Chapter IX: Part 9

“To the tunnel--as fast as ever you can go! It’s--it’s life and death!”

Callahan asked no further questions. Miss Virginia was the big boss’s daughter, and her demands were sufficient law and Gospel for any man on the Grillage Company’s pay-rolls. While the fireman was lifting her to his box, the heavy construction machine went slamming out over the yard switches, shrieking its warning to all and sundry, and the race was begun.

Though the track was new and rough, and the detours around the hill cuttings held curves of hazard, Callahan--“Wild Irish,” they called him on the job--slackened speed for nothing. Onward and upward through the gathering darkness roared the big locomotive, vomiting a trail of sparks to mark its crooked climb. Virginia Grillage tried pitifully hard to plan what she should do when the goal should be reached; but the dominant impulse would have nothing to do with cool-headed plannings. David’s life hung in the balance, and David must be warned. She could get no further than this.

So it came about that when the tunnel portal was reached, and Callahan and his firemen were helping her down from the high cab, common sense and clarity of mind fled away, and she was once more only an incoherent and badly frightened young woman. A gang of workmen waited at the tunnel mouth; dimly she realized that this was the night shift, preparing to go in when the day men should come out. One glance showed her that there was no member of the engineering staff with them; no one in authority save the burly Cornish drill-boss.

“Mr. Vallory!” she demanded; “where is he?”

The Cornishman knew the president’s daughter by sight. He pointed into the dark depths of the tunnel. “If ye’ll wait just a minute; it’s time for the shift to be coomin’ out, and he’ll be----” but the remainder of the sentence was lost upon the young woman who had darted into the black depths with neither light nor guide, stumbling blindly over the cross-ties of the spoil-track in her flight, and following the lead of the wide-spaced line of electric bulbs into the grim heart of the mountain.

* * * * *

A scant margin of two minutes after his daughter had halted and boarded a construction engine to be whirled away to the tunnel, Eben Grillage, who had been across to the commissary to put in a call for Plegg, returned to his desk in the _Athenia_ and once more began the reading of his neglected mail. A matter of three-quarters of an hour later, while he was still immersed in his correspondence, the swing-door of the forward corridor flew open as from the impact of a heavy projectile and Silas Plegg staggered into the office compartment. His lips were drawn back and he was shaking like one in an ague fit.

“The roof in Heading Number One!” he jerked out. “It’s down, damn you, do you hear that?--it’s down, and the day shift is behind it!”

Eben Grillage’s heavy face went purple, and for an instant his jaw sagged and he gasped for breath. Then the strong will triumphed for the moment over the failing body and he sprang out of his chair to catch the news-bringer in a grasp that threatened to crush muscle and bone.

“Vallory--where’s David Vallory?” he stormed.

“He’s--he’s in there with the men--and--and that isn’t all: your daughter’s there, too--if she isn’t buried under the slide!”

Slowly the big man’s grasp upon Plegg relaxed and the veins in his forehead swelled to whip-cords. Eben Grillage’s day of reckoning had come. Before the first assistant realized what was happening, the gigantic figure of the contractor-king swayed like a toppling tower and would have fallen with a crash if Plegg had not braced himself and caught it.

XXVI

The Heart of Qojogo

Virginia Grillage, flying into the tunnel depths over the rock-strewn spoil-track, was mercifully spared the introductory horrors of the sudden entombment. An earthquake crash, so close behind her that she was enveloped in a shower of flakings and spallings and stifling dust, a rush of air that was like a tornado to sweep her from her feet, and she stumbled and fell and was blotted out.

When she recovered consciousness there was darkness that could be felt and a silence to match it. She was lying on a pallet of coats; she knew they were coats because the sleeves of one of them were drawn over her; and some one was chafing her hands.

“Is it you, David?” she asked in a voice made small and weak by the horrible stillness.

“Yes; can you tell me how badly you are hurt?”

She grasped his arm and sat up.

“I--I think I’m not hurt at all,” she stammered. Then: “Did the roof come down?”

“It did. We found you half buried in the muck. What under heaven were you doing in here?”

“I came to tell you,” she said simply. “Where are the men?”

“They are all down at the slide, and Regnier is with them. They are trying to find out how effectually we are buried. You are sure you’re not hurt?”

“A little bruised and shaken up, of course, but that is nothing. Will the men be able to dig us out?”

With any other woman he knew as the questioner, David Vallory might have temporized. But he knew Virginia Grillage’s quality and the steel-true fineness of it.

“We shall not be able to dig out from this side,” he said soberly. “We are not equipped for it.”

She shuddered.

“This darkness is very horrible, isn’t it? And the air--it seems so close.”

David did not tell her that there was the best of reasons for the closeness of the air; that the ventilating conduit, and the smaller pipe-line which supplied the air pressure for the drills, were crushed under the avalanche, leaving them in a sealed pocket in the heart of Qojogo.

“You mustn’t let it grip you too hard,” he said, meaning to hearten her if he could. “By this time every camp on the line will have heard the news, and there will be no lack of help.”

She groped in the darkness and found his hand.

“I am not afraid, David--this is no time to be afraid. So you needn’t blink the facts for me. How wide was the bad place in the roof?”

“Twenty feet or more.”

“You say there are plenty of men to help; but you know, and I know, that only a few of them can work at one time in such a narrow place as the tunnel. Tell me plainly: will there be air enough to last until we starve to death? Or shall we be stifled before we have had time to starve?”

“I am not admitting either contingency yet; and you mustn’t. While there is life, there is always hope. But I can’t understand why you came here. What made you think I needed to be told?”

“That much is easily explained,” she said calmly. “There was a plot to murder you, and at the same time to bring about the first of a series of disasters that would smash the Grillage Company. Did you get a telephone message that a man was hurt, and that you were wanted up here?”

“I did. I was at McCulloch’s camp and I took an engine and came up here in a hurry. The accident report was a fake, and I came in to ask Regnier what he knew about it.”

“It was a part of the plot,” she went on evenly. “It was Judith Fallon who came and told me. She had already warned me that there was something threatening, but she did not know what it was. That first time was just before Mr. Strayer was hurt, and all she could tell me then was that James Lushing ‘had it in for you,’ as she put it, and was plotting with a man named Black Jack Runnels.”

“Runnels?” he queried. “Not Dargin?”

“No, it was Runnels; I’m sure of the name. Yesterday she came again. She had heard a little more, but nothing very definite. Then this evening I had been down to the _Athenia_--it came in from Red Butte on the afternoon train, as perhaps you know--and I was on my way back to the Inn. Judith met me on the path; she had been up to the hotel, looking for me.”

“Yes,” he encouraged.

“She was terribly excited and said that the thing, whatever it was, was to be done this evening, at the changing hour of the shifts. She told me that a man named Backus was to call you by ’phone and tell you that there was a man hurt in the tunnel. Then she said that you had already gone up the line; she saw you on an engine that overtook and passed her.”

“I saw a woman running on the Powder Can road, but I didn’t recognize her as Judith,” said David.

“You wouldn’t, of course, with the engine running fast. When she told me that you were already on your way up here, I didn’t know what to do. Then I thought of the telephones, and sent her up to the hotel to find Herbert Oswald and ask him to call you at the tunnel ’phone, while I ran down to the _Athenia_ to get father to ’phone. There was nobody in the _Athenia_; father had gone out somewhere. Then I tried to find Mr. Plegg, but he was gone, too. I didn’t know where to look for another telephone nearer than the Inn railroad station, and I was starting to run down there when I saw Callahan on his engine and made him bring me up here.”

“But surely you saw the night shift getting ready to come in, didn’t you? Do you mean to tell me that that bunch of thick-headed stone-borers let you come in here alone?”

“They were not to blame--not at all. I merely asked if you were in here, and when one of them said you were, I ran.”

“I am too thankful to say what I ought to say, about them and about you--thankful that you are alive,” said David, and his voice trembled a little. “One second, a half-second, later and you would have been fairly under the slide. As it was, we had to dig you out; and--and Vinnie, I hope no human being will ever suffer as I did when we found you. I--I thought you were dead, and that I had killed you!”

“It wouldn’t have been you,” she said softly; “it would have been the thing we call Business; the thing that is killing all the kindliness, all the fairness, all the best there is in us.”

“No,” he denied sturdily, “I can’t let you shift the blame that way. I knew what ought to be done here; I have known it all along. If I had made a fight for it with your father, as I should have done, he would have given in.”

“I don’t know,” she said wearily. “That was what I went down to the _Athenia_ for this evening--before I met Judith. Father wouldn’t listen to me; and now----”

David knew what it was she had begun to say and could not finish; that now Eben Grillage had lost the daughter for whom, at the end of the ends, all the cost-cuttings and life-risking economies had been made. Hence, he tried again to comfort her.

“We must always give him the benefit of the doubt,” he interposed. “From what Judith told you, it is perfectly plain that the roof hasn’t fallen of its own accord at this particular time, though there isn’t much doubt but that it would have come down some time. Within the past few days a crack had opened in one side of it big enough to conceal a charge of dynamite--or a time-clock infernal machine, which was probably what was used. It was timed to go off between the shifts, and Regnier and I were the only ones they meant to catch. It was the natural inference that we would stay in the heading to see the night shift come on; Regnier always does that.”

As if the mention of his name had evoked him, the fiery little French-Canadian came up to the heading with a flickering candle-end shielded between his hands. His first inquiry was for the president’s daughter.

“Mees Virginia--you vill not been keel? Zat ees _tres bon_!”

“What did you find out, Jean?” David demanded.

“Eet ees bad--ver’ bad. They vill deeg on the other side--peek--peek--but zat loose stuff she ees come down so fast as they peek it out, _oui_. Eet ees come down on our side, _aussi_, like one damn’ hopper--pardon, M’am’selle--like one hopper full with loose stones.”

“We have no tools on this side?”

“Nossing moch. The men s’all deeg with zat what they ’ave; the peek and shovel of the mucker; but eet ees nossing.”

Since anything was better than stagnation, Virginia proposed that they go to the slide to look on, or to help, if they could. The pilgrimage was made in silence, Regnier lighting the way as best he could with his candle-end. The barrier, as the candles revealed it, was a blank slope of broken rock. Four or five men of the day shift were shoveling half-heartedly at it, and the futility of the effort was apparent at once. For every shovelful removed, two more rolled down from the filled “hopper” above. David Vallory called a halt at once on the discouraging attempt.

“Let it alone, men; it isn’t worth while,” he said. “You are only wasting your strength, and you may need it all before we get out of here.”

With the small confusion of the shoveling stopped they all fell to listening. Far away, so far that it sounded like miles instead of feet and inches, they could hear faint tappings, followed at irregular intervals by the hoarse rumble of falling detritus. David went on his knees at one side of the pit to examine the pipe of the air-line. It was bent and crushed out of shape, and there was no air coming through it, though a subdued hissing proved that the pressure was on, and that the engineer at the portal compressor-plant was still trying to force air into the blocked heading.

While he was kneeling at the pipe, David discovered another ominous threat; his knees were wet, and in the drainage ditch cut at the side of the tunnel a little pool was forming. He knew well what this meant; that death in still another form was creeping upon them. The tunnel had been a “wet” tunnel almost from the beginning, and here was a hint that the great slide might possibly prove to be a dam as well as a barrier. Fortunately, however, there was a slight up-grade in the bore, and it might be hours, or even days, before the highest point, at the working end of the bore, would overflow.

“We are not doing any good here,” he said to the young woman who stood listening with him. “We may as well go back where it is drier.”

The men had scattered as far as the limits of the cavern would permit, and Regnier surrendered his bit of candle to David to light the retreat. In the heading David made a platform of a few of the bulkhead planks and rearranged the coat-cushioned pallet.

“In a little while the close air will make you sleepy,” he told his fellow-prisoner. “When it does, you must get all the rest you can. I am afraid we are in for a long siege.”

She nodded and sat down on the plank pallet, locking her hands over her knees.

“You needn’t be afraid to say what you think--to me, David. In your own mind you are wondering which will come first: hunger, the bad air, the rising water, or the digging away of the slide. I can face what is in store for us as well as another.”

“I don’t question your courage; God knows, you proved it sufficiently by coming in here when you knew what was going to happen--for you practically did know,” he hastened to say. Then: “Some of us men will probably break long before you will. That is why I say you must rest while you can. You may be needed later on--to keep some of us from forgetting that we _are_ men.”

She gave him a tired little smile. “You are giving me a name to live up to. I wonder if I shall be able to do it--at the last?”

“I don’t doubt it for a single moment; I have never doubted it. Did you have dinner before you began on this hideous adventure?”

She nodded again. “It was a good dinner, too. Your father and mine were at the table, and Lucille and Herbert Oswald.”

“And Wishart and the Englishman?”

“No; they respected the family reunion. Your father looked years younger, and he is as brown as anything. And that reminds me; there is something I ought to tell you--before a time comes when I may not care to talk, or you to listen. It is about Lucille and Herbert.”

“Go on,” he said gently.

“I gave Herbert his hint--after you had given me leave to do as I pleased. That same evening, when I was in my bed-room lying down, Herbert came up to find Lucille. They sat together in the sitting-room of our suite, and, most naturally, they thought I had gone out. It was wicked of me to lie there and listen, but I hadn’t the heart to let them know that they were not alone.”

“Everybody knows about your heart,” David put in, striving to dispel a little of the gloom.

“Herbert said his little say very gently and tenderly, and oh, David, I wish you could have seen Lucille’s face! It was just like a beautiful rose blossoming while you looked. She didn’t say anything at first; she just put her hand up to Herbert’s face, and I could see her touching his forehead and eyes and lips with those finger-tips of hers that can see more than most of us can with our eyes. ‘I--I wanted to see if you really meant it, Herbert, or if you were only just sorry for me,’ she said, so softly that it was hardly more than a whisper; and then: ‘Oh, my dear, my dear--I am _so_ happy!’”

There was silence for a little time; then David said: “I am glad you have told me, Vinnie; it’s a tremendous comfort to me now, in the light of what may happen to us here. You see, I am taking you at your word and not trying to hide things from you.”

“Then you think it is doubtful--our getting out alive?”

“Very doubtful,” he admitted, lowering his voice so that the men might not hear. “If it were a mere matter of digging out what has already fallen in--but it isn’t, you know. The crevice has been ‘prospected’ with test holes all the way up to the surface on the mountain-side three hundred feet above us. Plegg told me that only yesterday. It is rotten all the way through, and it will probably fall in as fast as it can be dug out.”

Again there was an interval of speechlessness, and then the hushed voice of the young woman sitting with her hands locked over her knees.

“Did my father know of that prospecting?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Poor father!” she said, and her voice was shaken. “He is just simply stone blind on that side, David. I’ve tried and tried, and I can’t make him see! And now--he is going--to pay--the highest price he knows--for the dreadful cure!”

“It is time for you to forget for a while, if you can,” said David, not knowing what else to say; and he went aside with Regnier, blowing out the light of the precious candle-end to save it for a time of greater need.

A little later, when he came back and struck a match, he found her sleeping with her face hidden in the crook of an arm, and he was glad.

XXVII

The Terror

When Virginia opened her eyes, after a troubled sleep which seemed to her to have lasted only a few moments, it was with a start, and out of the depths of a nightmare in which she had dreamed that some one was smothering her.

“_David!_” she called softly; and he answered at once out of the enveloping darkness.

“I am here--sitting beside you. Have you had a good sleep?”

“It was dreadful!” she shuddered. “I dreamed that a big man like--like my father--had his hand over my face and was stifling me. What time is it?”

“It is another day. It was a little past eight o’clock when I struck a match about an hour ago. You have slept all night.”

“And you?” she inquired quickly.

“I couldn’t sleep very much--naturally. Besides, I didn’t wish to. I was afraid you might waken and call me, and I shouldn’t hear.”

“There is no news?”

“A little. Regnier reports that the digging has gone on steadily all night. He knows the Morse alphabet, and he contrived to get into communication with Plegg during the night by tapping on the crushed air-pipe; so they know on the outside that we are here and alive.”

She pressed her hands to her forehead. Though he could not see the movement, he knew she made it.

“Does your head ache?” he asked.

“Some. The air is much worse, isn’t it?”

“It isn’t any better,” he conceded. “Once, in the night, they tried shooting the slide from the other side--blasting it with dynamite, you know. That was what made Regnier try the pipe-tapping. The fumes of the dynamite were blown through the loose stuff and that made it worse for us. Now they are trying to force a large pipe through the mass of the slide to give us air and food.”

“Will they succeed?” she queried.

“I promised, last night, to talk straight to you. If the slide is made up entirely of broken rock in small pieces, as it seems to be from our side, it should be comparatively easy to drive through it. But if the mass happens to contain large bowlders----”

“Then they will drill and blast them,” she put in quickly.

“Yes; but it may prove to be a long job; and I must be plain again. Every move they make seems to bring down more of the stuff from above. The water is not rising much, but the air is growing worse every hour.”

“All of which means that you think we should be prepared for the worst?”

“Yes; always continuing to hope for the best, of course. Are you very hungry?”

“Not yet. But you must be.”

“I can stand it better than the workmen. They have had nothing since they came in yesterday at ten o’clock. Very few of them carry a dinner bucket on an eight-hour shift.”

“How are they enduring it?”

“Each after his kind. Three of the Welshmen wanted to sing a while ago, but I wouldn’t let them. I knew it would waken you, and I thought you ought to sleep as long as you could.”

“Go right away and tell them to sing all they wish to!” she commanded instantly; and a little time after he had gone and returned, a Welsh melody rose on the stagnant air, lifted by voices that were strangely deadened by the stifling closeness of the dank cavern.

This was the beginning of a day of creeping horrors. Steadily, hour by hour, the vitiated air grew worse. All day long the rescuers were apparently fighting madly with the difficulties encountered in the pipe-driving attempt, but the buried ones could form no estimate of the progress made, or, indeed, if there were any progress at all.

As the hours wore on, the imprisoned workmen began to react to the torturings of the foul air and the despairing situation, each after his kind, as David had said. One man, a huge-muscled Cornish miner, went stark mad and it took the united strength of all the others to conquer and tie him. Another, a north-of-England coal miner, by his burring speech, was the next to break; he was not violent, but he babbled incessantly of green fields and sunshine--of running brooks, and the fresh, keen air of the north.

David Vallory tried to shield the woman he loved from as much of this as he could, and Regnier seconded him loyally. But at the last the heroic heart refused to be sheltered longer and kept away from the abyss into which the men were slipping one by one.

“No; you must let me do what I can, while I can!” she cried; and then she went about among the men and talked to them, bidding them be of good cheer, and telling them that they must be men to the very end--that God was good and merciful and He would not let them suffer more than they could bear. And once she persuaded the Welshmen to sing a hymn with her, her woman’s voice rising clear above the deeper tones of the men, and never faltering even on the last heart-moving stanza:

“Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes;
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies;
Heaven’s morning breaks and earth’s vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.”

It was then that Patrick Connolly, drill foreman and the leader in many a brutal pay-day brawl, made husky confession.

“’Tis your father’s blame, this, and well do we know it,” he grated. “’Twas in the back of me mind all night and all day that if we ever got out o’ this I’d take me two hands and choke him to hell, as we’re chokin’ this minut’. But ’tis all past and gone now, what wid the blessed love an’ nerve of you, little gyerl; an’ here’s hopin’ that the Gawd you believe in ’ll let you die quiet-like an’ peaceable, as I’d want my own little gyerl to go if I had wan.”

Through all this, David Vallory lived as one in hideous dream. But when the flare of another of the precious matches, a tiny flame that was scarcely visible in its brief and futile struggle with the heavy air, showed him that a second night was far advanced, he drew Virginia away to the heading and made her lie down on the coat-covered pallet, which he had remade, propping it as high as he could on the broken stone to escape the lower stratum of air.

For a long time she was silent, and when she spoke it was to ask if he were still beside her.

“Yes, Vinnie; I am here--and I shall be here when they find us.”

“You think it is all over, then?”

“I know that in a few more hours, a very few, the end must come. We can’t go on breathing this air indefinitely.”

She sat up again at that, and again he knew that she was holding her head in her hands.

“Have you ever wondered how the end would come to you, David?--how you would feel, and what you would do?”

“Not as often as I ought perhaps. There was a time last year, when I was in a caisson with Shubrick at Coulee du Sac. The bottom blew out under the air pressure, and we all thought we were gone. I don’t remember much about what I thought--only that Shubrick and I owed it to the ‘sand-hogs’ to get them into the air-lock first.”

“Once I saw a woman die,” she said, her voice thrilling with suppressed emotion. “She was horribly frightened at the last, and--and I’ve always prayed since then that when my time should come I might not go that way.”

“You won’t,” he made himself say; “there isn’t a drop of craven blood in you, Vinnie--dear.”

Again the brooding silence fell, and, as before, it was the young woman who broke it.

“If we are going to be stifled in a little while--as I suppose we are--it doesn’t matter much what we say to each other, does it, David? I mean that we needn’t consider any future, so far as we usually count futures in a conventional way?”

“No; we are only a man and a woman, naked before the God who created us, Vinnie--and we are about to die.”

“Then--David, dear--_I love you!_”

“I know it,” he returned gently; “I have known it for a night and a day,” and he took her in his arms and kissed her almost solemnly. “You are giving your life because you tried to save mine.”

She made no effort to free herself. She was weary and weak to the point of collapse, and the supporting arms were grateful and comforting.

“I had ambitions,” she murmured; “such splendid ambitions! Ever since I have been old enough to understand, I have known how dis--dishonestly much of the money was made in the contracting, and it has hurt me--oh, you don’t know how it has hurt me! Father doesn’t see; he simply can’t see. And then my ambition came. A year ago I saw how father felt toward you; first because you were Adam Vallory’s son, and afterward because you were yourself--just such a son as he would have given worlds to have for his own. I whispered to myself then that I would make you love me and marry me; and then there would be two of us to fight for honesty and fair-dealing and the--the righteousness that cares for something more than merely keeping clear of the law. You would have helped me, wouldn’t you, David?”

He bent and kissed the pulse in the throbbing temple.

“You could have made of me anything that you wished, dear. You know that.”

“I didn’t wish to make anything of you but what you were; what you had always been until father tied you hand and foot with that horrible debt of gratitude. Then he sent you out here, and I knew what would happen--what simply _must_ happen; how your gratitude to him would break you down, first in the little things, and then in the terrible ones. And that was why I persuaded him to come, and to bring me. Was it all very--unwomanly, David?”

“It was the finest thing a woman ever did for the man she loved. But you have always done the fine things.”

“Even when I made you fall in love with me when you didn’t want to?”

“I outdistanced you by many miles in that,” he said with sober gravity. “I think it went back to the kiddie days in old Middleboro.”

“In spite of Judith?”

He held her closer. “That is the one thing that I have to confess, Vinnie. I did go about a good bit with Judith, in my college years and before. We were just good chums, and I never thought for a moment----”

“Of course you didn’t! But I don’t blame Judith, either; I can’t, when I’ve done the same thing myself. But you were saying it went back to the kiddie days with--with me.”

“Yes; but I didn’t realize it until we met in Florida. I was full of hope then: I meant to make a success of myself so that I might go to your father like a man and say, ‘I want to marry your daughter.’ Then the big debt fell on me, and I couldn’t say anything while I owed your father more than I could ever hope to repay.”

“If you hadn’t died--we are both just the same as dead, aren’t we?--if you hadn’t died, you were going to pay him in the best possible way; by making ‘the apple of his eye’ deliriously happy, and by showing him the honest way out of all the little crookednesses and the big ones, too. Oh, yes; that was what was going to happen. After we were married he would have taken you into the company, and in just a little while you and I together would have been setting the pace; the good old-fashioned, honest pace. Isn’t it the pity of all pities that we had to go and die and spoil it all?--that we couldn’t have lived to make it come true, David, dear?”

“God!” he said under his breath, but for other reply there were no words.

After a time she spoke again.

“I--I think I’m going now, David. You said I’d outlast you and the men, but I shouldn’t want that. No, dear; there isn’t any pain, except in my head. I’m just--tired--and--sleepy.”

“You mustn’t give up, Vinnie!” he pleaded passionately. “We must live--both of us--to make it all come true! Listen! Isn’t that the men trying to cheer? _O my God, I thank thee!_”

A roaring blast of clean, fresh air, driven strongly enough to penetrate even to their distant retreat at the heading, fanned their faces. “The pipe!” he shouted; “they’ve got the pipe through and they’ve turned the air on. Vinnie--_Vinnie!_--we shall live, and it _shall_ come true!”

But the sudden reversal from despair to hope had been too much for the strong heart. The yielding body David was clasping in his arms had become limp and unresponsive, and the lips were silent.

XXVIII

Regeneration

The pipe of life, a four-inch steel tube which had been driven by screw-jack pressure through the mass of the slide as a result of Plegg’s inventive strugglings, soon refreshed the vitiated air in the sealed cavern. Beyond this, food, in well-wrapped paper cartridges, and hot coffee, in bottles, were passed through the tube, and the famished prisoners were able to break their long fast. That nothing within the possibilities should be lacking, Plegg ran electric wires, with an incandescent bulb attached, through the conduit, and thus the feast was lighted.

In the fast-breaking, Regnier ate with his men, but David carried his portion and Virginia’s a little apart. Though she had revived quickly in the splendid rebound of youth and health under the changed conditions, the king’s daughter ate sparingly and with eyes downcast, and was, in David’s eyes, more radiantly beautiful than she had ever been. After the keen edge of famine--David’s famine--was a little blunted, she looked up and met his glances bravely.

“We didn’t die, David, and--and you must forget,” she pleaded. “You will forget, won’t you?”

“Forget?--not if I live to be a million years old,” he avowed gravely. And after a pause: “You mustn’t be an Indian, Vinnie--to give, and then want the gift returned. I am going to talk to Plegg again in a few minutes, and you shall hear what I say to him.”

The previsioned talk with the first assistant--the four-inch pipe serving for a speaking-tube--turned out to be principally technical, to be sure. In his proper person as chief engineer, David gave directions for the pushing forward of the rescue work. The jack-screw process was to be employed again, this time to press a steel shield into the mass of loose debris, so that the rescuers might be protected as they dug. The shield could be made out of a cast-off boiler shell with the heads removed. In this manner a tunnel within the tunnel could be excavated and the prisoners released.

With so much for the technicalities, the human side of things came in for its word.

“Is Mr. Grillage with you?” David asked.

Plegg’s reply was guarded. He guessed, and guessed rightly, that Eben Grillage’s daughter was listening with David at the prison end of the speaking-tube.

“Mr. Grillage is at the hotel; he is not very well. He has had a stroke of some sort, but the Brewster doctor who is with him says it isn’t necessarily dangerous.”

“You have sent him word that we are all alive and well?”

“Sure; that was the first thing we did.”

“Good. Now listen, and carry out my orders to the letter. After you get the tunneling started here, put Altman in charge and go yourself to the telegraph office at the Inn station. I heard, day before yesterday, that President Ford of the P. S-W. was in Denver, with a number of his directors. The report was that Mr. Ford and his party were making an inspection trip over the western lines of the system. You send a telegram to Mr. Ford, asking him if he will come here for a conference with me, bringing as many of the directors as may be willing to come. Do you get that?”

“Perfectly. What else?”

“You may sign my name to the telegram, and make it as urgent as you can. This is important. Then I want you to go up to the Inn and see Mr. Grillage for yourself. Find out his condition exactly, and come back here and report.”

“All right; is that all?”

“Not quite. While you are at the hotel, see my father and sister and Herbert Oswald, and tell them that the danger is all over for us--that is, if you haven’t already ’phoned them.”

“Your father and Oswald came up here with me when the alarm was given, and they have been here ever since until a couple of hours ago, when I persuaded Oswald to take your father back to the Inn on the assurance that we should reach you with the pipe within a short time. Your father was pretty well tuckered out, and I didn’t dare to let him stay here any longer.”

“Good man!” said David; “I owe you something for that, Silas. Be sure and tell them at the hotel that we are all right and quite comfortable, and that there is nothing to worry about. And while you’re at it, you may give Oswald and my sister my hearty congratulations, and tell them, from Miss Virginia and me, that we hope they’ll be as happy as they deserve to be.”

Plegg, the imperturbable, let slip a little imprecation of joy.

“I--I’ll be damned!” he burbled; “you don’t know what a relief it is to hear you talking that way! Any more errands?”

“Yes; one more. Our engagement--Miss Virginia’s and mine--hasn’t been announced yet, so you may break the news, if you care to; to Mr. Grillage when you see him, to my people, and to the folks at the Inn. Also, you may let it go to the fellows on the staff and to the men on the job. We shall be married as soon as Mr. Grillage is up and able to give the bride away.”

“Good!--oh, _bully_ good!” came from the other end of the tube, from which it may be inferred that the first assistant’s half-cynical habit of self-restraint and reticence was broken beyond repair. Then: “Of course, I’m taking your word for it, but if Miss Virginia would--er--sort of counter-sign the order ... I haven’t heard her voice yet.”

Virginia put her lips to the tube and her eyes were dancing.

“It’s so, Mr. Plegg; can you hear me? And there are some other things that are going to be so, too--things in which you’ll have to help. We are counting upon you--may we?”

“You may, indeed; to the last scrapings of the grab-bucket!” was the ready assurance. “Now--I don’t want to be impolite, but if that is all, I’ll ask you both to take your faces away from the pipe; I’m going to put the air blast on again.”

Even with the help of the steel shield it took the remainder of the night and the better part of the next forenoon for the outside men, working in fifteen-minute shifts, to dig through the mass of the slide, the work being delayed somewhat by the encountering, in the midst of things, of a great bowlder which had to be carefully blasted with dynamite. Nevertheless, the task was accomplished finally. With the advancing shield the diggers burst through with a yell of triumph, and the poor prisoners were passed out one by one to the clean air and the blessed sunshine of the outdoor world.

Once more able to take command, David Vallory gave directions for the clearing of the tunnel by digging and timber-shoring from either side of the slide, and outlined for Plegg in a few words a plan for the excavating and permanent filling and arching of the breach. Plegg heard him through, and then looked up to say: “Does this mean that we’re to have a new deal?”

“Either a new deal or a smash. If I can come to some sort of terms with Mr. Ford, we’ll go on and finish this job honestly, the way it ought to be finished. If I can’t, we’ll take our losses and get out, without waiting to be kicked out.”

An engine had been ’phoned for to come up after the chief and Miss Grillage, but it was as yet only on the way. Miss Virginia was talking to the released hard-rock men, praising them for their courage, and telling them how glad she was to have been given the chance to share the peril with them, since the peril had to be. This gave Plegg his opportunity with his chief.

“You are speaking for Mr. Grillage, Vallory?--or only for yourself?” he queried.

“I hope I’m speaking for both of us. I’m afraid Mr. Grillage is out of the active part of it, permanently. Miss Virginia tells me that this is his second stroke.”

“Miss Virginia,” said Plegg; “of course, she is with you on this reformation turn-over?”

“Heart and soul; in fact, it is her idea. We’ll fight it through together.”

Once more the quaint smile twitched at the corners of the first assistant’s thin-lipped mouth and his eyes twinkled. “My congratulations,” he said; “I--I’m damned if you aren’t going to be ‘too good,’ after all! I hope you won’t fire your first assistant crook, Vallory. I’d like to see how it feels to work for an absolutely honest outfit for just one time before I die. Do I stay?”

“Just as long as I do, Silas.” And then the engine came, and David and his charge were whirled away to the valley.

At the stop at the foot of the Inn ridge, David helped Virginia down from the engine cab, and together they climbed the hill path. The news had been passed to the tunnel that President Ford and his inspecting committee had arrived at Powder Gap an hour earlier and were quartered in the Alta Vista; wherefore David Vallory knew that his request had been granted and that his hour was come.

“You will go to your father at once, of course,” he said, as they were ascending the steps of the Inn entrance. Then: “You must stand to your guns, Vinnie, and do all the things you said you’d like to do when you thought we had to die. Mr. Ford is here, and after I’ve had a word with Dad and sister, I’m going to fight the good fight with the Short Line people, taking matters entirely into my own hands. If Mr. Ford doesn’t fire us bodily, this job shall be finished--and finished honestly. After that, your father may fire me if he wishes to; but he must be made to understand that if he does, he is firing his daughter’s husband.”

“Oh!” she said softly, “it’s such a precious thing to find that you are just as big and strong as I always believed you were, David! I’ll stand by, and after you are through with Mr. Ford, you must come straight to our suite.” Then, with exaggerated humility: “May I have your august permission to say good-by to Freddy Wishart and Cumberleigh?”

“You can’t--unless you do it by wire,” he grinned. “Plegg tells me they went East on the morning train, shortly after he had announced our engagement here at the hotel. We can send them cards a little later, if you wish.”

XXIX

As It Should Be

The conference in the Alta Vista’s sun-parlor, which was isolated for the purpose, was rather long drawn out, as it was constrained to be, but in due time the large-bodied, shrewd-eyed man who had been doing practically all of the talking for the railroad company brought it to a conclusion.

“I have no more use for a welsher than you have, Mr. Vallory,” he said, referring pointedly to one James Lushing. “You have frankly admitted that there have been the usual contractor’s shavings and parings on the job, to the manifest detriment of the railroad company’s interest. I’ll be equally frank and say that Lushing was given his place with us largely because he knew of the little parings--having devised a good many of them himself, probably--and was therefore able to check and prevent them. But I wish it to be distinctly understood that we don’t stand for any highbinding methods; and your evidence of sheer criminality on Lushing’s part seems to be entirely conclusive. You say they have found the wrecked time-clock of the infernal machine in the tunnel digging?”

David nodded. “We have that, and the testimony of the young woman I speak of. Also, we have another witness in the person of a man named Dargin, who, my assistant tells me, is ready to testify that Lushing, the man Backus, and another named Runnels, deliberately plotted the blowing up of the tunnel, partly for the purpose of smashing our company, but principally--so Dargin says--to dispose of me in a manner which would appear to be entirely accidental.”

“Dargin?” said the president, with a faint smile. “Isn’t he the head and front of these Powder Can nuisances that you described in your letter to me, and wished to have us help you clean out?”

“The same,” said David.

“Did he know of your effort in this direction?”

“He did.”

“And yet he tried to warn you through the woman Fallon? What sort of a desperado is he, Mr. Vallory?”

“Really, I don’t know,” David confessed. “He is rather beyond me. Desperado is the word; he has a perfectly horrifying list of shootings to his credit, and is, generally, what is known west of civilization as a ‘bad man.’ And yet he agreed with me when I told him that his dives ought to be cleaned up, and that I was going to try to clean them up; adding that some day he might do it himself, if I didn’t beat him to it.”

“That would be a miracle, indeed,” said the railroad president.

“Yet it is one that is already wrought,” David put in. “Mr. Plegg--my assistant--assures me that the Powder Can saloons and gambling dens were all closed on the night of the tunnel explosion, and that Dargin had sent him word that they would not be reopened.”

Again the big-bodied president smiled. “We are living in an age of wonders, Mr. Vallory. This man Dargin’s action proves it, and, if you will permit me to say it, so does yours in asking for this conference. Do you know what has become of Lushing?”

“I do not. When it became known, as it was almost immediately, that the tunnel disaster was not an accident, Lushing disappeared, together with his accomplices. But, as I have pointed out, we have the evidence.”

“You could scarcely make a legal case against the railroad company,” said the president. “Lushing was acting entirely on his own responsibility when he stepped over into the criminal field to satisfy his grudge against you and Mr. Grillage. But I understand from what you have said that you have no intention of taking the matter into the courts.”

“None whatever. I am merely asking you gentlemen for a square deal in return for a square deal. Our bid on this job was too low, if the work were to be done honestly. If the railroad company will allow the slight increase in the estimates that I have asked for, we shall go on and complete the job to your entire satisfaction. And you may cover the entire mileage six feet deep with inspectors if you choose.”

There was a little interval of silence to follow this statement, with some uneasy moving in their chairs on the part of the four Short Line directors who had listened to the arguments pro and con.

“I believe in you, Mr. Vallory,” said the president at length, slightly stressing the pronoun. “If the matter were solely in your hands, I should say, go ahead on the plan you have outlined. But what guaranty can you give us that Mr. Grillage will permit you to carry out your ideas? You must remember that we have had dealings with him before this.”

“Mr. Grillage will not interfere,” said David calmly. “The chief reason is that before the new plan goes into effect, I shall be his son-in-law and a partner in the business of the Grillage Engineering Company.”

“Oho!” said the railroad magnate, with a good-natured chuckle. “So the wind sets in that quarter, does it? Are we to understand that you will have your wife’s approval and--er--coöperation in these business matters?”

“To the very fullest extent,” was the prompt rejoinder. “In fact, the course I have indicated is based more upon her initiative than mine.”

“That is better. I have had the privilege of meeting Miss Virginia, and--you are to be congratulated, most heartily, Mr. Vallory. Did the--er--accident in the tunnel contribute something toward the bringing about of this happy state of affairs?”

“It did,” said David shortly. “You may, or may not, have heard that Miss Virginia took her life in her hands to save mine and those of the men of the day shift.”

President Ford rose to intimate that the conference was ended.

“We’ll meet you half-way, Mr. Vallory, and in good faith,” he said. “I am told you have a lawyer friend here in the house; our attorneys will meet him and draw up new contracts. We shall ask only for decent economy and fairness; and if you can do as you promise--get the line open before snow flies--there will be a substantial bonus for you, individually; which may enable you to make your interest in the Grillage Engineering Company a financial as well as a--er--sentimental one. I think that is all we need to say this morning.”

David Vallory passed through the corridor to the Grillage suite with the blood hammering in his veins. In the hour-long conference with the railroad magnates he had kept his word to Virginia, fighting openly and honestly, and battling his way through to the desired end. The battle had not been won without stress. At first, there had been only silence and cold attention on the part of the magnates. But the triumphant fact remained: he had warmed them finally and the victory was won.

But now the real crisis was at hand. Would Eben Grillage, the benefactor to whom he owed his fealty in the final analysis, turn the helm over to a moneyless youngster who was masterfully proposing to marry his daughter out of hand, and to throw all of the Grillage business methods and maxims into the scrap-heap?

Virginia met him at the door of the private suite, and her eyes were full of trouble.

“You must be prepared for a great change, David,” she told him. “It is paralysis, and he will never be the same man again. You must help me, dear; in a way, you know, I was the cause of it.”

“We’ll carry the load--together,” he assured her gently, and then she led him to the bedside of the stricken giant.

Her word of warning did not come amiss. For a moment David was shocked silent, and he could scarcely realize that the big figure propped among the pillows was that of the man who had stood as the very image of strength and aggressive vigor at their last meeting on the morning of the departure for the fishing excursion. The beetle-browed eyes were undimmed, to be sure, but the heavy face hung in folds, and its color was that of age-old parchment. Yet the indomitable spirit was unbroken.

“Come to look over the wreck, have you, David?” he said, with the grim Grillage smile strangely distorted by his malady. “Makes me think of that advertisement of the insurance people: ‘A house may burn, but a man _must_ die.’ I’m not dead yet, though.”

“Of course you’re not,” said David cheerfully. “You’re not going to be allowed to die before I’ve paid you some of the big debt I owe you.”

Again the grim smile flitted across the flabby expanse of the wrecked face.

“Vinnie tells me you’re aiming to make the debt bigger before you make it less. Do you realize that you’re taking all I’ve got in the world worth having, David? But of course you don’t; you young robbers never do. Have you seen President Ford?”

“Yes; I have just had a talk with him and four of his directors. We are to have a new contract, with increased estimates, and a square deal all around. And bygones are to be bygones.”

Eben Grillage rocked his head slowly back and forth on the pillows, and this time the grim smile was almost ghastly.