factory district and across the railroad tracks to the better lighted
main street of the town. Conscience is definable only in terms, not of
the common, but of the individual human factor. For the David Vallorys
there are no compromises. He either was, or was not, Judith Fallon’s
keeper. Had he been responsible for her development up to a certain
point, the danger point, and had then been blind enough or thoughtless
enough to cast her adrift? One responsibility he could not shirk: from
a time reaching deeply into their childish years his influence over her
had been stronger than that of any one else, her parents not excepted.
How was he to know that her yielding to him had been chiefly sexual,
and that unconsciously he had walked in her path instead of leading her
to walk in his? But even so, was he wholly blameless?
These soul-searching questions kept even step with him on the way to
the hill suburb, and they made the home leave-taking, a little later,
thoughtfully abstracted. It was his promise to his sister to come home
for Christmas, if he could leave his work, that reminded him of another
responsibility; and all the way down to the railroad station he was
hoping that Herbert Oswald would not forget his agreement to be at the
train.
Oswald had not forgotten. He was waiting at the station entrance, and
together they walked out upon the platform. The Chicago express was
bulletined fifteen minutes late, and David was thankful for the brief
extension of time. There was a thing to be said to Oswald, and, finding
no way in which to lead up to it, he plunged bluntly.
“Bert, there is something that I want to say--that I’ve got to
say--before I leave. You’ve been a mighty good friend to us in this
shake-up, and we shall always owe you a lot more than we can pay. But
I’m obliged to be a sort of dog in the manger, right here at the last.
I have a sister, and she is blind.”
“Well?” said Oswald, and his voice was a bit thick.
“You know what I ought to say; what I want to say, and can’t. Lucille
isn’t like other girls; she can’t be. And yet she is just as human as
other girls. You mustn’t go to the house so often, Bert. If you do,
there’ll be an explosion some day, and you’ll never get over being
sorry.”
“I don’t know exactly what you mean,” was the low-spoken reply.
“Then I shall have to tell you in so many words, brutal as it may
sound. With her affliction, Lucille can’t marry, and she--oh, dammit
all--you know what I mean!”
“Do I?” queried the young lawyer, in the same thick voice. “Perhaps I
do, and perhaps I don’t. You might make it a little plainer, if you
care to.”
The belated train had evidently made up some of its lost time; it was
whistling for Middleboro and the roar of its coming was already filling
the air of the calm summer night with thunderous murmurings.
“I will make it plainer. The little sister has taken you on as a
friend. But at the same time you are the only man outside of the family
who has ever taken the trouble to make her life more bearable. Let it
stop at that, Bert; for God’s sake, let it stop at that if you don’t
want to break her heart!”
The train was in; the conductor was calling “All aboard!” and the
Pullman porter had opened his vestibule. Oswald crossed the platform
with David Vallory in sober silence, but at the hand-gripping instant
he found his tongue.
“You may go to your job and rest easy, David. I’m the last man on God’s
green earth who will ever do anything to break your sister’s heart.
Good-by--and let me hear from you.”
VI
The Henchman
The great concrete railroad bridge at Coulee du Sac was nearing
completion, and for David Vallory, who had spent a summer, an autumn,
and the better part of a winter on the work, the closing scenes of his
brief summer stop-over in Middleboro had withdrawn into a past already
taking on the characteristics of remoteness.
In their general aspect the bridge-building weeks and months had been
uneventful, or, at least, unexciting; long working days made short by
a keen interest in his chosen profession; the good will, early won, of
his associates on the engineering staff; clipped words of approval now
and then--progress markers, these--from his chief, Grimsby, a saturnine
man-driver who cracked the whip oftener than he praised, and who seemed
to enjoy to the fullest extent the confidence of the boss of bosses,
Eben Grillage.
Only once in the nine months had David taken time off; a scant
three days in December, two of them travel-spoiled, and the one in
between--Christmas Day, it was--spent with his father and sister in the
Middleboro home. Partly he went to keep his conditional promise to the
blind one; but underlying the fraternal motive there was another. Twice
during the previous summer he had written to Judith Fallon, conceiving
it to be no less than a binding duty. There had been no reply, but
the second letter had been returned to him with the postal legend,
“No such person at the address given,” stamped upon the envelope. His
twenty-four-hour Christmas stay in Middleboro gave him little chance
to make inquiries; but few inquiries were needed. The Fallons had
sold their cottage in Judsontown and moved away, leaving no word by
which they could be traced. Also, there was a story, not vouched for
by David’s informant, that there had been trouble of some sort in the
Foundries offices, with a big Irish foreman smashing his way into Mr.
Thomas Judson’s private room and assaulting its occupant.
With this new barb to rankle, David went back to his work at Coulee du
Sac saddened and depressed, and grievously weighted with the sense
of responsibility. He found no difficulty in believing the story of
the explosion in the Judson offices, and was well able to supply the
missing details. Fallon’s quarrel was the deadliest a father could
have, and the only wonder was that he had not committed a murder.
During his nine months’ isolation at Coulee du Sac, David had met the
Vallory benefactor only a few times; and the benefactor’s daughter not
at all. For the lack of the social opportunity he was grateful rather
than sorry. In the light of the Judith Fallon tragedy he was beginning
to question his right to make love to Virginia Grillage, even if the
magic circle could be broken into; or if not to question the right, to
realize the immense and humiliating barrier which must always exist
between a man with a tragedy in his past and a woman to whom that past
should be as a pane of glass. And the height of the barrier was not
lessened by the thought that, in the last analysis, he was culpable
only to the extent of having been bat-blind to the temperamental
abysses yawning for the Judith Fallons. A great love might condone the
blindness, but no pure-minded woman could ever be made to believe that
it was total.
As to Virginia’s whereabouts during the three-quarters of a year,
David had learned something from Eben Grillage, himself. She had
spent the summer with a party of friends in the Rockies--the farther
Rockies--touring and resting at a small resort hotel known only to the
elect; she had spent the shooting season with other friends in the
Adirondacks; and she had gone to Florida late in the season to escape
the Northern winter.
So much for the slightly wider horizons. In the working-day field,
David had been given the most convincing proof that he had not been
merely placed and forgotten. There had been offerings of ample
opportunity to show what was in him, with pay-roll advances to fit;
and on a March day when Grimsby, the saturnine chief of construction,
called him into the bridge office for a conference, he was given fresh
assurances that he had been accepted as a post-graduate member of the
staff.
“You are a rising young man in the profession, Vallory, and if you keep
on as you’ve begun, you’ll come out at the top of the heap,” was the
complimentary phrase with which the conference began. “You are not like
most of the young fellows I’ve had to hammer into shape; you don’t go
around firing off the proposition that you know it all.”
“I should hope not,” said David. “That sort of thing is the best
possible evidence that a man needs to go to school again.”
“Meaning that we’re all learning all the time?--that’s the idea,
exactly,” said the chief brusquely. “Take it in the use--the modern
use--of reinforced concrete, for example: we are all children going to
school in that field. What we don’t know about it would fill a library.”
“You are right,” David admitted. “I’m learning something new about it
every day.”
“And just because we are still in the apprentice stage, I imagine we go
pretty wide on the side of safety,” Grimsby went on. “That’s natural;
we’re afraid to take our own figures after we’ve made them. Now this
‘mix’ we’re using on this bridge; I’ll venture the cement content could
be cut down twenty per cent and still leave an ample margin of safety.
What?” Then, with an abrupt break: “Sit down and have a cigar.”
David found a three-legged stool and nodded acquiescence to the general
postulate that the use of concrete as a substitute for masonry was as
yet but a babe in arms.
“The quality of the cement is another disputed point,” Grimsby argued.
“There isn’t the least doubt in my mind that we are altogether too
finical about that. We’ve set up a code of theoretical standards;
such and such a degree of fineness, such and such a chemical analysis,
and all that; and yet, after the job’s done, you can’t tell where the
tested stuff ends and the untested begins. Isn’t that so?”
“I couldn’t prove that it isn’t,” said David.
“All right; neither can I. But on this very point we’re continually
having trouble with the railroad people, as you know. We may admit
cheerfully that we don’t know quite all there is to be known about
concrete; but neither do the railroad company’s engineers. Their
inspectors on this bridge are a bunch of cranks; that is the sort of
fault-finders that the ‘party of the first part’ always hires to put on
the job to watch the contractors. If we lived up to the specifications
as they’d like to make us, the Grillage Engineering Company would come
out about a mile deep in the hole.”
Again David Vallory acquiesced. From time to time he had had troubles
of his own with the watch-dog inspectors representing the railroad
company for which the bridge was being constructed.
“You younger fellows are fresh from the laboratories, and you have the
latest word in the testing experiments,” said Grimsby. “That’s why
I’ve called you in for a conference. You’ve been following the cement
tests made in our field laboratory, haven’t you?”
“Most of them; yes.”
“Well, you haven’t seen anything wrong with the stuff, so far, have
you?”
“Never.”
The bearded chief nodded. “That’s the talk,” he said; then he made his
frontal attack without further preface. “You are loyal to your salt,
aren’t you, Vallory? If what they tell me about you and Mr. Grillage is
true, you ought to be.”
“I hope I am,” returned the loyalist, a little at a loss to prefigure
what was coming next. Then he added: “My family owes Mr. Grillage a
greater debt than we can ever hope to pay, if that is what you mean.”
“So I’ve understood. Now we can get down to the nub of the thing.
You’ve heard that the railroad company has hired a new chief engineer,
haven’t you?”
“Mr. Esher? Yes; I met him day before yesterday when he was going over
the work.”
“Esher is his name, and he’s the prize crank of the lot. He has just
thrown out that last shipment of cement on us; says it doesn’t test up
to standard in the railroad lab. It’s all poppy-cock, of course. Some
little-boy chemist on the railroad pay-roll has made a blunder--that’s
all there is to it. Now then; have you been keeping in touch with your
college?”
“Fairly well; yes.”
“Stand in with the professors in the college cement lab.?”
“Yes; I know them all.”
“Good men, are they?--men whose word you’d take in settling a dispute?”
“In proof tests, you mean? Certainly; I’d accept them without question.”
“Good. Here’s what we’re up against. This shipment of cement that
I’m talking about is the material Shubrick was to have used in the
under-water work on Pier Four. We can’t afford to throw it away, and to
save it we’ll have to do a little juggling; but I want you to satisfy
yourself fully beforehand. Take samples of the cement, just as it
stands, and send them to your college for analysis. We’ll keep Shubrick
supplied out of the reserve stock until you get your answer. Better get
the samples off to-day.”
Now all this was purely routine, and David, who had thus been honored
by the confidence of his chief, went about it as a part of the day’s
work. The samples were duly taken and forwarded to the university,
with a personal letter explaining the reason for the requested
analysis. An unbiased opinion was desired, and the letter-writer
ventured to hope that it might be given promptly.
In a few days the answer came, and it was entirely satisfactory.
The samples which had been submitted tested fully up to standard,
and the college authorities were at a loss to understand why any
question should have been raised as to the quality of the material.
David Vallory showed the letter to Grimsby, and was rewarded by the
hard-featured chief’s nearest approach to a smile.
“Now for the needful bit of juggling,” was Grimsby’s comment. “The
railroad people have us by the neck because we have to ship everything
in over their line. But we’ll fool ’em, Vallory. Luckily, the cement
mill isn’t on their line. We’ll send the condemned shipment out
to-night, as if we were returning it to the mill. To-morrow morning you
can slip out on the passenger train and overtake the freight, say at
Little River, on the F. S. & A., where we are building the power dam
for the paper mill.”
David Vallory was staring out of the office window with a small
frown wrinkling between his honest gray eyes. He could forecast what
was coming, and while the cause seemed to be righteous enough,
the expedient to which he was to resort bore all the earmarks of
crookedness.
“And then?” he queried.
“Then you can take a few laborers off the dam--I’ll give you an order
to Bullock authorizing it--shift the cement into other cars, and fire
it back here. When it comes in, it’ll figure as a new shipment, and
you’ll have to doctor the railroad way-bills a bit to make them fit.”
It was the first time in his working experience that David had been
asked to carry out a piece of deliberate trickery, though there had
been other occasions when he had helped to throw dust into the eyes of
the too-critical railroad inspectors. Quite naturally, his point of
view in these smaller deceptions had been that of the men who figured
with him as Eben Grillage’s paid henchmen; but this cement “juggling,”
as Grimsby had baldly named it, had all the characteristics of a crime.
“It’s a rotten shame that we have to get down to such methods!” he
protested. “Let me go to Mr. Esher with the result of these university
tests and Professor Luthe’s letter. Taking them together they ought to
convince him that we’re not trying to put a spoiled batch of cement
across on him.”
Grimsby’s smile was too well guarded to betray his real meaning.
“Esher would turn you down cold. It’s his business to stand by his own
laboratory, of course, and he’ll do it. I didn’t ask you to get this
college analysis with any hope of convincing Esher with it; I merely
wanted you to be satisfied in your own mind. You see what we’re up
against. If we have to throw away that shipment of Portland, it will
mean a good chunk of loss for the Grillage Engineering Company. You
said you owed the big boss something; now’s the time to prove that you
weren’t talking through your hat.”
Thus appealed to, David stifled his qualms; and the next day he carried
out his instructions faithfully and to the letter. The condemned
material was overhauled at Little River and was shunted into the
Engineering Company’s own construction yard at the dam. Here it was
shifted to other cars by Bullock’s laborers, and the juggling process
was brought into play. To the F. S. & A. agent at Little River, David
merely stated a fact. He was shipping three car-loads of cement from
the company’s yard at the dam to the bridge at Coulee du Sac. Would the
agent way-bill them accordingly?
“Ship cement in one day and out the next, do you?” grinned the
railroad man. “Didn’t I see the yard crew shoving these three cars over
to the dam yesterday?”
“These are not the same cars,” said David, and he produced the yard
boss’s memorandum to prove it.
The half-truth, which was wholly an untruth so far as the inner fact
was concerned, succeeded. The cars were billed, and in due course they
reached Coulee du Sac as a new shipment. Just what was to be gained by
the juggling, when the railroad inspectors would be certain to sample
the cement and test it, with probably the same results as those they
had reached before, was not very clear to David Vallory. But one night,
a little farther along, he was given a shock of enlightenment.
The shock was administered by his bunk-shack mate, the engineer in
charge of the under-water work in the caissons; Shubrick by name, and
by training a man who had grown accustomed to many shifts and tricks
in that branch of engineering which is fullest of fatalities. To
Shubrick David Vallory was freeing his mind on the general subject of
over-critical inspection.
“These railroad watchers are getting on my nerves more and more, all
the time!” he complained. “They act as if they think we are a bunch
of crooks, needing only half a chance to scamp this job so that it
will fall into the river with the first train that passes over it. Do
they worry you on the under-water work as much as they do us on the
concreting?”
Shubrick grinned ferociously.
“I’d shut off the air and drown a few of them if they did. Just the
same, David, they’re onto their job all right. You needn’t make any
mistake about that.”
“You say that as if you thought we needed watching. Do you think so?”
This time Shubrick’s grin took a sardonic twist.
“When you are a few years older, you’ll know a heap more, David. Why,
good Lord, man! are you nourishing the idea that this contracting
company is doing business on a philanthropic basis?”
David Vallory shook his head. “You’ll have to diagram it for me, I
guess. We may not be any too honest; I’ve seen some things done that
I’ve wished we didn’t have to do. But that isn’t an admission that
we’re a gang of thieves, to be watched and harried from one day’s end
to another.”
“It’s a fight,” said the older man cynically. “The other fellows tie
us up with a lot of specifications that they know perfectly well would
ruin us if we should live up to them; and, on our side, we live up to
just as few of them as the law will allow. The honor system may work in
college, but it doesn’t get by to any marked extent in business. As far
as that goes, you, yourself, are not as innocent as you look, David.
You worked that little cement juggle the other day to the queen’s
taste.”
“You heard about that?” said David, and it was a mark of the short
distance he had traveled on the road to equivocation that he flushed
when he said it.
“Everybody knows about it--everybody but the railroad people. You
played it mighty fine. What’s puzzling me is the railroad way-bill part
of it. How on top of earth did you contrive to get those way-bills
doctored on the F. S. & A. at Little River? Did you buy the agent?”
The flush deepened under David Vallory’s eyes. The misleading
explanation he had made to induce the railroad agent to bill the
condemned cement as a mill shipment to be transferred from the work on
the dam to that on the Coulee du Sac bridge was the least defensible
part of the transaction, or so it seemed to him.
“The less said about that part of it will be the soonest mended,” he
returned gruffly.
“Well, it was a neat little trick all the way round,” the under-water
boss commented. “If Congdon hadn’t fallen down in the first place, we
wouldn’t have had to work it.”
This was new ground to David Vallory and he said as much. “What did
Congdon have to do with it?” he asked.
Shubrick relighted his pipe, and after a puff or two: “Do you mean to
tell me that you don’t know?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t ask.”
Again the under-water engineer sucked slowly at his pipe. “There is one
of two things, David,” he remarked, after the pause: “you are either
a good bit deeper than I’ve been giving you credit for being--or else
you’re too innocent to be running loose without a guardian. Didn’t
Grimsby tell you how it all got balled up in the beginning?”
“He told me that some railroad chemist had blundered in making the
tests.”
Shubrick’s laugh was soundless. “It was our man Congdon who did the
blundering. After he had made the tests in our own lab., he was ass
enough not to see to it that the railroad chemist didn’t get a whack at
the stuff.”
“Are you trying to tell me that the cement wasn’t up to standard?”
demanded Grimsby’s accessory.
“If you need to be told. It’s a ‘second,’ all right enough; it sets
unevenly, and is otherwise off color; but nobody will ever know the
difference after it’s in place in the bottom of the river.”
For a moment the air of the small bunk shack became stifling and David
Vallory got up and went to stand in the doorway. When he turned back
to Shubrick it was to say: “Then the whole thing was a frame-up, was
it?--to enable us to work off a cheaper grade of Portland in a place
where it couldn’t show up?”
“Of course it was. We have to play even when we can.”
“But I had that shipment analyzed myself. I sent samples of it to the
university.”
“Then you took your samples from the wrong sacks, that’s all. I’m using
the stuff in the caisson, and I guess I know what I’m talking about.
It’s punk.”
“If that is so, why haven’t the railroad people found it out in a
second test?”
“That’s easy. This time Congdon was right on the job and saw to it that
they got the proper kind of samples. You needn’t look so horrified;
the bridge isn’t going to tumble down.”
But more important things than bridges were tumbling down in David
Vallory’s heart and mind at that moment. When a young man has grown up
in an ethical atmosphere the first broad step toward the unethical is
apt to be subversive of a good many preconceived ideas and standards.
After a time he said:
“Shubrick, the frame-up wasn’t altogether on the railroad people. Part
of it was on me.”
“That’s easy, too,” said the older man. “Grimsby was merely trying
to provide you with a good, stout _alibi_; to leave you a nice,
respectable hole to crawl out of in case there should be any future to
the thing. But if you’re really stirred up about it, you are foolish.
Things like that are done every day. We are fighting for our own hand.
The Golden Rule is pretty to look at, but it doesn’t hold water in
business.”
“You’re taking the ground that we are dealing with a condition and not
with principles of right and wrong?”
“Precisely. A man has got to be loyal to something, Vallory: I’m
loyal to my bread and butter; so, too, in the long run, are you, and
ninety-nine other men out of a hundred. Possibly it digs a little
deeper with you. Haven’t I heard you say that you’d willingly go
a mile or so out of your way where Mr. Grillage’s interests are
concerned?--that it was up to you to take long shifts or hard ones, or
anything else that came up?”
“You have.”
“There it is, then. No man living has ever been able to draw the
line absolute between ethical right and wrong and lay it down as a
mathematical axiom. I’ll put it up to you. If you are a fanatical
crank your duty is plain. You know the inside of this cement deal, and
you can show it up if you feel like it and make it cost the Grillage
Engineering Company a pot of money. But you are not going to do any
such asinine and ungrateful thing--you know you’re not. What you’ll do
will be to tell yourself that the particular grade of Portland used is
strictly a matter of opinion between our staff and the railroad’s, and
let it go at that.”
It is altogether improbable that Warner Shubrick regarded himself as in
any sense an _advocatus diaboli_; and it might be even farther afield
to suppose that Grimsby had given him a hint to safeguard the cement
fraud by trying to justify it for his shack-mate. None the less, the
seed was sown and a new point of view was opened for David Vallory.
Given time to wear itself out, the natural indignation arising upon
the discovery that he had been used as a tool in Grimsby’s small plot
became gradually transmuted into something quite different. Shubrick,
in declaring that a man must be loyal to something, labeled a solvent
which has dissolved much fine gold in the human laboratory. The
transition from loyalty to an ideal to loyalty to a cause is not so
violent as it may seem. Hence, it need not be written down as a miracle
that, in proportion as the ideals withdrew, there grew up in David
Vallory a blind determination to be loyal, first, to his salt.