Chapter VIII: Part 8

“Yes,” David agreed; “now that they know they can’t bluff us. That is what I meant to do; turn the bluff the other way around. I guess we did it.”

The first assistant, isolated in his seat on the fireman’s box, held his peace until the train came to the end of its run in the headquarters yard. But on the way over to the bunk car with his chief, he had a word to add, and added it.

“Now that Crawford has dumped the wheel-barrow and spilled all the garden truck, I can speak of a thing we’ve all known since the story of your manhandling of Lushing drifted into camp. Lushing is peacock-vain; no stage-door johnnie was ever more so. Even when he was here on the work he kept his mustaches curled, his beard trimmed to a hair, and his clothes looking as if he had just stepped out of a tailor’s shop. You’ve spoiled his beauty for all time, and he’d draw and quarter you for it if he could.”

“As a matter of fact, I hit him only once; it was all the chance I had before his gun went off. But I don’t care what I’ve done to his face, Plegg. As I remarked to Crawford, I’m only sorry I didn’t break his neck.”

“Perhaps it would have been safer if you had,” was the quiet suggestion. “As it is, he’ll never forgive you, and he won’t be satisfied with any light revenge. Which brings on more talk. I have a notion that this ‘arrest’ business to-night was pure bunk. I don’t doubt that Lushing had gone through all the forms and had sworn out the warrants. Doubtless, he was going to make a bluff at serving them. But, Vallory, I’ll bet a little round gold dollar with a hole in it that the real play was to make you put up a fight so that you might righteously be killed in resisting an officer of the law.”

Again David said, “I don’t care,” and Plegg went on calmly. “If that is the play, we’ll have to take measures accordingly. You mustn’t run around on the job unless I’m with you. If you will pardon me for saying it, you are not quite quick enough on the draw, as yet; and you haven’t learned to hold the other fellow’s eye while you’re doing it. That is about all the difference there is between living and dying when it comes to a show-down, you know.”

They had boarded the bunk car and were preparing to turn in. David looked up from the boot-unlacing and his eyes were bloodshot.

“Damn your grannying!” he flared out savagely. “When I need a wet nurse I’ll advertise for one!”

A few seconds later he looked up again, to find Plegg chuckling softly.

“What the devil are you laughing at?” he snapped.

The chuckle expanded into the first assistant’s slow, half-cynical smile. “And once, not so many months ago, I was idiotic enough to cherish the notion that you might be too good!” he exclaimed, in mock self-derision. And with that, he rolled himself in his blankets and turned his face from the light.

XXIII

The Killer

On the morning following the raid which had failed to connect, Eben Grillage carried out his promise to side-track business and go a-fishing. David made the necessary arrangements, stocking the _Athenia’s_ larder with provisions from the camp commissary, borrowing a tent and camping outfit from one of the grade subcontractors, and otherwise bestirring himself to expedite the departure of the anglers.

With the _Athenia_ out of its berth and safely on its way to some unannounced destination in the upper Timanyoni, a handicap of a sort was removed; a handicap and a restriction. As David phrased it for Plegg, he had gotten two non-combatants out of the range of the guns and the field was now clear for whatever battle of reprisals might be threatening.

Of the restriction removed he said nothing to Plegg or to any one. There be certain secret curtains of the heart which are not to be drawn aside for alien eyes to view what may lie behind them; and as yet, not even to himself would David admit that he was no longer able to see eye to eye with his father. None the less, it was with a distinct sense of relief that he waved good-by to the pair standing on the rear platform of the private Pullman as Callahan’s “mogul” snaked it out through the yard to make a flying-switch coupling with the outgoing stub train.

It was on this same morning that Plegg reported for the third time his inability to find the man Backus, and the report was made while he and Vallory were climbing the mountain on their way to make an inspecting tour of the western slope activities, including the tunnel drift which was slowly gnawing its way to meet Regnier’s bore from the eastward.

“I’ve had a dozen ‘trusties’ looking for him and they have combed Powder Can and every other mining-camp in a ten-mile radius,” was Plegg’s summing-up of the search. “He has disappeared as completely as if the earth had swallowed him.”

“If we could only be sure that the earth _has_ swallowed him,” growled the one for whom the restrictions had been removed. “But there is another fork to that road, Plegg. Maybe Lushing has him hidden out somewhere. Had you thought of that?”

“Yes; that seemed to be the most reasonable explanation of his disappearance. But in a very short time I discovered that Lushing was also looking for him.”

“You are sure of that?”

“Quite sure. I have it from a number of different sources. He has even gone so far as to offer a reward--not publicly, of course, but the word has been passed among our workmen.”

“Which means that Lushing knows Backus has something to sell. We mustn’t let Lushing beat us to it, Plegg. You haven’t stopped your investigating machine, have you?”

“Not at all. I have even gone Lushing one better and raised his bet on the reward--though you didn’t authorize me to spend any real money.”

“You did right; and I’ll see to it that the money is forthcoming when it is needed.”

Here the matter rested for the time, and the two men spent the entire day on the western slope, tramping over the work on the desert cut-off, visiting the sub-headquarters in Lost Creek basin, and taking the lost motion out of the job wherever it was found. Cartwright, the sub-chief in general charge of the over-mountain work, was making good progress, though he, too, complained bitterly of the obstructing activities of the railroad inspection staff. Lushing, as it appeared, had not yet been over the range since his return from the East, and Cartwright, a nervous little man with a harsh voice and a choleric eye, was explosively profane when he was told the story of the raid that failed.

“Some of us will have to ‘get’ that beggar yet, Vallory!” he rasped. “It’s gone a long way past any business vigilance on his part; he is simply a vindictive scoundrel, and he is making a personal fight upon the entire Grillage outfit. If he shows up on this side of the range, he’d better bring a bodyguard with him; that’s all I’ve got to say!”

On the return from the desert inspection, David and his first assistant had supper at Cartwright’s headquarters on Lost Creek, and afterward crossed the mountain by starlight. Plegg dropped out of the procession of two on the descent to the eastern tunnel entrance, ostensibly to see how Regnier was getting along, but really because the dangerous roof drew him with a mysterious fascination that was always making him go out of his way to take another look at it.

David Vallory kept on down the mountain alone, and in due time, with a number of brief pauses at the various working points, tramped into the Powder Gap yard at an hour not far from midnight. Learning from the yard boss that there had been no new developments during the day, he went across to the bunk car and let himself in. There was a fragrance of good tobacco smoke in the darkened interior, and as he struck a light he was wondering what member of the staff had been making free with Plegg’s carefully hoarded store of “perfectos.”

It was not until after he had snapped the lamp chimney into place, and was turning the wick to its proper height, that he had a shock that sent his hand quickly to the grip of the weapon slung by its shoulder-strap under his coat. Sitting quietly on Plegg’s bunk, and still smoking the cigar which had perfumed the stuffy interior of the little car, was the swarthy, cold-eyed master gambler of Powder Can.

Dargin was the first to break the surcharged silence.

“Been waiting for you,” he said shortly; and then: “You needn’t be feelin’ for that gun. If I’d wanted to croak you, you’d ’ve been dead a whole half-minute ago.”

David Vallory sat down on his own bed, the shock spasm subsiding a little.

“I hope I haven’t kept you waiting very long,” he ventured, not too inhospitably.

“About a half-hour. But I had some smokes in my poke, and the waiting didn’t cut any ice.”

Hastily David passed in review the various reasons why Dargin should come thus to lie in wait for him. There were two and possibly three; all of them warlike if Dargin chose to hold them so: the attempt to abate the man-traps, the attempt to persuade Judith Fallon to leave Powder Can, and for the third, the assumption that Dargin was in a partnership of some sort with Lushing. In the new recklessness which had come to him with the other transformations, he attacked the reasons boldly in their order.

“You’ve got a kick coming, Dargin, if you want to make it,” he began brusquely. “I’m out to wipe your Powder Can speak-easys off the map if I can swing the big stick hard enough.”

“I was onto that a month ago,” was the growling answer. Then, after a deep pull at the fragrant cigar: “I reckon they ought to be wiped out--though that ain’t sayin’ that I wouldn’t take a crack at the man that did it when it came to a show-down.”

“If you think the place ought to be cleaned up, why don’t you do it yourself?” David shot back.

“Huh! Maybe I will, some day--if you don’t beat me to it.”

“But if I should beat you to it, I suppose you’ll come after me with a gun. Is that the way of it?”

The shadow that flitted across the swarthy face of the man on the opposite bunk was scarcely a smile, though possibly it was intended for one.

“I might; but it’d be a heap like takin’ candy from a baby. You ain’t been carryin’ a gun long enough to get the hang of it. You’re a whole lot too slow to make it interestin’.”

“All right,” said David; “we’ll pass that up. The next thing may get a bit nearer to you. Judith Fallon has doubtless told you that she knew me back East, and that we went to school together and were good friends?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But perhaps she hasn’t told you that I have tried to persuade her to break off with you and leave Powder Can?”

“No; she ain’t told me anything like that.”

“Well, it’s so; I did it.”

“What for?”

“For common decency’s sake. If you admit that the mining-camp dives ought to be wiped out, you’ll also have to admit the facts concerning that girl. I know you’ve been befriending her honestly--the only mistake you made was in not putting a bullet through Tom Judson before you turned him loose--but you must know that a man of your stripe can’t befriend any woman without making her pay the penalty.”

“A man of my stripe, eh?--well, I reckon that’s so, too.”

“Then you are not here to pick a quarrel with me over Judith?”

“Hell, no; not in a thousand years!”

“Then what did you come for? Did Lushing send you?”

“Jim Lushing? He can’t send me nowhere. He ain’t got the insides.”

David Vallory had reached the end of his resources. There was apparently nothing for it but to wait patiently until Dargin was ready to disclose the object of the midnight visit; and he seemed to be in no manner of haste.

David unbuckled his uncomfortable weapon and tossed it aside. “I can’t think of any other grouch that you might have,” he said, with the nearest approach to his former good-natured smile that he had been able to achieve since the moon of Virginia Grillage’s favor had gone into eclipse for him. Then he dug into Plegg’s locker and brought out the first assistant’s cherished box of “perfectos.” “Your smoke is about used up; have another,” he offered.

Dargin helped himself, and took the lighted match that David held out to him. Then the flitting shadow that passed for a smile began at the corners of the hard-bitted mouth and crept slowly up to the murderous eyes.

“I’m stuck on your nerve, Dave Vallory--damned if I ain’t!” he grated. “If you could only draw a fraction quicker and shoot as plumb straight as you can talk, you’d be some man. Now I’ll spill what I mogged over here to spill: ever hear of a duck named Backus?--Simmy Backus?”

“Yes,” said David.

“Well, he used to pipe off the easy marks for me--same time he was working for you-all.”

“I know.”

“You lose him, and you’ve been lookin’ for him, ain’t you?”

“Right, again.”

“Uh-huh; I thought so. Know why you couldn’t find him?”

“No.”

“Well, I can tell you, I reckon. I had him hid out.”

“Hid out? locked up, you mean? Why did you do that?”

“Because he’s a worm. He was aimin’ to give you the double-cross: tried to sell me a chance on it. I didn’t hate you-all bad enough to let him run loose; see?”

“Is that straight, Dargin?”

“Straight as a string.”

“But they tell me that you and Lushing have a stand-in together; and Lushing hates us heartily enough.”

“Maybe so; and maybe we have got a stand-in. But that ain’t no skin off’m this other thing. Backus is a worm.”

“I’m glad you don’t like worms. I have a feeling that way, myself.”

The master gambler got up and pushed his soft hat back to allow the forelock of Indian-black hair to fall over his brow. As he was moving to the door, he said, “Reckon that’s about all I had to spill--all but one little thing: that damn’ worm’s done dug him a hole and crawled out. Thought maybe you’d like to know. So long,” and he was gone.

For a long time after he was left alone, David Vallory sat on the edge of his bed, buried in thought. With the spy, Backus, at large, it was only a question of time when Lushing would have another weapon in his hands. In odd moments David had made an estimate on the cost of shooting down the menace in the eastern tunnel drifting and concreting the gash which would be left by the blasting out of the fissure material. The figures were appalling. Not only would the profits on the entire contract be likely to disappear in the chasm; there was a chance that there would be a huge loss, as well, since nobody could tell how much of the fissure contents would come down in the blasting. As Eben Grillage had frankly confessed, the line-shortening job had been taken on a narrow margin, and there had been no provision made for untoward happenings.

There was but one conclusion to be reached, and by this time David Vallory had passed all the mile-stones of hesitancy. Backus, the worm, must be found and silenced, and there must be no fumbling delay in either half of the undertaking.

XXIV

No Thoroughfare

At the departure of the two fishermen, Virginia Grillage had taken Lucille Vallory under her wing, closing the cottage under the pines and taking the blind girl to the hotel. This left Oswald more or less unattached. Since there was no welcome for him at the foot of the ridge, and David had not even taken the trouble to introduce him to the members of the engineering staff, he spent the greater part of his time at the Inn, devoting himself, so far as Miss Grillage would permit it, to the care and comfort of the helpless one, and taking his meals in due submission at a table with Miss Virginia and her charge, the Englishman, and the heir of profitable breakfast-foods.

Beneath these routine time-killings, days in which nothing transpired to break the monotonous round of eating and sleeping and lounging upon the shaded porches of the Inn, Oswald fancied he could feel the tension of an approaching crisis. To a keen-eyed young lawyer whose profession led logically to a study of the human problem in all its phases, the premonitory signs emphasized themselves. Miss Virginia, apparently engrossed in her favorite pastime of playing off one man against another, struck a false note now and then; young Wishart was occasionally jogged out of his customary rut of good-natured indolence; and even the imperturbable Englishman was losing the fine edge of a carefully cultivated Old-World indifference to his surroundings.

Notwithstanding these indications, it was Lucille Vallory who first put the impending threat into words, confiding in Oswald one evening when Virginia Grillage had gone for a stroll along the ridge accompanied by her two shadows.

“What is it, Herbert?” the blind girl asked; “what is happening to us all?”

“What should be happening?” he evaded. “Aren’t you enjoying yourself?”

“You know what I mean,” she insisted. “Nothing is the same any more; I can feel it. You are troubled about something, and so is Virginia. No, it isn’t anything that either of you say; it’s just how you feel inside. And Davie; he is different, too--so cruelly different. Is it because he is worried about his work?”

Oswald said what there was to be said, doing violence to his own convictions in an effort to shield the loved one. There was nothing for anybody to be troubled about, he told her; and David--she must remember that David was now at the head of an immense undertaking and was carrying a heavy load of responsibility. She was silenced, but he could see that his well-meant effort had been thrown away.

This happened on an evening when the two fishermen had been three days in the wilds of the upper Timanyoni. On the next morning the monotonies were broken. Little gossip of the big job penetrated to the Alta Vista, the summerers, as a rule, being content to hold the great engineering feat as a part of the scenic stage-effect for which they paid in their hotel bills. But on the morning in question, when Cumberleigh had joined a sunrise peak-climbing party, and Wishart was not yet out of bed, there was news of a small catastrophe. Oswald had the story from one of the Alta Vista clerks as he was getting his morning mail. Some time during the night an accident had happened in the big tunnel. In one of the blasts a man had been blown up and desperately hurt. A Brewster doctor had been telegraphed for and was coming up on a special train.

Oswald was interested only casually, and he saw no special significance in the added word particularizing the injured man as one of the railroad company’s inspectors. As he was crossing the lobby he met Miss Virginia. Though she was apparently just down from her rooms and on her way to breakfast, her first word was of the tragedy, or near-tragedy, in the tunnel.

“You have heard of the accident to Mr. Strayer?” she asked hurriedly. And then: “Have you seen David this morning?”

Oswald answered both queries in a single sentence.

“Yes, I’ve heard of the accident--the clerk was just this minute telling me about it: and I haven’t seen David.”

Miss Virginia was plainly anxious and disturbed She hesitated for a moment, a little frown coming and going between the straight-browed eyes, and Oswald noted that she was nervously twisting a bit of paper between her fingers. “I must see David--at once,” she said, half as if she were thinking aloud. “May I ask you to go and tell him so, Herbert?”

Since Virginia had shown herself more than friendly in his own trying involvement, Oswald consented willingly.

“I’ll find him for you,” he promised; and a minute later he was on his way down to the construction yard.

It so happened that he had to go no farther than to the office bunk car. The door was open and he went in. David Vallory was sitting behind the small mapping-table, checking dimensions on a set of blue-prints. At the sound of Oswald’s footsteps he looked up with a scowl of impatience, and his greeting was a challenge.

“Oh, it’s you, is it? I’ve been thinking it was about time you were showing up. When do you start back to Middleboro?”

Oswald ignored the ungracious demand and said what he had been sent to say.

“Miss Virginia is at the hotel, and she wishes to see you.”

“What for?”

“I didn’t inquire. She asked me to find you and deliver her message. I have done both.”

“I can’t go just now; I’m, busy.”

“Then I’ll wait for you,” said Oswald coolly, and he sat down on Plegg’s bunk, found a cigarette in his pocket case and lighted it.

In sheer perversity, as it seemed to the young lawyer, David went on shuffling the blue-prints and making figures on a pad under his hand. Oswald waited in silence and in due time had his reward.

“Be half-way decent about it, Bert, and tell me what I’m wanted for,” said the figure-maker, looking up suddenly from his work. “She has Cumberleigh and Wishart; aren’t they enough?”

Oswald’s smile was a palpable easing of strains. If David’s malady were nothing worse than a fit of jealousy, it was not necessarily incurable.

“I was wondering, before I came out here, what Vinnie might be doing to you,” he said. “You wrote us that she and her father were here, if you remember.”

“What she did to me was done more than a year ago, if you care to know. But you haven’t answered my question. What does she want of me this morning?”

“Honestly, I don’t know, David.”

“Where did you see her?”

“In the hotel lobby; she was on her way to the breakfast-room, I think.”

“And the other two?”

“Cumberleigh has gone to climb Qojogo with a sunrise party, and Wishart hasn’t turned out yet. Half of the time he is never visible before noon.”

“What did she say?”

“She asked first if I had heard of the accident in the tunnel last night.”

Once more David Vallory bent over the table and busied himself with the figure-making.

“You’ve heard of it, I suppose?” he offered, without looking up.

“Only in passing. The hotel clerk told me that a man was hurt; in one of the blasts, I think he said.”

David pushed his work aside as one who faces the guns only because he must. “Let’s go,” he consented shortly; and together they walked through the yard and climbed the ridge.

Miss Virginia was waiting on one of the porches when the pair crossed the painfully cared-for bit of greensward in front of the Inn. Oswald, telling himself that he had done his part, went on through to the breakfast-room, leaving David to fight his battle--if there were to be a battle--alone. The young woman’s first question was as direct as it was unexpected.

“Why have you been avoiding me so persistently?” she asked, making room for the summoned one to sit beside her on the settee.

“Perhaps it was because I had just sense enough to see that I had served my turn and wasn’t needed any more,” he answered in a tone that might have been copied faithfully from the king of the contractors in his most brittle mood.

“Silly!” she chided, with a strained little laugh. “I could forgive you for saying such a thing as that if you were only sincere. It isn’t Cumberleigh and Freddy Wishart, David; it’s yourself.”

“You wrote and told them where you were,” he accused.

“As it happens, I did not. But you needn’t try to hide behind a shadow--or two shadows. You have had other reasons for avoiding me. For one thing, you have met Mr. Lushing, and you have quarreled with him.”

“Everybody seems to know that,” he complained. “Go on.”

“For another thing, you have determined, in spite of all that we have talked about, to fight Mr. Lushing with his own weapons.”

This seemed to be too accurate to be classed with the shrewd guesses, and he accused her again.

“You’ve been prying into Plegg.”

“I haven’t seen Mr. Plegg in weeks; I haven’t been prying into any one, and I haven’t needed to. You have been showing very plainly that you have broken with the ideals--all of them. Why couldn’t you stay up on the pedestal, David? It was such a nice pedestal!”

He laughed mirthlessly. “You are such a queer mixture of good, hard sense and back-number romanticism,” he commented. “Can’t you realize that I’ve got to be a man among men?”

“That is what you ought to be--in the other and better meaning of the phrase. You won’t make a very successful villain, David.”

“Perhaps not; but I shall try mighty hard not to let the other man make a wooden Indian of me,” he returned grimly.

“And you haven’t stopped, even at--murder.” She shuddered over the final word, but she would not qualify it.

He was regarding her through half-closed eyes. “Having said that much, you ought to say more, don’t you think?” he suggested.

“I am going to say more; lots more. That man in the tunnel last night: he wasn’t blown up by a blast.”

“How do you know he wasn’t?”

“One of your men carried or dragged him half-way to the mouth of the tunnel before the blast was fired.”

“Well?” he prompted.

“It comes to this; either it was a sheer accident--a stone falling from the roof--or there was foul play. Mr. Lushing says it was foul play.”

“Lushing? You don’t mean to say that he has had the brazen effrontery to come to you!”

“No; he didn’t come here. He sent me a note; an unsigned note, because he is a coward. He did it once before, when he was dis--when he left the Grillage Company. He says you will be tried for murder if the man dies, and he throws it in my face.”

David got upon his feet rather unsteadily, but the unsteadiness was of rage.

“There wasn’t any murder last night, but there is going to be one when I can find this man who writes anonymous letters to you!” he broke out.

“No; sit down again, please. I am not nearly through. It makes very little difference what Mr. Lushing, or anybody else, may write or say to me, David; but there are other things that do make a world of difference. What special thing is there in that tunnel that you don’t want Mr. Lushing or his engineers to find out?”

He stared at her gloomily. “If you were your father’s son instead of his daughter, I might tell you.”

“You will tell me anyhow,” she declared quickly. “If you don’t, I shall find out for myself.”

“I believe you are quite capable of it. But there is nothing to be told more than I have already told you. You may remember that I admitted that there was a place in the tunnel that may be called dangerous. If Lushing finds out about it, he will immediately insist that it is dangerous, and the railroad people will make us spend a lot of money needlessly. Your father didn’t put me here to bankrupt the Grillage Engineering Company, Vinnie.”

She ignored the clause in condonation.

“So, accordingly, you have given orders to our men to have an accident happen if the secret seems likely to be discovered. This is simply horrible, David!”

“It is rather primitive, I’ll admit. But it’s business--in the modern meaning of the word. More than that, I owe it to your father.”

“You don’t owe him _anything_ that ought to be paid with such a frightful price! What ought to be done with that place in the tunnel? What would be done if you were not blind to everything but profit and loss?”

David shrugged his shoulders and turned his face away. “I suppose the bad piece of roof would be shot down.”

“And you are deliberately allowing it to stay up--if it will--and endangering the lives of your workmen every hour of the day and night?”

“Hard-rock men always take a chance. It is a part of their trade. And Regnier, or some other member of the staff, is always there to take it with them.”

“You are hopeless--absolutely and utterly hopeless, David! Don’t you see what you are forcing me to do?”

“No.”

“I have some little conscience, if you haven’t. I can’t say anything to Mr. Lushing, of course, and I wouldn’t if I could. But I can write to Mr. Maxwell, the general manager of the railroad at Brewster. It so happens that I know him, and his wife.”

“Hold on; you wouldn’t do anything like that! Think a minute of the position in which it would place your father.”

She shook her head despairingly.

“You drive me into a corner and then beat me!” she cried. “It is all wrong, wrong! And you have broken my heart, David, because I thought you were different. You lay this horrible burden upon me one minute, and tie my hands the next. What if this man who was hurt last night should die?”

“He won’t die; but neither will he talk,” was the gritting reply.

The young woman had risen and her color was coming and going in hot little flashes.

“You think because I am my father’s daughter you are safe in saying anything you please, and in going on in any hard-hearted way you choose! It is what I might have expected of a man who would deny his only sister her one little chance of happiness. You are worse than other men, because you know the right way and you won’t walk in it!”

He sprang up suddenly and caught her hands in both of his.

“You are right, Vinnie; I do know better. Every word you have been saying has cut like a knife!” he burst out, smashing all the barriers of insincerity at a single blow. “I know where I stand, and what I’ve been doing, and I have been a conscious hypocrite every time I have pleaded the way of the world as my excuse. But a man _must_ be loyal to something. For the obligation, the immense obligation, I owe your father. I have put my hands between his knees as the old-time vassals used to do, and sworn to make his cause my cause. He knows about that bad tunnel roof; knows more than I do; and when I spoke to him, he told me to forget it. I can’t be disloyal to him--and keep even a thief’s sense of honor!”

She released her hands quickly. It was early for any of the porch loungers to be out, but they were standing fairly in front of the lobby windows.

“That is better; much better,” she commended with a little sigh. “I thought you were gone, David; honestly, I was afraid that the good old David I used to know and--and think a lot of--was dead and buried--and it hurt me as much as it would if you had been my own brother. Now, if I could only forget what happened last night----”

“You may set your mind at rest about Strayer,” he put in quickly. “He won’t die; and he wasn’t assaulted, as you seem to think he was, though I won’t say what might or might not have happened in another minute or two. He was testing the bad roof with the point of an iron bar, and a loose rock came down upon his head.”

“But now you will pull the roof down, or timber it, or do whatever is needful to make it safe?” she said, half pleading with him.

“No; my hands are tied, too. I can’t saddle the company with the added expense after your father has told me in so many words to let it alone. Neither must I let Lushing find out and force it upon him if I can help it. We must just trust to luck, Vinnie; there is no help for it.”

“There is going to be help for it,” she asserted, with true Grillage resolution. Then: “One more word before you go, David: you won’t fi--quarrel with Mr. Lushing again?”

But at this his eyes grew hard. “I owe him something more, now, for that anonymous letter. Besides, he’s out for my scalp, personally, and I shall certainly try to hold up my end if he starts anything. You can’t blame me for that, Vinnie. But that is a future. There is Wishart coming out of the breakfast-room, and I suppose he is looking for you. Anyway, my job is yelling for me and I must go. Don’t you worry a single minute about anything; do you hear?”

“Not even about Herbert and Lucille?” she threw in quickly, as one thrusts an antagonist who is helplessly off his guard.

“Oh, say; that isn’t fair!” he retorted, with a frown that turned itself into a grin in spite of the reluctances. “I’m right about Bert and the little sister--I’m practically certain I am; but you’ve got me going, and you know it. Do whatever you think is best. Good-by.”

What Miss Virginia thought was best was not to stay and meet the short-sighted heir of the breakfast-foods who was rambling aimlessly in her direction. Instead, she went into the lobby and sent a telegram. It was addressed to her father at Red Butte, and it was short and to the point:

“Highly important that you return at once.

“V.”

XXV

Cataclysmic

Notwithstanding his chief’s angry assertion that he did not need safeguarding, Silas Plegg had contrived to keep track of the goings and comings of “the little big boss” on the job, and his vigilance was increased after the near-tragedy in the tunnel. The gossip of the camps made much of the little war which had developed between the Grillage Company’s chief and Lushing, and it was quickly passed from lip to lip that the enmity between the two men had now become actively and vindictively personal; had, in the phrase of the unfettered desert country, reached the stage in which each was “looking” for the other with vengeful intent. In spite of the assertion, often repeated and as often contradicted, that Strayer’s injury was purely the result of an unlucky accident, there were many to speak of it with an eyelid drooped, and to intimate that Lushing would go far to even up the account with David Vallory, an account which carried its largest debit item in the blow which had disfigured him.

For Plegg there was a small lessening of one of the many stresses when David, on the day after the accident, had modified the order given in the battle night when he had so promptly backslidden into the field of things elemental.

“About keeping that tunnel situation dark, Plegg: I’ve been thinking that some of our men might take me too literally--that possibly you did,” was the way the modifying clause was introduced. “I was pretty savage that night. I told you that Lushing shot at me, but let you infer that he missed. It was a miss, but it wouldn’t have been if my field-note book hadn’t turned the bullet.”

“I saw the hole in your coat afterwards,” said Plegg quietly.

“Yes; the shock stopped the clock for me, and the gambling house people carried me out for dead--thought I was dead. Naturally, when the clock got to running again, I was hot; was still pretty warm when I talked with you at Brady’s. Of course, I didn’t mean to convey the idea that Lushing, or any member of his staff, was to be massacred out of hand.”

“Of course not,” the first assistant agreed, readily enough. “But we are not to let them find out about the ‘fault,’ are we?”

“Not if we can help it without going to extremes. Mr. Grillage will be back before long, and I’m going to put that tunnel-roof question up to him again good and hard. I know what it will mean to us if we have to dig that hollow tooth out and fill it, but just the same, the responsibility is getting too heavy for me, Plegg. It’s got so I wake up in the night to think about it, and that’s bad medicine.”

Plegg offered no comment on this, but he made haste to pass the word to Regnier that guile, and not violence, was henceforth to be used in preserving the secret of the bad roof. Shortly after the word-passing Regnier had a deduction of his own to proffer. It was to be inferred that the secret had finally escaped, through the man Backus, or otherwise, and that Strayer’s accident had been taken as a warning. None of the railroad inspectors were venturing into the tunnel since Strayer had been injured, Regnier reported.

Beyond this, there was a plot of some sort afoot, so Regnier told Plegg. An attempt had been made to bribe one of the portal watchmen posted to keep unauthorized visitors out of the tunnel, and the briber was one of the Powder Can dive-keepers--not Dargin, but one of his concessionaries, who was also known as “Black Jack.” The watchman had proved incorruptible, and had reported the attempt to Regnier. His story was that he had been offered a certain sum of money if he would find out when Vallory was to be in the tunnel at any shift-changing time, and would use the working telephone to notify the briber beforehand.

Plegg said nothing of this to his chief, but it made him doubly watchful. Also, it made him fertile in excuses to keep Vallory from making any but strictly unannounced visits to Heading Number One. Time was all the first assistant hoped to gain. It was reported that Mr. Grillage’s private car was on its way back from Red Butte, and there was the slender chance that, with the president on the ground again, something might be done to clear the air and quiet the various gathering menaces.

This was the situation at the close of the day when the private Pullman _Athenia_ came in and was shunted to its former position on the spur track. At the moment of its arrival David Vallory was making a tour of the lower camps. Plegg was in the construction yard, and he saw Eben Grillage and his fishing companion leave the car and go up to the Inn together. And after dinner he saw the king of the contractors come back to the car alone. Later still, the first assistant, smoking his pipe on the platform of the office bunk car, saw a woman descending the path from the hotel. Recognizing the big boss’s daughter, Plegg dutifully went across the yard tracks to meet her.

“Thank you, Mr. Plegg,” she said, as he came up. “I imagine I was just about to lose myself. Whereabouts is the _Athenia_?”

“I’ll show you,” he offered, and he led her around an obstructing material train and over to the spur-track, where he helped her up the steps of the private car. As he was lifting his hat to go away she stopped him to ask a question.

“Do you happen to know where Mr. Vallory is?”

Plegg gave such information as he had, or thought he had: the chief was somewhere down the line at one of the lower camps; or at least he had gone down earlier in the evening and he had not come back to supper. The young woman appeared to be satisfied with the answer, and when the porter had admitted her to her father’s car, Plegg went his way, wondering if anything new had developed. The conclusion was negative. Miss Virginia’s question was natural and casual; one that need have no bearing upon the threatening conditions--doubtless had none. But if he could have been a listener at the door of the office compartment in the _Athenia_, he would have known better how much was at stake in the matter of keeping in close touch with his chief’s movements.

Miss Virginia found her father planted in his great chair behind the glass-topped table-desk. The fishing absence was responsible for a huge accumulation of mail, and he was slitting the envelopes with a nimble dexterity curiously at variance with his massive bulk and knotty-knuckled, square-fingered hands.

“Hello, little girl; you down here?” he rumbled; and before she could speak: “I got your wire--two days late. What is it?--something that won’t keep until I have read my mail?” Then, with a chuckling laugh: “Which one is it you’re going to spring on me--Wishart, or the ‘belted earl’?”

“Neither,” she replied succinctly. “I have come to talk business.”

“Oho! business, is it? Well, I guess I’m a business man. Go ahead and open up your samples.”

“The reason why I telegraphed you to come back was because you haven’t kept your promise.”

“Which one?” he inquired, with large indulgence.

“The one you made me when you were sending David out here. You promised me that he wasn’t to be spoiled.”

“Oh, that’s it, is it?”--with another of the deep-chested chuckles. “All right; let’s have it: what do you think you’ve found out?”

“You know, well enough,” she returned coldly. “For a time, I think, Mr. Plegg was able to keep the crooked things hidden from David--as you doubtless instructed him to. But of course David soon found out what is being done, and that it is being done by your orders. And now you are about to make a criminal of him. I don’t see how you can ever look his father in the face.”

Eben Grillage wagged his big head sorrowfully.

“You’re all I’ve got in the world, Vinnie, girl, and there’s mighty little I wouldn’t do for you; but it’s terribly hard to live up to your notions, sometimes. You’ve been a business man’s daughter all your life, and yet you haven’t the faintest idea of what business means.”

“I have a very clear idea of what it means to cheat, to lie, to put human life in jeopardy, and to take a clean, straightforward young man like David Vallory and turn him into a potential murderer.”

“Oh, pshaw!” grunted the king of the contractors. “I suppose somebody has been scaring you about that tunnel and the few cracks it has in the roof. Was it David?”

“No, it wasn’t David; I found out about it myself, before you went away. And the ‘few cracks’ have nearly killed one man, already.”

“Strayer, you mean?--I had David’s report of that. Strayer is a pretty good engineer, and he ought to have known better than to pry a rock loose and let it fall on his own head. Vinnie, I’m getting sore about this thing. That tunnel roof will stand up all right if they’ll only quit monkeying with it and let it alone.”

“I’m not here to argue with you about the tunnel as a tunnel,” said the daughter, with a touch of the true Grillage bluntness. “I merely wish to find out if you’re going to try to patch up that broken promise.”

“What in the name of common sense can I do--more than I have done? I wrote Plegg to keep David on the windward side of the little economies we have to make, and I’m sorry if he hasn’t been able to do it. I’ll haul Plegg over the coals, if that will make you feel any better.”

“Mr. Plegg doubtless did his best, and it wasn’t good enough. David is a graduate engineer and a grown man. He would be singularly stupid if he could be your chief of construction and not know what was going on right under his eyes. But that is not the point now. Are you, or are you not, going to give David authority to do what he, and Mr. Plegg, and every member of your own engineering staff, know ought to be done to that dangerous place in the tunnel--a thing that is endangering the lives of the men every day? That is what I came to ask.”

It was a rare thing for Eben Grillage to refuse his daughter’s demands, even when they were unreasonable; but the habits of a ruthless life-time were too strong to be set aside, even at the bidding of indulgent fatherly affection.

“You are my daughter, Vinnie, but you are just like other women when you get your head set on anything. If I should let you run my business for me, there wouldn’t be any business left after a little while, and we’d both join the bread line. If you’ve made up your mind that David is the man you want, just say so and I’ll take him off the job and set him up in any kind of business you pick out--if you can pick one that measures up to your Utopian notions of honesty. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

She did not answer the question. There was one more arrow in her quiver and she fitted it to the string and drew the bow.

“The tunnel isn’t the only thing, as you know. James Lushing makes it an open boast that he will break you, and you know best what reasons he may have for thinking such a thing possible. Beyond that, David has met him and they have quarreled--fought. I have been told that Lushing’s first blow will be struck at David, to get him out of the way.”

“Who told you any such thing as that?”

“No matter; I have heard it, and I have no reason to doubt the truth of the report. David is so loyal to you that he is the biggest obstacle in Lushing’s way. Everybody knows that Lushing can command the help of any number of desperate characters in Powder Can. It wouldn’t be beyond him to----”

--“To have David killed off out of the way?” supplied the big man, with another chuckle. “If you go much deeper, you’ll be telling me that David is the man, after all. But don’t you worry. When you marry David Vallory, Vinnie, you’ll marry a man. If he is half the scrapper I take him to be, he’ll be well able to take care of himself in any mix-up with Jim Lushing--or with any of Lushing’s paid blacklegs.”

The special pleader’s eyes grew suddenly weary.

“Then you will do nothing about the tunnel?” she asked patiently.

“Not until I have some better reason than a foolish little girl’s notion--no.”

“Hasn’t David told you what he thinks ought to be done?”

“Oh, yes, of course; the hard-rock men got him rattled, right at the start, and he came to me about it, boy-like.”

“And you told him to let it alone?”

“Sure I did. We are going to lose money enough on this job, as it is.”

The fine persistence was broken at last. The daughter of the luxuries--and the ideals--rose and moved toward the door. As she reached the vestibule exit she turned and gazed at the big man filling the great arm-chair, and there was neither anger nor impatience in her eyes; only a profound depth of shocked disappointment and reproach.

“I never knew you _could_ be so hard and pitiless,” she said slowly. “If this is what money and the love of it can do to you----” The swing door of the vestibule yielded under her hand and she went out, leaving the sentence unfinished.

At the car-steps the negro porter had placed his carpeted foot-stool, but Silas Plegg was not there to see the president’s daughter safely across the tracks. It is conceivable that she did not mark the omission. From childhood she had known construction yards and the paraphernalia of the contracting trade, and her father was fond of boasting that she was as self-reliant as any boy.

Picking her way in the gathering dusk around the obstructing cars filled with building material, she came presently to the foot of the path leading up to the Inn. Out of the first clump of scrub pine on the hill trail a woman darted into the path and blocked it. Virginia Grillage stopped short with a little gasp of apprehension. Then she saw who it was.

“You--Judith? were you looking for me?”

“I was. They couldn’t tell me at the hotel, and I was that frightened I thought I’d be choking. Jack Dargin sent me, and the other Jack--Black Jack Runnels, he is--would be killing me if he knew I came. You’ll remember what I was telling you yesterday. David is to be murdered--in the tunnel some way--I don’t know how. They’re to get him in between the shifts; when the day men have come out and before the night men have gone in. Dargin says there’d be a clock of some kind in a box--he said to tell you that, and you’d understand.”

“But David isn’t at the tunnel; he is at one of the lower camps. Mr. Plegg told me so just a few minutes ago.”

“Maybe he was, but he isn’t now; he went up on an engine not ten minutes ago. It was Simmy Backus’s job to get him there--to ’phone him there was a man hurt in the tunnel. He’d fall for that--David would--and he went. I saw the engine when it passed me, going up. What must we do? ’Tis you that would be loving David, Vinnie Grillage, and that I know well, but you’re not the only one: I--I’d die for him this minute!”

For a moment Virginia Grillage, quick-witted and resourceful as any daughter of Eve since the world began, stood shocked and irresolute, fighting desperately for some shreddings of the capability to act which had suddenly deserted her. Then the lost self-control came back with a bound.

“The telephone!” she gasped. “You run back to the hotel, Judith, and find Bert Oswald--tell him what you’ve told me and he’ll know what to do! While you’re doing that, I’ll try to find a ’phone here in the yards. Run!” and she set the example by flying down the path and dodging around the obstructing cars to reach the _Athenia_.

To her utter dismay, she found the private car untenanted. The lights were still on, and the recently opened mail lay on the desk, but the big swing-chair was empty. Twice, and again, she called her father, and when there was no answer she caught up the telephone set from the desk and tried to make somebody hear. But the set was dead; the wires connecting it with the working system had not been restrung since the _Athenia_ had returned from Red Butte.

Next she made frantic and fruitless search for the porter; but the negro, too, had disappeared. Plegg was the alternative now, and she ran breathlessly up the yard to the office bunk car. But this, also, proved to be a hope defeated, or at least deferred. The car was dark when she reached it, and when she tried the door she found it locked. The remaining expedient, the only one that suggested itself, was to run to the Inn railroad station a half-mile distant down the yard, where she knew there was an accessible telephone. It was a lame expedient and she knew it; a thousand things might delay the sending of the message of warning to the tunnel, and time was priceless. Yet she ran, stumbling over the loosely bedded cross-ties, and praying that she might happen upon Plegg or some other member of the staff who would know what to do and how to do it.

She had scarcely begun this new flight when she saw one of the construction locomotives lumbering toward her on the main track. The quick wit was coming to its own again, and she stopped, stripping off her coat and stepping into the cone of the headlight beam so that she could be seen when she waved her signal. The engine was Callahan’s “mogul,” and she gave a little sob of joy when she recognized the good-natured Irishman who leaned from his cab window to ask what she wanted. Callahan was the driver with whom she had ridden oftenest when David Vallory had been showing her over the job.

“I want you and your engine, Mr. Callahan!” she panted. “Will you take orders from me?”

“Sure I will, Miss Vinnie,” was the quick response; and when the fireman had helped her up to the foot-board: “Where will ye be wanting the ould ’Thirty-six to be taking you?”