you’ve come to say,” he thrust in gruffly. “Suppose you say it and have it over with.”

Oswald looked up in mild surprise.

“I didn’t come here to scrap with you, David. And, so far as I know, I haven’t done anything to make you run at me with a chip on your shoulder. Of course, I know you are thinking I ought not to have come out here, but----”

“What I may think doesn’t seem to cut any figure,” said David, with the air of a man who would rather precipitate a quarrel than avoid one. “I told you exactly and precisely what I thought a year ago as I was leaving Middleboro, and I haven’t had any reason to change my mind.”

Oswald, ready enough in any legal matching of man against man, seemed helplessly nonplussed.

“You have changed rather ferociously,” he remarked. “I don’t quite know how to take you. If you are giving me a fair shot at your present self, you are not the David Vallory I used to know.”

“No, I am not the same. A little while ago I was trying my best to kill a man; I shall do it yet, one of these days, if he doesn’t keep out of my sight. But go on and say what you’ve got to say.”

“It amounts to this: for a whole year I’ve kept faith with you--honest faith--and every day of that year has been a day of heartburnings and regrets. Your attitude toward your sister is entirely unreasonable. There have been blind wives before this, and they have been happy wives--and mothers, for that matter; at least, their blindness hasn’t necessarily been a bar to happiness. A year ago, if I had spoken, I should have spoken only for myself: now I am speaking for Lucille as well as for myself.”

“All of which is entirely beside the question,” was the irritable rejoinder. “I know Lucille, and however far she has allowed herself to go in the matter of learning to care for you or for any man, it’s a sure thing she has never thought of marriage, even as a possibility. If you propose it, two things will happen; she will wake up to the fact that she has been mistaking love for friendship; and she will realize that she has to refuse the love. After that, her life will be nothing but a miserable, repining blank.”

“I can’t agree with you at all,” objected the lover, argumentatively ready to defend his own point of view. “If you were the David Vallory I once knew, you would listen to reason; at least, to the extent of giving your sister a voice in ordering her own future. I have come to the fork of the road, David, and I am here to say it to you, face to face. I need Lucille, and she needs me. When the time is fully ripe I shall ask her to be my wife. You put me under bonds of a certain sort a year ago, but now I shall refuse longer to be bound by them; I repudiate them absolutely.”

David Vallory sat down, and for a time the silence of the small car interior was broken only by the clash and jangle of a shifting-engine in the upper yard. Finally the decision came.

“Oswald, Lucille is my sister, and I am going to stand between her and the life of heartbroken wretchedness you are planning for her. You give me your word that you will not break over while you are both here together, and upon that condition you may stay in Powder Gap as long as you see fit.”

Oswald stood up and his lips were pale.

“And if I refuse to submit to any such unreasonable and humiliating condition--what then?”

David Vallory frowned up at his one-time schoolmate.

“You say that you have been bound by your promise of a year ago, but that you now repudiate it; as a man of honor, you are bound by it until I release you.”

“You are not answering my question.”

“I’ll answer it. The stub train going east leaves here every morning at seven-thirty; I’ll give you a day or two in which to think it over--with the promise still holding good.”

“And if, at the end of the day or two, I still refuse to recognize your right to interfere?”

“This is not Middleboro; and, as you have remarked, I am not the David Vallory you used to know. If you still decline to listen to reason, you’ll take that train and get out of here--if I have to hog-tie you and throw you into the baggage-car!”

“_David!_”

“You needn’t beg; I mean it. I am neither drunk nor insane. You have said your say and I have said mine, and that settles it.”

The young lawyer took a step toward the door. But with his hand on the knob he stopped and faced about.

“So this is what Eben Grillage has done for you, is it?” he grated. “Like master, like man; with the doctrine of brute force for your code. I wouldn’t have believed it possible for the son of your father, David.”

“I have had the brute force all along, only I haven’t had sense enough to apply it,” was the surly rejoinder. “But it’s never too late to mend. Good-night--if you’re going.”

“I am going, but not before I have finished saying my say. For the present, and purely because I don’t consider the time fully ripe, I shall postpone asking your sister to marry me. But I refuse utterly and definitely to be bound by your tyrannical conditions.”

Shortly after Oswald had gone, David Vallory rummaged in Plegg’s kit-locker until he found a blued service revolver in its holster. He hung it under his coat by the shoulder-strap, and then dug further for a supply of cartridges. Thus armed, he took to the open again. The shock of the bullet bruise was still unsteadying him, and the bruise itself was hurting savagely, but he would not give up to it. At Brady’s Cut he found Plegg.

“The war is on,” he announced briefly, when he had taken the first assistant aside.

“You have seen Lushing?” Plegg asked.

“Yes; and he gave himself away: says he means to break us. We had it back and forth for a few minutes, and then he pulled a gun on me.”

“Good Lord!” said Plegg. “Where were you?”

“In one of Dargin’s card-rooms. We mixed it. I couldn’t stand for the gun-pulling--and some other things. He tried to plug me, but I’m hoping he got as good as he sent. Anyhow, I’ve cleared the air a bit. I’ve taken the liberty of borrowing your extra forty-five, and I’m going loaded for him after this. I’ve told him what he may expect if he shows his face on this job again while I’m here.”

“For heaven’s sake! I--well, it isn’t my put in, but you’ve rather got me going, you know. Can you--er--do you know how to use the forty-five?”

“Not very well; I did a little pistol-practice in Florida. But to-morrow you’ll take me back in the hills and show me a bit. Just now we’ve got other fish to fry. We’re going to fight Lushing on his own ground. He says we’re a gang of thieves, and if we have the name, we may as well have the game.”

“But even if you’ve bluffed him into staying off the job, he still has the ear of the railroad people.”

“That’s all right; I’ll fight him to a knockout, all the way up to Mr. Ford--if he wants to carry it that far. In the meantime we’ll show him, and the men who are paying his salary, that we know how to hit back when they call us thieves. Pass the word to our staff, and let the fellows pass it on to the foremen and subcontractors. They’ll know how to cut the corners, and how to keep the railroad inspectors from finding out--no coarse-hand work, you know, Plegg, but every dollar that can be squeezed out of this job from now on. That’s what we want.”

Plegg was shaking his head like a man in a maze; and the new chief--new now in his attitude as well as in the shortness of his service--went on.

“About that weak spot in the tunnel; have you found out who gave it away to Dargin?”

“Yes; a fellow named Backus, who worked in one of the muck shifts. The men say he was a steerer for Dargin’s faro-game.”

“What has become of him?”

“He’s fired: I suppose he’s in Powder Can.”

“He is the man we want. I’m going to put it up to you, Plegg, to find him and grab him before he gets next to Lushing. When he is found, buy him, and shoot him out of the country--anywhere where he’ll be out of Lushing’s reach until we get this job done.”

“And if he can’t be bought?”

“Lock him up somewhere and keep him from talking. Now about the bad roof itself: that is where Lushing can hit us the hardest. Give Regnier his tip, and do it to-night. Tell him to have the tunnel re-wired for lights so there won’t be a bulb anywhere near that soft spot. Tell him to keep his men quiet if he has to raise the pay of every man in the three shifts. Then make him understand that the rule against the admission of outsiders must be rigidly enforced, if he has to maintain an armed guard at the portal.”

“That won’t keep Lushing’s inspectors out,” Plegg suggested mildly.

“I’m coming to that. Regnier must see to it that some man of ours who can be trusted is within reach every time an inspector goes in. We don’t care to hurt anybody needlessly, but if one of our hard-rock bullies should happen to get into a scrap with the man who chances to discover that ‘fault’--well, you know what I mean. Mr. Grillage says that place is perfectly safe, and we’re going to take his word for it.”

The first assistant nodded, and the slow smile bared his teeth and wrinkled at the corners of his eyes.

“I certainly owe you an apology,” he said, with the faintest suggestion of irony in his tone; “several of them, in fact. There was a time when I fancied you were going to be too good--to revert to that morning in the Pullman a year ago; and I imagine Mr. Grillage harbored the same inadequate notion. You’ll want to be getting back to headquarters, I suppose: there is an engine due down from the tunnel--there it comes--I’ll flag it for you.”

David caught the eastbound engine, but he did not stop off at the headquarters camp. That was because Crawford, the concrete bridge builder, was at the yard platform to climb to the cab with a bit of news. Under new orders, inspectors had been placed at the three bridges in Crawford’s section, and they were in relays so that there was hardly an hour in the three shifts when one of them was not on duty. Crawford was looking for Plegg, but when he found that the first assistant was unattainable, he unburdened himself to the chief, setting forth the hard conditions.

“Well?” said David, while the engine halted.

“It’s--er--making it sort of difficult for me,” said Crawford, unwilling to go much deeper into the matter in the face of Plegg’s inhibition forbidding detail talk with the boss.

“Difficult? How?”

“Why--er--there can’t very well be two bosses on a job, and when I give an order and Strayer countermands it----”

“Do you mean to say that Strayer is trying to boss your job?”

“It amounts to that.”

David turned to the engine-driver.

“Run us down to bridge Number Two, Pete,” he ordered, and the heavy construction locomotive lumbered down through the yard and out over the switches.

The run was a short one, and at the bridge approach David and his assistant got off to walk over to the new structure. The bridge plant was well lighted by carbide gas flares, and prominent on the form stagings was the big figure of Strayer, the railroad inspector. David Vallory called up to him.

“Come down here a minute, Strayer; I want to talk to you,” he said.

When the railroad engineer joined him he led the way to the cement platform, where the noise of the mixer was less insistent.

“What’s the idea, Strayer?” he demanded.

The big man did not affect to misunderstand.

“You know perfectly well, Vallory; or if you don’t, you ought to. Crawford’s scamping these bridges shamelessly. He is scanting the ‘mix’, and also the reinforcing steel. I’ve caught him at it.”

“Why didn’t you complain to me?”

“What the devil good would it do? I’ve yelled at you people for everything, and you patch one hole only to leave another.”

“I suppose you have your orders to come here and take the direction of the work out of the hands of my man?”

“I have orders to see that you don’t pull any more bones on us, if I have to eat and sleep on the job to prevent it. And I’m like little old Casabianca, Vallory; I obey orders.”

“Who gave you the orders?”

“Lushing: he’s back now.”

“Don’t you know that he’s a damned crook, himself, Strayer?”

The square-jawed, bearded inspector laughed grimly.

“Set a thief to catch a thief, eh?” he grinned. “Between us two, Vallory, I haven’t much use for Lushing; none at all, personally. But he’s the boss.”

“Do you know where he is now?”

“Yes; he’s over at Powder Can: makes his headquarters in the Hophra House.”

“I take it you’re not particularly struck on standing over Crawford this way, day and night, are you?”

“Well, if you put it that way, I’m not. Crawford’s a good boy, and he means well. See here, Vallory, if you’ll give me your word that you’ll make the boy live up to the specifications on these bridges, I’ll do what I can to keep Lushing off of you. Is it a go?”

David was thoughtful for a moment, and then he said: “I’ll do better than that, Strayer. I’m needing another engineer to handle the tunnel approach work on the other side of the mountain. I know what the railroad company is paying you, and I’ll better the salary. This is straight goods. What do you say?”

The big man shook his head slowly.

“You oughtn’t to make a break like that at me, Vallory, and you know it. It’s too bald, and--well, dog-gone it all, I thought better of you!” The inspector turned and walked away with his head down and his hands in his pockets. David Vallory waited until he had passed the corner of the cement house, and then, at a signal from Crawford, he sprang upon the bridge stagings.

“We’re up against it,” said the bridge builder hastily; “that’s why I went after Plegg. We’ve reached the point where we’ve got to place the top span reinforcement, _and I haven’t got the steel_!”

“How is that?”

“It’s this way,” Crawford explained, still more hurriedly. “When we begun on this job, Plegg and I figured the plans over and he--that is, we concluded that it was simply wasting steel to put it in as thickly as the plans called for--why, the factor of safety was the whole cheese! So we agreed to cut the steel down. If you can’t get Strayer away from here for an hour or so, I’ll have to stop the run and take the risk of the concrete’s setting in the forms while we’re getting some more steel down here.”

A month earlier David Vallory would have known what to say, and would have said it, without garnishings. But now he merely nodded and walked down the runway and across to the cement house where Strayer was still pacing back and forth.

“This situation needs threshing out from the bottom up, Strayer,” he began crisply. “Suppose you get on the engine and go up to headquarters with me where we can fight it out to some sort of a conclusion. I’m tired of this business of scrapping with you fellows all the time.”

“I’m sorry, Vallory, but Lushing is the man you’ll have to talk to.”

“You’re his second, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but you know the rules; I don’t have anything to say when he is on the job.”

“Well, he isn’t on the job. He had a racket with a man over in Powder Can a couple of hours ago, and they tell me he’s knocked out for the present. That puts it up to you, again, doesn’t it?”

“Why, yes; I guess so--if he’s--how badly is he hurt?”

“I don’t know; pulled a gun on a man, and the man jumped him.”

Strayer shook his head.

“That’s bad; neither Mr. Ford nor Mr. Maxwell will stand for anything like that. Just between us two, Vallory, Lushing has always spent a lot of time in Powder Can--did it while he was with your people.”

“I know. But now that he’s out of it, temporarily, at least, why can’t we get together and straighten up some of the kinks? You know how exasperating it is for these fellows of mine to have somebody standing over them with a club all the time. Come on up to camp with me and we’ll hammer it out.”

Crawford had stopped his concrete mixer because he had to; no more concrete could be poured until the steel bars were placed. The crisis had come, and while Strayer hesitated, David Vallory, the new David, took the deep-water plunge into the stagnant pool of open trickery. Crawford’s men were bringing the scanted supply of steel bars, getting in each other’s way to kill time. David stepped over to the steel pile and counted the pieces.

“Say, Crawford!” he called out; “you haven’t got enough steel here! Heavens and earth, man! don’t you know any better than to run right up against a shortage like this?”

Crawford gasped twice, and then he understood. “Ding bust it, Mr. Vallory, I ought to be fired! Mr. Strayer, here, has been keeping me so busy that I haven’t looked at that steel pile. What are we going to do?”

“Do? You’ll just have to place what you’ve got, and hold your mixer until we can get some more down to you. I’ll go back to the yard and see that it’s hustled out. Come on, Strayer; let’s take a ride.”

The crisis was past and the big inspector climbed on the engine with the Grillage chief.

“I’ll take an hour off with you, Vallory, after I’ve seen that steel put on the car,” he laughed; and at a sign from David, the throttle was opened and the locomotive clattered away up the grade.

XXII

At Bridge Three

After the dash in the card-room at Black Jack Dargin’s place, and its immediate and transforming consequences, Silas Plegg, shrewd observer and most efficient of assistants, looked confidently for trouble, and went about prepared to stand by his chief when the trouble should materialize. It was during Lushing’s administration as the Grillage chief of construction that the Powder Can kennels had begun to flourish, and it had been broadly hinted that he had been a sharer in the profits. Rumor had it that he was still hand-in-glove with the kennel-keepers; and with such a lawless contingent at his command, the ex-chief became--at least in Plegg’s estimation--a man whose enmity was to be feared.

Besides keeping a brotherly watch over his chief, Plegg contrived to keep in touch with the Powder Can end of things. Lushing, he learned, had been laid up for a matter of two or three days as the result of the brief card-room battle, and he was still making his headquarters in the Powder Can tavern. Thus far he had not been visible on the work, though from the increased activities of his inspectors it was apparent that he was directing a searching campaign of investigation.

Vallory’s men were required to dig try-holes beside foundation walls of abutments and retaining masonry to prove that the foundations went deep enough. Test-borings were made in the fills to ascertain their density. The slopes of the hill cuttings were surveyed and re-surveyed to make sure that the angles agreed with the map notes. In one of the bridges, Strayer--this time with apologies to David Vallory--had holes drilled to verify the placing of the reinforcing steel. In uncounted ways the investigation was pushed; to the discomfort of all concerned--and also to the sharpening of the wits of those who had something to conceal.

Throughout this interval David Vallory gave an excellent imitation of a man hard at work, riding the line incessantly, encouraging, driving; plotting with his subordinates to outwit the inspectors, and keeping a vengeful eye out for Lushing. In due time it began to be whispered about that “the little big boss,” as he was affectionately called by the rank and file, not only “had it in” for Lushing, but that he had fairly bluffed the chief inspector off the job. It was known that he went armed; and on at least one occasion when he disappeared for an hour or so in Little Creek gorge, there was some one to report that he had spent the time practicing at a target with a “forty-five.”

Naturally, with so many working crises thickly bestudding the days, David had little time to climb the hill to the Inn; or, if he had the time, he seldom took it. Duty visits he paid, indeed, to his father and sister in the tree-sheltered cottage; but these were brief--crabbedly brief when Oswald chanced to be one of the cottage’s inmates. On all of these excursions he avoided the hotel, with morose offishness in the saddle. None the less, he now and then got a glimpse of Virginia--and chanced to see her always in company with one or both of the men upon whom the desirable moon--unattainable by those who cry for it--seemed now to be shining its brightest.

It was after one of these brief evening visits to the cottage under the pines that David found Plegg waiting for him at the foot of the ridge.

“Just to make sure you shouldn’t be taken off your guard,” said the first assistant; and without further preface: “Lushing is on his way up here with a bunch of men sworn in as deputies. Crawford has just ’phoned in from bridge Number One.”

“What’s the object?”

“Nobody seems to know, but I have a guess coming. Burford, the new transit-man working with Strayer, gave me a hint. He’s a soak, and yesterday, after he’d been hitting his pocket-bottle pretty freely, he let out a word or two about something sensational which was to follow this epidemic of inspection we’ve been having.”

“Didn’t describe it, did he?”

“No; he was so plainly ‘lit up’ that I didn’t pay much attention to him. But since, I’ve been piecing the odd bits together. This dead set that the railroad force has been making at us can have only one object--to get evidence of some sort against us that will hold in court.”

“Well?”

“I shouldn’t wonder if they have the evidence.”

“The tunnel?”

“No; that is safe, as yet, I believe. It is in the bridges. There is a certain specified penalty for jerry-building bridges that are to be used for human traffic, you know.”

“Bosh!” said David. “These little two-by-four spans we are throwing over the Powder River would carry anything you could pile upon them; you know they would, Plegg. And they’d do it if they didn’t have a single bar of steel in them.”

“Sure!” said Plegg, with a dry smile. “But we’d better be getting over to the car and the ’phone. If those temporary sheriffs are coming up here, we ought to know it.”

“Lushing won’t come,” David averred, as they walked together toward the bunk car office.

“Think not?”

“He’d better not.”

The service telephone was buzzing when they entered the car. Plegg picked up the receiver and held it to his ear. After a time, he said, “It’s Crawford again. He is at Number Three bridge now. The Lushing crowd had a break-down with their gasoline push-car, and Tommy skipped across the hill in the hair-pin curve and got to Number Three ahead of them. He says he talked to one of the men who came back to Number One to borrow a monkey-wrench. The man was foolish enough to let the cat out of the bag and brag about it. The bunch is coming up here to arrest you and Mr. Grillage. Crawford wants to know what he shall do with the few minutes he has at his disposal.”

David Vallory took three seconds for reflection.

“Tell him he has a brain of his own, and now is a good time to use it,” he said shortly. “And you may add that we’d like to buy a little delay if there is any in the market.”

Plegg repeated the message, rounding it out with a demand for a quick report as to results. The waiting interval was remarkably short. When the ’phone buzzed again, Plegg answered with a single word. “Shoot!” he said, and David, sitting in the opposite bunk, could hear the minified repetition of the reporting voice without being able to distinguish the words. Crawford was brief, as befitted a man of action; and when Plegg returned the receiver to its hook he was smiling grimly.

“You’ll have to hand it to Tommy for being able to make a hurry use of what little brain he may have,” he commented. “He slipped a stick of dynamite into the stone bin at Number Three, and now he says there are about forty tons of crushed rock spilled on the track for the gasoline car to climb over. And the car is not yet in sight.”

“That is better,” said David coolly. “They’ll get around the obstruction, no doubt, but it will hold them for a little while. Now for our part of it. You once remarked that the law doesn’t reach this far from the nearest court-house. We don’t know, officially, that these men are coming as officers, and we’ll act upon that ignorance. You go over to the bunk shacks and turn out a handful of Brady’s day-shift men. Tell them to bring pick-handles. Then go to the light plant and tell the night engineer to listen for a pistol shot. If he hears one, he is to pull the switch on the yard circuit and leave us in the dark.”

“So that the Lushing crowd won’t be able to identify any of us?”

“So that we shan’t be able to identify them--as officers.”

“Once more I’m apologizing to you,” said Plegg, in mild irony. “Anything else?”

“Nothing, except that you are to pick your men, and let it be understood that the raiders are after Mr. Grillage and me. If you pick the right men, they’ll fight for that. I’ll run over to the _Athenia_ and get Mr. Grillage out of the way. I don’t want to have him mixed up in this, even by implication.”

As Plegg went one way, David went the other, hurrying across to the private Pullman, which he knew was occupied because it was lighted. When he pushed through the vestibule swing-door he found the contractor-king poring over an estimate sheet. Taken for an instant off his guard, the big man looked haggard and care-worn. It was this that made David begin with a sober protest.

“You put in too many hours down here, Mr. Grillage,” he said, much as he might have said it to his own father. “How about that fishing trip you were going to take with Dad?”

“We’re going, pretty soon, now,” was the gruff reply. And then: “David, you’re right; I’ve got too darned many irons in the fire, and some of ’em get too hot, and some of ’em freeze. Hurry up and get through with this Short Line crucifixion, so you can take hold and blow some of the other bellowses for me.”

“‘Crucifixion’ is right!” said David, with a workmanlike scowl. “I haven’t worried you much about the job lately, but the railroad people--with Lushing egging them on, of course--have been mighty active for the past few days--perniciously active, I’d say. I didn’t know what was up until just now; though I’ve been ready for anything. It seems they’ve been trying to find a peg upon which to hang a legal fight, and they think they’ve found it--just what sort of a peg, I don’t know.”

“Legal, you say; do you mean criminal?”

“Plegg thinks it may be; based on alleged jerry-work on the bridges, or something of that sort. Anyhow, Lushing is on his way up here with a gang of subsidized deputies, and Crawford telephones that the object of the raid is to arrest you and me.”

“Huh!” grunted the giant, straightening himself in his chair. “Going to try that, is he?”

“So Crawford says. I came to ask you to go up to the hotel and let me handle it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Some few days ago I met Lushing and we had a--er--well, a little disagreement, you might call it. He----”

“I heard about it,” interrupted the boss of bosses, with a satisfied grin. “You beat him up and warned him to stay off the job if he wanted to keep his hide whole. I owe you something for that, David; it did me a whole lot of good. But go on.”

“Plegg’s getting a few of Brady’s Irishmen together, and we’ll take care of these raiders. We don’t know, in any legal way, that they are deputies, and we shall act accordingly. What I need is to get you out of it; so far out that you won’t know anything about it, if any one should ask you after the fact.”

Eben Grillage gripped the edge of his desk with both hands and pulled himself out of his chair. David marked the forced muscle-strain that went into the effort, and immediately saw a curious change come over the massive face with its staring eyes and hanging, dewlap jaws.

“Run away from a fight, David? I guess--it would be the--first----”

David leaped, and was in time to ease the big body back into the swing-chair before it could crumple and fall. For a few seconds Eben Grillage sat motionless, purple-faced and gasping. Then he reached into a desk drawer, found some tablets in a druggist’s box, and swallowed one. The effect was almost instantaneous.

“It’s all right, now, David,” he mumbled, a bit thickly; “just a little spell. But it’s telling me that my fighting days are over, I guess. Lucky I’ve got you, my boy. Stick me up on the hill path, and I’ll keep out of your way and give you a free hand.”

David did more than was required. Precious as time might be, he went all the way to the Inn with his charge, and at the leave-taking laid filial commands upon the man whose right to command him he had never questioned.

“This settles it, Mr. Grillage,” he protested warmly. “To-morrow you’ll take Dad and your fishing tackle and get out of here--go away and stay away until we get this railroad snarl straightened out. Go on in, now, and go to bed. Plegg and I will do the needful.”

With this parting injunction he fled down the ridge path and took command of the little group of huskies that Plegg had assembled beside the bunk car.

“Any more news?” he demanded; and Plegg answered.

“Another ’phone from Crawford. He is blockaded in the Number Three bridge office shack, but he got a bit of talk through before they cut his ’phone wire. Lushing has taken our night shift off the bridge and set it at work shoveling the crushed stone off the track. Tommy says they will be able to get through with their gas-car within the next few minutes.”

“Good. We won’t wait for them,” said David quickly. “Get that engine up there at the coal chute, and couple an empty flat-car ahead of it, and another behind it. Hurry!”

The order was carried out briskly, and when the oddly made up train slowed to a stand beside the bunk car, the pick-handle squad climbed upon the rearward car, and the chief and his first assistant sprang into the engine cab. “Down the line!” was David’s order to the engine-driver, and the train moved off, gathering such momentum as the roughly surfaced construction track permitted.

In the make-up of the train the engine was backing, with an empty flat-car for its pilot. Being a construction machine, the locomotive had a headlight at either end. With the yard switches left behind, David reached up, uncoiled the short signal-bell cord, and shouted into the ear of the big Irishman at the throttle. “Listen, Callahan: I’m going up on the coal to keep a lookout and flag for you. If I give you one bell, clamp your brakes and make an emergency stop; if I give you two bells, let her have all she will take. Understand?”

The Irishman nodded; and David, with Plegg at his heels, climbed over the coal to a lookout position on the rear end of the tender. By this time the scenery, or so much of it as the starlight revealed, was unreeling itself rapidly on either hand, and in the beam of the tender-carried headlight the straight-away stretches of the track rushed up in quick succession to be shot to the rear under the roaring wheels. “Lord!” yelped Plegg; “if we should meet ’em on a curve!----” but David Vallory made no reply. He was gripping the bell-cord and staring steadily down the track ahead, following the double line of rails to the farthest reach of the spreading cone of light.

As it chanced, the meeting point with the gasoline-driven push-car was not on a curve. On the mile-long tangent which marked the approach to bridge Number Three the converging lines of the rails in the distance met in a dark blot; a moving blot that shot quickly into the glare of the headlight. Plegg saw a series of black dots tumbling grotesquely from the blot to right and left, heard a sharp double clang of the signal in the cab behind him, and felt the sudden lurch of the tender as the engine’s throttle was opened. “_Duck!_” was the command shouted in his ear, and the next instant there was a crash and the air was filled with flying wreckage.

Luckily, no wheel of the attacking train was derailed, and a minute or so later, Callahan, in obedience to a signal from his chief, was braking the heavy “mogul” to a stop beside Crawford’s dynamited rock pile. The place was light with flares, the concrete-pouring on the bridge had been resumed, and Crawford came down the staging runway with a broad grin on his boyish face.

“I saw a little of it from the far end of the staging,” he chuckled. “How many of ’em did you get?”

“Not any of them, I hope,” said David Vallory soberly, as he swung down from the engine step. “It was meant for an object-lesson--not a murder. Now talk fast, Crawford: how many of them are there, and who are they?--besides Lushing?”

“Seven in all, besides the boss-devil; and they looked to me like Brewster toughs, or hold-up men, or something of that sort.”

“Armed?”

“Sure!--one of ’em ran me off the staging with a gun.”

“Brewster toughs, you say?--are you sure they are not Powder Can toughs? Lushing would have to take them to Brewster to have them sworn in as deputies--which would account for their coming from down the line.”

“By George--that’s so! I did see a bunch of plug-uglies going down on the stub train yesterday, come to think of it.”

David Vallory turned upon Plegg. “There you are,” he said. And then to Crawford: “We are going back to headquarters now, and maybe they’ll give us a scrap as we go by, and maybe they won’t. If they don’t show up for us, they may come down here and make trouble for you. How about that?”

“I’ll take my chances,” returned the bridge expert cheerfully. “I have my old pump-gun now; it was in the office shack, and I didn’t have sense enough to go and get it before they came up and fell on me. I’ll stand ’em off, all right, if they try to stop the job again.”

“You said one of them came to you at Number One to borrow a monkey-wrench: what did he say?”

“He was just joshing me a few lines while I was looking for the wrench; said I wouldn’t have any bosses to-morrow, because they’d both be in jail. I asked him who he meant by ‘both’, and he said, ‘the big one and the little one.’ I took that to mean you and Mr. Grillage.”

“You probably guessed right; but the man was a liar. We are not going to jail--any of us. And before I forget it: you’ve done a good job to-night, Crawford, and I shall see to it that you get credit where it will do you the most good.”

“I don’t need any credit; it’s all in the day’s work,” laughed the cheerful bridge builder; then, as his chief was turning to climb into Callahan’s cab: “Oh, say--I meant to ask you: have you seen Lushing since you--er--since he went into retirement a few days ago? He’s a plumb sight! You broke his nose; turned it around so it points east when he’s going north. Gee! but he looks fierce!”

“It ought to have been his neck,” was the brittle rejoinder, and then the double-ended train pulled out for the return.

There was no demonstration at the point where the abandoned gasoline car had been demolished, though David had the train stopped and got off with his pick-handle squad to beat the covers. The straight piece of track was on the river bank, with a wooded hill on the left from which a few determined snipers might have wrought havoc with the beaters, but no man was found and no shot was fired.

Plegg spoke of the probabilities as the train proceeded up the valley.

“We are through with them for to-night,” was his prediction. “It is eight miles to Powder Can or the Gap, and only four to Agorda. They’ll go east instead of west.”