of March, that the newer viewpoint got itself set forth in words.
“I didn’t know what a cramped little circle I’d been trotting around
in all my life until I came up here,” he wrote. “You have to go up
against the real thing in the world fight before you can get your ideas
straightened out, and give things their proper relative values. The
university did nothing for me in that respect, and the Government job
in Florida was a mere anæsthetic. But here I’m doing a man’s work, and
carrying a man’s responsibility. I know you won’t take it as a brag if
I say to you, Dad, that I’ve grown more in the nine months that I’ve
been at Coulee du Sac than I did in the nine years before that. For
the first time in my experience I’m beginning to be able to peep out
over the edge of things, and to grab hold while the grabbing is good.
Incidentally, I’m learning what it means to be loyal to a man who has
been loyal to me and mine, and I know it will please you when I say
that I’ve been able, now and then, to work off a little of the big debt
of gratitude we owe to Mr. Grillage.
“Ordinarily, I should suppose, Mr. Grillage doesn’t trouble himself to
keep tab on the many apprentice engineers that he has scattered around
on his numerous contracts, but I’ve had more than a hint that he looks
my way, now and then. Only yesterday Grimsby was telling me in his
sort of bitter way that he guessed the big boss was grooming me for
something better than I have now. While I’m well enough satisfied with
my present billet, I’m not married to it so that Mr. Grillage couldn’t
divorce me. Anyway, here’s hoping.”
It was only a short fortnight after the writing of this home letter
that David was summoned to Chicago by a telegram from the king of the
contractors, and he went with a light heart, half forecasting another
promotion. Also, he was soberly jubilant over the thought that, by some
happy conjunction of the lucky planets, he might again be permitted to
divide time, at least for one evening, with Virginia Grillage’s retinue
of court-payers.
VII
A Reward of Merit
It was after city office hours when David Vallory reached Chicago,
arriving in obedience to the telegram from headquarters, and he was
preparing to go to a hotel for the night when a brisk young fellow
in livery singled him out to ask his name and to tell him that Mr.
Grillage’s car had been sent for him. In the waiting automobile, to his
unbounded surprise and delight, he found Miss Virginia. The lapse of
something over a year had only made her more ravishingly beautiful in
David’s eyes, and his welcome was all that he could ask--and more.
“You ought to feel highly honored,” she said, making room for him in
the limousine. “I ran away from a houseful of people to come in town
for you.” And then, lest he should be too unreasonably happy: “It is
_so_ good to be reminded of dear, old, study Middleboro again!”
“I wish to goodness I might remind you of something besides
Middleboro,” David complained, laughing; “of myself, for example, or
Palm Beach, or--well, in fact, almost anything. Do you realize that it
is over a year since we last met?”
“I do, indeed. Also, I realize that you have never, by any chance,
written a line or happened to come to Chicago at any time when I’ve
been at home. Or perhaps you’ve been here and didn’t think it worth
while to let me know.”
“Nothing like it,” said David, matching her mood. “I haven’t been in
the city since your father sent me to Coulee du Sac, unless you count
the car-changing times when I went home at Christmas. You don’t realize
that I have become a workingman since I left the Government service. I
have, and I’ve had a laudable ambition to stick to the job and earn my
wages honestly.” Then, as the car began threading its way through the
traffic to the northward: “Where are you taking me?”
“Home, of course; to The Maples.”
“To the houseful of people? I shall disgrace you.”
“No clothes?” she suggested, with a smile that made him tingle to his
finger-tips.
“Absolutely nothing to wear!”
“How shocking! But never mind; I shall tell them all that they are
lucky not to have you in overalls and mining-boots--or don’t you wear
mining-boots on bridges? However, you needn’t worry; you won’t have any
chance to be social, unless it’s at dinner. Father will monopolize you.”
“What is he going to do to me; fire me?”
The limousine had reached the northward lake drive, and the king’s
daughter pressed the bell-push for more speed. “Dinner will be
waiting,” she explained. Then she answered his question. “It’s a
perfectly profound secret, of course, but I really believe you _are_
going to be ‘fired.’”
“That is a nice, comforting thing to be told--just before dinner!” he
laughed. “But my obsequies are of no special consequence; tell me about
yourself. Is the English lord still hovering upon the horizon?”
“Cumberleigh? What do you know about him?”
“Oh, nothing much; I merely heard last summer that you were going to
marry him.”
“When I do, you shall have a handsomely engraved invitation to the
wedding--for the sake of the past-and-gone kiddie times in old
Middleboro. Won’t that console you?”
“I am consoled speechless. Weddings and funerals always affect me that
way, and the Cumberleigh occasion will be both, from my point of view.”
There were some miles of this light-hearted foolishness; brief miles,
to be sure, since the big limousine was both powerful and speedy.
At the end of the miles the car turned in past the gate lodge of a
lakeside estate, an establishment princely in extent, landscaping and
architecture; and the gap which a disparity of worldly possessions digs
between hope and fruition suddenly yawned wide for David Vallory.
“Why the sphynxian silence?” inquired the princess of the
magnificences, gibing amiably at David’s lapse into speechlessness.
“Too much money,” he returned half playfully, waving an arm to include
the display of the Grillage fortune. “I was just wondering what it
means to you, individually.”
“I have often wondered, myself,” was the half musing rejoinder.
“Sometimes I think it means a lot. It grips one that way, now and
again. But there are other times when I’m simply obliged to run away
from it, just to convince myself that I’m not one of the lay figures in
the stage-setting. Can you understand that?”
Her answer gave David another of the ecstatic little thrills. It was
not the first time that she had let him see that the quick-witted,
clear-sighted girl-child of his boyish adulation had been only
overlaid, and not spoiled, by the lavishnesses.
“I think I understand it perfectly,” he assured her. “Money, in and of
itself, is nothing. It is only a means to an end.”
The limousine was stopping under the carriage entrance of the great
house and they had but a moment more of the comradely isolation. It was
the young woman who seized and made use of it.
“I hope you will always remember that, David--and let it be clean
money,” she said soberly; and then, with a quick return to the playful
mood: “Here we are, just in time for dinner. I shall introduce you to
the houseful as my cradle-brother--may I?--and after dinner you may go
your way with father and get yourself properly ‘fired.’”
Drawing pretty heavily upon the simplicities, David won through
the social preliminaries without calling any marked attention to
himself. Miss Virginia’s “houseful” made an even dozen at the rather
resplendent dinner-table, and the naïvely inquisitive young wife of an
elderly stock-broker, who was David’s elbow companion, and who kept
him busy answering childish questions about his profession, saved him
from particularizing too curiously as to the others, though he was
observant enough to note that none of the many competitors he had had
at Palm Beach was among them. At the table dispersal he found himself
at once in the clutches of the master of the house.
“Come on into my den and we’ll break away from all this hullaballoo,”
growled the king of the man-drivers; and when the coveted privacy
was secured: “Pull up a chair and smoke. You’ll find cigars in that
sponge-box, or pipes and tobacco on the mantel. How did you leave the
bridge?”
“We are working on the closing span, and two months more ought to see
the rails down and the trains running over them,” David reported,
settling himself in a deep chair with one of the long-stemmed pipes.
“Now that the cold weather is over, there is nothing to hold us back.”
“Lose much concrete in the freezing?”
“No; very little. We used your idea of tarpaulin coverings and a
perforated steam-pipe and saved practically every yard we put in place.
There was some little kicking on the part of the inspectors, but we got
by with nearly all of it.”
“Huh!” grunted the big man. “A bunch of inspectors wouldn’t be happy if
they couldn’t find something to kick about! That’ll do for the bridge.
We’ll call it a back-number for you and pass it up. I’ve been letting
you alone at Coulee du Sac; wanted to see what you were going to make
of yourself--what you were made of.”
“I hope I haven’t disappointed you too badly,” David ventured.
“You haven’t; if you had, you wouldn’t be here to-night. Now then; are
you ready to tackle something a good deal bigger than an assistant’s
job on a concrete bridge?”
“I’ll tackle anything you give me; though I’m not asking you to push me
any faster or farther than the good of the service will warrant.”
“Don’t you lose any sleep over that,” was the gruff retort. “You’ll
never get any plums from me merely because you happen to be Adam
Vallory’s son. For that matter, the shoe’s on the other foot. I’m
thinking about giving you a hard job--a damned hard job. What do you
know about the Nevada Short Line new-alignment project out in the
Timanyoni country?”
David shook his head in token that he knew little.
“Practically nothing more than the technical articles in the
engineering journals have told me.”
“Well, it’s a right sizable job, and we have the contract. We had a
fellow named Lushing out there as chief, but I had to let him go.”
“Incompetent?” said David.
“No; competent as the very devil. But he welshed; let himself be bought
up by the railroad company.”
“How was that?”
“Just plain crooked; gave us the double-cross; chummed in with the
railroad staff; took favors, and all that. Any time he wanted a special
to run down to Brewster for a night off, he got it--and we paid for it.”
Having his recent experience in mind, David Vallory understood
perfectly. With a man of the Lushing type in charge as chief
constructing engineer there would naturally be no cutting of corners on
the hard-and-fast specifications; no saving of money for the Grillage
treasury.
“It seems to me that plain business loyalty is one of the things you
buy, or ought to buy, with the salaries you pay,” was his disposal of
the Lushing case.
“Lushing is a fise-dog, and he has proved it by going over to the
railroad engineering staff as chief inspector,” rasped the man-driver.
“What do you think about that?--going over to the other side and
carrying with him all the information that his job with us had given
him?”
David was by this time sufficiently partisan to lose sight of the fact
that a discharged man might be excused for taking the first place that
might offer.
“It was unprofessional, to say the least,” was his comment.
“There was more to it than that, but we needn’t go into the
contemptible whys and wherefores,” Grillage went on, with a portentous
frown. “I let him out, and for a month or more we’ve been rocking along
without a chief--and with a man against us who knows all the tricks of
the trade. I’ve called you in to ask if you think you are big enough to
swing the job and hold up our end of the pole. Grimsby says you are.”
David Vallory gasped. It was a tremendous promotion for a young man
less than four years out of college, and he was wise enough to discount
his lack of experience.
“I am only an apprentice, as you might say, Mr. Grillage, and many a
man with my equipment, or more, is still carrying a transit,” he said,
after a momentary pause for the breath-catching. “But I’m going to
leave it with you. If you think I am equal to it, I can only say that
I’ll do my level best not to disappoint you.”
The big man’s laugh was like the creaking of a rusty door-hinge.
“You’re modest, David, and that isn’t the worst thing that can happen
to a young fellow in his beginnings. But I’ve been keeping cases on
you, and I go a good deal on what Grimsby says. He gives you a good
send-off; says you know the engineering game, and can keep your head
and handle men. The Timanyoni job won’t ask for much more, unless
it’s a little of this loyalty you talk about. If you need an older
head, you’ll have Plegg, who’s been first assistant on the job since
it began. Plegg has the age and the experience, and you can lean on
him for everything but initiative--which is the one thing he hasn’t
got. Now we’ll get down to the lay-out,” and he took a huge roll
of blue-prints from its case and began a brittle outlining of the
realignment project in the Hophra Mountains.
David Vallory, still a trifle dazed by the suddenness and magnitude
of the promotion, bent over the drawings and became a sponge to soak
up the details. In the construction of the Nevada Short Line over the
Hophras in the day of the great gold discoveries, haste had been the
watch-word of the builders. With the golden lure ahead to put a premium
upon speed, the engineers had eliminated cuts, fills and tunnels, so
far as possible, and had made the line climb by a series of reversed
curves and heavy grades to the surmounting of the obstacle mountain
range at Hophra Pass.
Now, since the Short Line had become an integral part of the
far-reaching P. S-W. system, a campaign of distance-shortening and
grade-reducing had been inaugurated. There were bridges to be built,
hills to be cut through, tunnels to be driven. Powder Can, a mining
town nestling in the shadow of the mountains, was the center of the
activities, but the work extended for some miles in either direction
from the town, with the heaviest of the hill-cutting and tunnel-driving
climaxing in the big bore which was to form the needle’s eye for the
threading of the mountain range.
Again modestly discounting his lack of experience, David Vallory was
doubtful of his ability to plan and carry out such a vast undertaking
from its inception. But the trail was already broken for him, and he
had only to walk in the technical footsteps of his predecessors. And
with a good assistant who had been familiar with the work from the
first, this should be comparatively easy.
“I’m your man, Mr. Grillage,” he said, after the maps and plans had
been duly considered. “I’ll lean on Plegg, as you suggest, and give you
the best there is in me. I’ll say frankly that I don’t believe I’m big
enough yet to swing a thing like this as a new proposition. But with
the lay-out all made and the work in progress, I ought to be able to
pick it up and carry it to the finish.”
“That’s up to you,” said the big man shortly. “You may take this set
of blue-prints with you and check yourself into the job on your way
to Colorado. Grimsby says you’re good for the engineering end of it,
and I’m taking his word for that. But there is another angle that you
mustn’t lose sight of. It is a big job, and there were half a dozen
bidders. We had to cut mighty close to get in, and any bad breaks on
our part are going to shove the profits over to the other side of the
books and write ’em down in red ink.”
“There mustn’t be any bad breaks; that’s all there is to that part of
it,” said David, with youthful dogmatism.
“That’s the talk. And more than that, we must shave all the foolish
frills out of the specifications. You know how that goes, or, if you
don’t, Matt Grimsby hasn’t done his duty by you. On a job like this the
railroad engineers would have us gold-plate every spike we drive, if
they could. You’ve been in the contracting business long enough now to
know what I mean.”
David made the sign of assent without prejudice to any of the standards
of uprightness and fair play, the undermining of which he was still
far from suspecting in his own case.
“I shall be working for the Grillage Engineering Company, first, last
and all the time,” he asserted. “The company’s business is my business,
and I haven’t any other.”
At this, the contractor-king’s gruffness fell away from him as if it
were a displaced mask.
“There spoke your father, David, and a better man never lived. I was
only trying you out a while back when I said that you needn’t look for
the plums just because you happen to be Adam Vallory’s son. After you
get a little farther up the ladder and find that you have to depend on
the man or men lower down, you’ll be willing to pay high for a little
personal loyalty of the sort that looks an inch or two beyond the next
pay-day. I’m putting you right where I’d put a son of my own, if I had
one, out yonder in the Timanyoni country, boy--and for the same reason.
I want to have somebody on the job that I can bank on and swear by.”
It was the one touch needed to put the fragrant flower of personal
relationship upon the juggler-grown tree of promotion. David Vallory
was still young enough to take the oath of allegiance without
reservations to any master strong enough and generous enough to
command his loyalty, and Eben Grillage could have found no surer way to
light the fires of blind, unreckoning fealty.
“A little less than a year ago, Mr. Grillage, you loaded me with the
heaviest obligation a man can carry. You are adding to it now by giving
me a boost big enough to make a much older man light-headed. I’d be a
mighty poor sort of a son to Dad if I didn’t----”
“Never mind the obligations,” the master broke in, with a return to the
brittle abruptness. “There is an old saying that the quickest way to
make an enemy of a man is to do him a favor. If it isn’t working out
that way in your case, why, so much the better. Now you may go back
to the dinner people, if you want to. I’ve got to dictate a bunch of
letters.” And the king of the contractors jabbed his square-ended thumb
on a push-button to summon his secretary.
VIII
Out of the Past
Dismissed from the presence of the hard-bitted maker of destinies,
David Vallory--not being a devotee of bridge--spent little enough of
what was left of the evening in the manner in which he most wished
to spend it. But at the end of things, when hope deferred was about
to fold its wings and go to bed, Miss Virginia gave her place at the
second whist table to the elderly broker’s juvenile wife, and David had
the reward which comes to those who only stand and wait.
“Well, have you been dishonorably discharged?” she asked, after they
had passed out of earshot of the card players.
“I imagine you know a lot more than I can tell you about it,” he
bubbled happily. “I’m to take an early train to-morrow morning and
vanish, disappear, fade into the western horizon.”
“Are you sorry--or glad?”
“Both. I’ve had a promotion so whaling big that it makes my head swim.
But the place of it is a mighty long jump from Chicago.”
“You didn’t make any use of the nearness of Chicago while you had it
at Coulee du Sac,” she cavilled. Then: “Are you starting west without
going to see your father and sister?”
“I was with them Christmas, as I told you. And I have a plan which
has been simmering while I was waiting for you to get tired of the
whist-game. If the living accommodations in the Timanyoni country are
at all possible, I shall send for Dad and Lucille a little later in the
season.”
“The accommodations are very good. There is a small summer-resort hotel
with cottages on the ridge opposite Powder Can.”
“You have been there?” David asked.
“Once; for a few weeks last summer, or rather early in the autumn, when
the work was just starting. But won’t that be a rather violent change
for your father and sister?--from sleepy old Middleboro to the heart of
the Rockies?”
“Possibly. But there are reasons for believing that it will be
beneficial all around. Dad isn’t entirely well. His heart was never
in the banking business to any great extent, but just the same, the
breaking up of all the old routine is hard for him. A complete change
will do him no end of good.”
“You said ‘reasons’, and that is only one.”
“There is another. How much do you remember about my sister, Lucille?”
“Only that she is blind, and perfectly angelic, and the most delicately
beautiful child that ever breathed.”
“She is all those things yet--only more so. Do you remember Bert
Oswald?”
“Oh, yes; quite well. He is a lawyer now, isn’t he?”
“Even so. Worse than that, he is in love with Lucille, and--er--I’m
very much afraid she is with him--entirely without realizing it, you
know. It’s a pitiful misfortune for both of them. Of course, Lucille
can never marry.”
“Why do you say ‘of course’?”
“With her affliction? She doesn’t dream of such a thing! Herbert has
been very decent about it. I put him on his guard last summer before I
left Middleboro, and he hasn’t spoken--yet. But a day may come when he
will speak, and then, as I have told him, there will be trouble and a
lot of needless wretchedness. That’s why I want to get Dad and sister
away from Middleboro. If they are not where Bert can drop in every few
minutes, it will be different.”
For a time the daughter of profitable contracts did not comment on
the plan, but when she did there was a touch of her father’s shrewd
directness in her manner.
“You are the most frightfully cold-blooded person I’ve ever met,” she
told him. “If you had ever been in love yourself you wouldn’t talk so
calmly about separating these two. What if Lucille is blind? There
have been blind wives, and blind husbands, for that matter, since the
beginning of time. You’re hard-hearted.”
“No,” said David; “I am only trying to be the right kind of a
brother--as I have tried to be ever since that black day years ago when
old Doctor Brown told us that the little sister would never see again.
And your argument falls down at the other end, too. You say, if I had
ever been in love myself.... That has already happened to me, Virginia.”
Her laugh was deliciously care free. “And you have never told me!” she
mocked. “Does she live in Middleboro?--or maybe it’s Florida. Or have
you broken all the traditions by keeping faith with a college widow?”
“No, she doesn’t live in Middleboro or in Florida, and I am very
certain she has never been a college widow. It’s only a pipe-dream for
me as yet, but some day----”
“Some day she will grow tired of waiting and marry somebody else,” was
the brisk retort. “Is she pretty?”
“No; that isn’t the word at all.”
“Beautiful, then?”
“So beautiful that I can’t be with her without going fairly dotty.”
Again she laughed derisively.
“You seem to have all the symptoms, and really I didn’t believe it of
you, David. You have always seemed so solid and sensible.”
“I am both,” he boasted gravely. Then in a quick shift to safer ground:
“You told me once that you enjoyed going out on the work with your
father--is there any chance that you may come to the Timanyoni this
summer?”
“Maybe. I liked it when I was out there last year--for some things.”
“And for some other things you didn’t? What were they?”
“I’d rather not talk about them. But there was one thing.... Do you
know anything about Powder Can?”
“Less than nothing beyond what your father has just told me. He says
it’s a mining-camp.”
“It is worse than the usual mining-camp, or it was when I saw it. It is
the only place where the workmen can go to spend their pay, and you
know what that would mean.”
“I can visualize it pretty well; whiskey, dance-halls and gambling
dens, and all that.”
“Yes. We saw little of it at the hotel; the Inn is quite a distance
from the town and on the other side of the river. But once I went there
with--with a man. I didn’t know where he was taking me--or us; there
was a party of us from the hotel, you know; slummers, you’d call us.”
“I don’t know the man, but he ought to have been murdered,” said David.
“Something like that, yes,” she said. “But that wasn’t what I meant
to speak about particularly. One of the places where he tried to take
us--only we wouldn’t go in--was a dance-hall. There was a girl at the
piano; I could see her from where I was standing on the sidewalk. She
was beautiful, David, and it made my heart ache to see her in such a
place.”