to imagine the kind of man who would take you to such a place as that!”
“He isn’t worth imagining,” she asserted quietly. “But I was speaking
of the girl. She was playing for the dancers, you know, and just in the
little minute that we were standing there, a big quarryman broke out
of the circle and--and put his arm around her neck. It was horrible.
She fought like a tiger, but the man was too strong for her. He struck
her ... with his fist.”
David shook his head. “Why are you making yourself remember all this?
It’s just painful, and it can’t do any good. It was a shame that you
had to see it.”
“That is foolish,” she reproved gravely. “We are not living in the
Victorian age, David, and the shame wasn’t in my seeing it. The dancing
stopped, of course, and the men in our party, or some of them, rushed
in and interfered. The girl was carried out; the brute’s blow had
knocked her senseless. She was taken home and we did what we could for
her. The next day I went to see her.”
“That was like you, Virginia, only----”
“Only what?”
“I won’t say that you ought not to have done it; you know best about
that; but----”
“I had to go, David. There was a--a sort of obligation, you know. She
was one of our Middleboro girls. I didn’t know her, but I remembered
seeing her as a little thing. Perhaps you knew her; her name is Judith
Fallon.”
If a bomb had been suddenly exploded under David Vallory he could
scarcely have been more completely unnerved and shaken. They were
sitting in a window alcove a little apart from the bridge players, and
the looped-back curtains dimmed the lights in some measure--for which
he was thankful. But Virginia Grillage seemed not to have noticed his
gasping start at the mention of Judith’s name, and she went on soberly.
“As I say, I had to go, and I found that things were not quite as bad
as they seemed--though they were bad enough. The girl had lately lost
her mother, and she was keeping house in a little three-room shack
for her father, a mechanic in the Murtrie Mine. I didn’t see him,
of course, but from what Judith said I gathered that he had taken
to drinking after the mother’s death. You’d say he must have gotten
pretty low, to let his daughter earn money by playing the piano in a
dance-hall.”
David recalled the John Fallon he had known; a rough-cast, unlettered
man, but a skilled mechanic and thrifty.
“I knew him well,” he said; adding: “There was some trouble--family
trouble, I think--before the Fallons moved away from Middleboro. I
heard something about it when I was home for Christmas.”
“It’s the conditions in Powder Can,” she averred; “and for those the
new work on the railroad is responsible--an army of workmen with money
to throw away. Judith, and probably her father, are neither better nor
worse than other people with their point of view. It isn’t fair to such
people to permit the conditions.”
“I quite agree with you,” he rejoined hastily. “I don’t know how much I
shall be able to do, as chief of construction, but from what you have
been telling me it is evident that this plague spot right at our doors
ought to be cleaned up with a strong hand.”
“Does that mean that you are going to reform things out there, David?”
“Whatever needs reforming, yes; if I can.”
“I wish you might say that and mean it, knowing all that it implies,”
she returned, half musingly.
“What does it imply?”
The card players were rising, and there was a sputtering rapid-fire of
motors in the driveway.
“That,” she said slowly, “is something you must find out for yourself,
if you can--and will. Now I must go. People will want to be telling
me what an exquisite time they’ve had. You say you are leaving early
in the morning? Then I will say good-night and good-by. The hall man
will show you your room. Give my love to your father and sister when
you write, and don’t, for pity’s sake, drag them away out yonder to the
ragged edge of nowhere!”
IX
Silas Plegg
Powder Gap, a hill-studded basin where the Powder River, leaping down
from the high watershed of the upper range, gathers itself for the
swift rush to its emptying into the Timanyoni forty miles away, lies
like a half-closed hand in a gorge of the Hophras, with the upturned
fingers and thumb postulating the surrounding majesties of mountain
peaks, and the forested hills and ridges figuring as the callouses in
the palm.
At the foot of one of the callouses lies the mining hamlet of Powder
Can; once, in the day of the early mineral discoveries, a plangent,
strident nucleus of excitement, but--in the phrase of its oldest
inhabitant--a “has-been” at the time of David Vallory’s advent, with
a few deep shafts and winding drifts out of which day-laborers,
unenthusiastic successors of the early discoverers and plungers,
winched or wheeled a few monthly car-loads of low-grade ore.
In some measure the Nevada Short Line’s track-changing activities had
brought a return of the plangencies. Scattered construction camps with
their armies of workmen dotted the basin above and below the mining
town, and once more saloons and dance-halls and gambling places sprang
up and did a thriving business on real pay-roll money. Eben Grillage’s
attitude toward these absorbents of the money he paid out for labor had
ever been that of the closed eye. To all appeals for the betterment of
conditions in the humanitarian field he had a stereotyped reply: “The
Grillage Engineering Company is strictly an industrial proposition. It
does not undertake to say how its employees shall spend their time or
their money when they are off duty.”
On the summit of a ridge diagonally opposite Powder Can the prospective
millionaires of the mining-camp had, in the day of magnificent
expectations, laid out a suburb for the future city, and in token of
their faith in the future had built a log-house hotel with appropriate
cottages. For some years after the collapse of the mining boom the
hotel had remained closed; but with the nearer approach of the railroad
it was reopened, with a few families from Brewster as the groundwork of
the guest structure, and some small sprinkling of tourists to come and
go during the season.
For a month or more after his arrival in the Hophra basin, David
Vallory saw little of Powder Can the town, and still less of the
log-built inn on the top of the adjacent ridge. New to every phase
of the track-changing project, he had scant time even for eating and
sleeping. At a dozen different points on the new location the work was
driving at top speed; here and there bridges in process of construction
over the swift mountain stream; numerous hill cuttings where great
steam-shovels clashed their gears and chains from shift to shift
throughout the twenty-four-hour days; prodigious fills growing foot by
foot with the dumped spoil from the cuttings; and, last but by no means
least, the projected tunnel under Powder Pass which was inching its way
from both sides of the mountain in gigantic worm-gnawings through the
granite.
During this strenuous preliminary period in which he was striving to
gather the multiplicity of working threads into his hands, David lived
in the bunk trains and mess tents, getting in touch with the various
units of the laboring armies, and absorbing the details as a thirsty
dog laps water. To his great satisfaction he found his staff largely
composed of young men eager to make a record; eager, also, to pledge
fealty to a chief who was himself young enough to be still in the
process of winning his spurs. Plegg, the first assistant, was the
single exception to the youth of the staff. He was a man of middle
age, and at their first meeting David was struck with a vague sense
of familiarity; an elusive impression that he had somewhere in the
memory files a picture of the senior assistant’s weathered face, with
its clipped beard, shrewd eyes and thin-lipped mouth about which a
half-cynical smile played so often and so easily as to become almost an
added feature.
“Have we ever met before, Mr. Plegg?” he had asked, at that first
meeting; and the mildly sardonic smile had immediately fallen into
broader lines.
“Once, Mr. Vallory; on a fine June morning nearly a year ago. It was
in a Pullman sleeper, back in God’s country; and, if I recall it
correctly, I told you you would go far if you were not too good. You
are fulfilling my little prophecy very handsomely; and incidentally
we are both proving the truth of that old bromide about the extreme
narrowness of the world we live in. I’m glad to have you for my chief.”
It was Silas Plegg who did the most toward helping the new chief in
the absorbing of the details, and David Vallory early acquired a great
and growing respect for the technical gifts of his first assistant.
The organization of the engineering staff, and of the rank and file,
was fairly geniusful, the hand of a master being evident in every
disposition of the huge working army. David weighed and measured,
studied and observed; and at the end of the preliminary month was ready
to give credit where credit was due.
“Plegg, you are too good an engineer to be anybody’s assistant,” he
said, one evening after they had finished a round of the night-shift
activities and had returned to the cramped quarters of the small bunk
car which they shared together. “Why didn’t Mr. Grillage give you this
job after Lushing quit?”
Plegg’s smile was grim.
“If I were really as cynical as you think I am, I might hint that
possibly Mr. Grillage had a young man in his eye whom he wished to give
a shove up the ladder. But I’ll stand it upon another leg. Mr. Eben
Grillage is an excellent judge of men; and he knows me of old.”
David shook his head.
“That ought to be your very best recommendation. What have you ever
done to make him pass you up in the promotion scheme?”
“It was something that my ancestors did--if you believe in heredity.
They gave me the qualities of a good follower and neglected to include
the saving moiety of leadership--that’s all. But speaking of Mr.
Grillage; did you know he is on his way out here?”
David had not known it and he said so. “How did you hear?” he asked.
“Such news always travels ahead of a man of Mr. Grillage’s importance
in the scheme of things. I heard it from one of the clerks at the Alta
Vista Inn. The big boss has wired ahead for a double suite.”
The double suite could mean only one thing, and David’s pulses
quickened after the most approved fashion of pulses in such case made
and provided.
“He is bringing Miss Virginia with him?” he queried.
“Most likely. She chums with her father a good bit--when she isn’t too
busy otherwise. Ever meet her?”
David Vallory admitted the fact affirmative but did not dilate upon it.
“She is a pretty good little engineer, herself,” Plegg went on. “She
was out here last fall, and it was whispered around at the Inn that
Lushing had the colossal nerve to make love to her.”
“But that wasn’t the reason why he was dropped?” said David, willing to
learn something more of the rise and fall of his predecessor.
“Nobody knows; but it may have had some bearing. Mr. Grillage never
had much use for Lushing as a man, but he was--and is--a cracking good
organizer; a man who could squeeze a profit out of a job on a bid that
had driven every other contractor out of the field. It was a fairly
open secret around here last fall that Miss Virginia turned him down
hard; and after that he began to sell us out to the railroad company.
Basing the notion upon the Inn gossip about him and Miss Virginia, our
fellows were not slow to charge his treason to pure vindictiveness.”
David Vallory was wiser now than he had been when he began as a working
assistant on the Coulee du Sac bridge.
“What did he have to sell, Plegg?” he asked.
Plegg closed one eye and his habitual smile showed his strong, even
teeth.
“Little tricks of the trade,” he answered obliquely. “You are the chief
on the job now, and if you don’t know what they are, you can say that
you don’t, and swear to it.”
“You mean that we are not giving the railroad company a square deal?”
Again Plegg’s reply took the diagonal instead of the direct line.
“We are giving them all they are paying us for. Of course, they are
not satisfied; no party of the first part in a contracting deal ever
is. And now that Lushing has gone over to their side of the fence,
we’ve had trouble on top of trouble. If you’ll take a word of advice
from an older man and a subordinate, you’ll stay out of it. In fact, I
think that is what Mr. Grillage expects you to do.”
At the moment, David did not attach any special importance to this
remark of Plegg’s about Mr. Grillage’s attitude. But if he could have
turned the leaves of the book of days backward to the night of his stay
at the lakeside mansion of the lavishnesses, the explanation would have
synchronized itself quite accurately with his retreat to his room in
The Maples and the departure of the last of the bridge-playing dinner
guests.
At the door-closing upon the final couple, Miss Virginia had sought
her father in his den. By this time the private secretary had been
dismissed and the king of the contractors was alone.
“Hello, Vinnie, girl!” he rumbled. “Come to tell the old daddy
good-night?”
“Partly,” was the crisp rejoinder. “But mostly it’s about David. You
have decided to send him to the Timanyoni, in spite of my little
protest?”
Eben Grillage’s laugh resembled nothing so much as the rasping of
circular saws, but he meant it to be good-natured. He could hold no
other attitude toward the daughter whom David, in his talk with his
father, had characterized as the apple of his eye.
“You women are too much for me, Vinnie. You like David, and you want
to see him get ahead. But when I hunt out a good place for him, you
suddenly take a notion that you don’t want him to have it. What’s the
particular reason?”
It was at this point that the young woman had taken a chair at the
opposite side of the broad working table where she sat facing her
father.
“If I thought I could make you understand,” she said, half musingly.
And then: “I do like David and I respect him. It seems such a needless
pity to spoil him, don’t you think?”
“What do you mean by spoiling him?”
“You know perfectly well what I mean. He has his own ideas of
uprightness and common honesty--or he did have them before he went to
work for the company--and they are the right ideas. How long is he
going to be able to keep them if you put him in charge of the work in
Powder Gap and make him responsible for all the crooked things that are
being done?”
“That’s a pretty hard word to fling at your old daddy, Vinnie. Has it
reached the point where you can call your father’s business crooked? If
I had known that the colleges were going to put that kind of a fad into
your head, they wouldn’t have got any of my money--not in a thousand
years.”
She shook the head in question despairingly.
“How often must I say that it wasn’t the colleges. It is in the air.
A new era is dawning, if we only had eyes to see and ears to hear. As
a people we had forgotten that there was such a thing as an American
conscience. Some of us are remembering now.”
“Some few impractical college professors and fanatics are making
mountains out of molehills!” was the grumbling retort. “You mustn’t
be foolish, Vinnie, girl. Competition is the life of trade, and
competition means a fight. If we don’t do the other fellow--within
reasonable business limits, of course--he’ll do us, and we’ll all go to
the poor-farm.”
“We have been over all that before, many times,” said the young woman,
with a touch of weariness in her tone. “I don’t ever hope to make you
see it as I do--as I can’t help seeing it--but I shouldn’t be your
daughter and a Grillage if I refused to make a fight for David.”
For some little time the grizzled giant in the wide-armed chair made
no reply. He had picked up a paper-knife and was absently passing it
through his thick, square-ended fingers in the manner of one testing
the keenness of an edged tool. Finally he said: “Is David the man,
Vinnie?”
She did not affect to misunderstand him.
“There isn’t any ‘the man’ yet. I like the grown-up David, partly
because he has kept the promise of the little-boy David, and partly
because he is so different from the others. He needs an alert,
wide-awake sister to look after him much more than he does a wife.
Besides, he’s already in love with--some girl.”
The father’s chuckle was good-naturedly derisive.
“That’s sheer girl-talk--the sisterly business, and the other--and it
isn’t like you to try to throw dust, Vinnie. We’ll clear the air in
that quarter, once for all. I haven’t any objections. David’s a good
boy; a good son of a mighty good father. If he inherits some of Adam’s
finicky notions, I suppose that can’t be helped. He’s as poor as Job’s
turkey, but I can make him a rich man for you if you don’t insist on
chucking too many stones in front of the wheels. You can’t marry a
poor man, you know; you haven’t been brought up right.”
It was just here that the daughter of profitable contracts showed her
first touch of warmth.
“You have some other reason for sending David to the work in Powder
Gap,” she said accusingly. “You know you have always made it your boast
that you never mix business and sentiment.”
“Maybe this was one time when business and sentiment happened to trot
in double harness”--with a grim smile. “If you’re figuring on being a
contracting engineer’s wife some time, you’ll have to throw away some
of your highbrow college notions and get down to the practical things.
One way and another, we’ve been getting in Dutch with the railroad
people out yonder on the Short Line. You know that, don’t you?”
“I know there has been quarreling almost from the beginning.”
“Well, Ford, the president of the P. S-W. system, contends that we have
a set of crooks in charge out there--this in spite of the fact that
some understrapper of his on the ground has hired Lushing, the biggest
of the crooks. Ford knows David’s family, and the straight-backed
honest old stock there is in the Vallorys. I’m killing two birds with
one cartridge. With Adam Vallory’s boy in charge for us at Powder Gap,
Ford may rest easier, and maybe he’ll make it a little easier for us.
And, by giving David his boost, I’m fixing it so you won’t have to
marry a poor man.”
“I’m not talking about marrying; I’m talking about the soul of a man,”
was the quick retort. “It is in your hands to keep David Vallory true
to his ideals, or to make him like other men who have one conscience
for their personal relations and another for business. David is more
loyal to you than your own son would be, if you had one; after what
you did for his father last summer he would go through fire and water
for you. It isn’t right or just for you to use so fine a thing as his
gratitude and make it the means of his undoing!”
Again the big man in the opposite chair fell silent. When he spoke
again it was to say:
“You’re all wrong, Vinnie, girl; wrong and a little bit wrought up. You
are carried away by your own impossible notions of the golden-rule in
business, and all that--things that you know about only by hearsay. You
won’t take it amiss if the old daddy has his notions, too, will you?
Just the same, we’re chums, little girl, and we won’t fight about a
little thing like that. I’ll see to it that David doesn’t have to stick
his fingers into the tar-barrel, if that’s what you want. Now run
along to bed.”
The upshot of this heart-to-heart talk between the father and daughter
had been a letter to Silas Plegg, which followed David Vallory so
promptly in his westward flight as to be in the first assistant’s hands
when he made his introductory round over the big job with the new
chief. It was a letter to be read, remembered, and burned; but if David
Vallory could have seen it, it would have explained Plegg’s attitude,
and many other things which grew more and more puzzling as time went
on.
X
The Miry Clay
Having himself so recently made the journey from Chicago to the
Timanyoni, David Vallory knew that he could count upon at least two
clear days in which to gather up the loose ends and otherwise to
prepare his huge working machine for a critical inspection by the
president of the company. To that end he called a conference of the
members of his staff and applied the spur. The big boss was coming, and
it was up to them to show him the machine in perfect working order. If
there were any loose ends, now was the time to tie them in.
“There’s only one thing that I’d like to see changed,” said Crawford,
the grading expert who had charge of the line building on the lower
end of the cut-off; “that is this crazy practice of paying off every
two weeks instead of once a month. I count on at least a ten per
cent reduction in my gangs for two or three days after every second
Saturday--which is about the length of time it takes the high-rollers
to get rid of their money in the Powder Can dives.”
“Leaks of that kind are precisely what we are trying to find and stop,”
the new chief broke in. “Any suggestions?”
There were several made by different members of the staff, but they
were all variations upon the same theme, namely, some method by which
the too-frequent pay-days might be abolished.
“I’m afraid the twice-a-month basis will have to stand,” was David
Vallory’s decision. “I talked that matter out with Mr. Grillage before
I left Chicago. He is opposed to the fortnightly pay-day, but he has
been forced to establish it on all of his contracts because other
companies have adopted it, and if we don’t keep step we lose our men.”
“Zat Powder Can--she is one blot on zee face of zee eart’!” spat out
Regnier, the fiery little French-Canadian engineer who was handling the
gangs in the rock cuttings.
David Vallory nodded. “I’m new to this country,” he admitted. “Are
there no laws by which these man-trappers can be put out of business?”
It was Plegg who made answer to this.
“The sheriff’s writs don’t run this far from the nearest court-house.
What is everybody’s business is nobody’s business. Besides, the
man-traps and the construction camps have gone hand-in-hand ever since
the beginning of time.”
“There is no reason why they should continue to do so to the end of
time,” David cut in. “If the Powder Can lawlessness is holding us back,
we must clean it up.”
Plegg shook his head. “That’s easier said than done. The town is on its
own, and it gets its revenue chiefly from our pay-rolls. The mines,
with the single exception of the Murtrie, don’t amount to anything.”
“Maybe the railroad people would help us out,” suggested Altman, the
smooth-faced, young-looking mining engineer who was directing the
granite boring in the east-end tunnel heading. “Somebody told me once
that nearly all of the town is built on land leased from the railroad
company.”
“I’ll look into this Powder Can business, myself,” said David, as the
conference broke up. “The thing that’s biting us just now is the need
to show Mr. Grillage a clean slate when he comes. He knows good work
when he sees it, and I don’t want to have to begin making excuses the
minute he lights down in Powder Gap. Go to it and key things up to
concert pitch.”
With the great machine grinding merrily under this new impetus, David
Vallory did look cursorily into the Powder Can situation, stealing
time from the strenuous activities to make inquiries as to what might
be done. Up to this time, when the doing of something began to urge
itself baldly as an industrial necessity, he had been postponing action
in this particular field, excusing himself upon what seemed to be the
perfectly justifiable plea that the mining-camp man-traps and their
curbing or abolition were matters outside of the line of his duties;
a view which he knew to be in strict accordance with that of the
president of his company. It was not that he meant to adopt the policy
of the blind eye in principle. His promise to Virginia Grillage forbade
that. But the excuses had opened the door to postponement.
Such were the surface indications of the vein of reluctance; but
deeper down there was another reason for the postponement. Not at
any time since his arrival had David forgotten that Judith Fallon
was most probably still living in Powder Can. If he should chance to
meet her--which was not at all unlikely--the entire question of his
responsibilities--a question which the lapse of time, and the growing
hope that he might one day win the love of Virginia Grillage, had
pushed into the background--would be reopened.