use in making an appeal to the law. As Plegg had pointed out, the
Powder Gap region was far enough distant from civilization to be a law
unto itself. But there was the hope that he might be able to make such
representations to the railroad people, who were the lessors of the
land upon which the town was built, as might induce them to intervene
on the side of law and order. Being thus brought face to face with the
thorny duty, he enlisted Plegg; and after the mess-tent supper they
crossed the basin together to make such a survey of the conditions as
would enable them to present the demoralizing facts in their reality to
the railroad company.
With one of the fortnightly pay-days less than thirty-six hours in
the past there was ample evidence of the malignance of the social and
industrial ulcer. The wide-open resorts were packed with throngs of the
Grillage workmen, and the harvesting of the hard-earned dollars was in
full swing.
“We’ll see it all while we’re about it,” said David; and with Plegg at
his elbow he pushed his way through one of the crowded bar-rooms to
a den at the rear where a faro-game was running, with the circle of
sitters backed by eager gamblers who reached over the shoulders of the
chair circle to place their bets. Outside in the bar there was noise
enough, but here the strained silence was broken only by the clicking
of the counters, the heavy breathing of the men, and the silken whisper
of the cards as the dealer ran them from his box. David let his gaze
sweep the table circle and come to rest upon the forbidding features of
the man who was running the cards; a swarthy, heavy-faced giant with
Indian-like hair, drooping mustaches that only half veiled a mouth of
utter ruthlessness, and eyes that were at the moment as dead as the
pallor showing beneath the Mexican-darkness of his skin.
“‘Black Jack’ Dargin,” Plegg whispered in Vallory’s ear. “He owns and
runs this place, and does his own dealing, but he has another sort of
dive a little farther up the street.”
David Vallory’s jaw was set when they had worked their way out to the
open air.
“It isn’t even a square game!” he gritted. “What I don’t know about
faro would fill a book, but any sober man with eyes in his head could
see that that scoundrel was running a stacked deck! Who is this Dargin?”
“You’ve seen,” said Plegg shortly. “In a way, he’s the boss of this
camp; has a reputation as a ‘killer’ and he has traded on it until he
has everybody ‘buffaloed.’ He is the only faro dealer I’ve ever seen
who would consent to run a game without a ‘lookout.’ He makes a brag of
it; says all he needs is a boy to sell the chips. The woman is the only
human being in this camp who has ever made him take a stand-off.”
“The woman?” said David.
“Yes; I keep forgetting that you’re new. She is another example of
Dargin’s cave-man methods. When the work began here in the Gap last
September, Dargin was about the first man on the ground for the shekel
harvest. He opened this place and a dance-hall, killed a man or two
to get himself properly dreaded, and began to rake in the easy money.
About that time the woman dropped in.”
“God pity her, whoever she is,” was David’s comment.
“It was a curious case,” Plegg went on, as they walked together up
a street blatant with the roistering crowds. “Shortly after the
dissipations had caught their stride a young plunger from somewhere
back east turned up here and took rooms in the Hophra House. As nearly
as I could learn at the time, the young ass was rich--or at least a
rich man’s son--and he had been stung on a Powder Can mining scheme.
He came here to see what he’d been let in for, and he didn’t have any
better sense than to bring his wife along--to such a wolf-den as this!”
“Go on,” said David, with some dim premonition warning him that,
instead, he should have told Plegg to stop.
“I don’t know all the ins and outs of it; or just how much or how
little the woman was to blame. But the upshot of the matter was that
one day, right in the face and eyes of the whole camp, as you might
say, Black Jack backed this young fool up against a wall, stuck a gun
into his face, and gave him a quick choice between passing out there
and then, or buying his life and a chance to vanish by giving up all
claims to his wife.”
“Good heavens!” the listener ejaculated. “Cave-man is right!”
“One of the laws of the jungle that Kipling didn’t mention,” was the
first assistant’s terse summing-up. “Dargin saw something that he
wanted, and that was his way of reaching out and taking it. But now
comes the queer part of it. The young plunger disappeared between two
days, and everybody looked to see the woman take up with Dargin. But
that isn’t what happened. She stayed on at the Hophra House for a few
days and then sent for her father, a poor devil of a machinist who
seemed to be trying to drink himself to death. Either she or Dargin got
him a job at the Murtrie mine, and the two of them set up housekeeping
in one of the mine shacks.”
“Dargin and the woman, you mean?”
“No! the woman and her father. And that’s the way it has been ever
since. Making all due allowances for the time and place, Dargin’s
relations with the woman are the only half-way decent ones he has. The
old man was drunk half the time, so Dargin gave the girl a job playing
the piano in his dance-hall--by way of giving her a chance to earn
an honest living, you’d say. That seems to be as far as it has gone,
except that one day last fall a tipsy ‘hard-rock’ man tried to take
liberties with the girl at the piano, and when she fought him, struck
her. He skipped out, across the range, but Black Jack caught up with
him and shot him.”
David Vallory’s premonition of coming tragedy had been fulfilled long
before Plegg reached this point in his story, but if there had been
any doubt as to the woman’s identity the incident of the “hard-rock”
man would have dispelled it. Oddly enough, the filling-out of Judith
Fallon’s story did not seem to lessen his own feeling of moral
obligation; on the contrary, it increased it. More than ever, as it
appeared, it was needful that Judith should be taken quickly out of the
false position into which her relations, innocent or otherwise, with
the man-killer had placed her.
By this time their progress up the single street of the town had
brought them to another of the resorts; a dance-hall, this, also with
its bar-room annex. There was little room on the dancing-floor for
spectators, and they did not try to enter. But enough could be seen
from the bar to determine the character of the place.
“This is Dargin’s other place,” said Plegg. “It’s the least tough of
any of the Powder Can joints, and the money is made over the bar. If
a man gets too well ‘lit up’ he is thrown out. Most of the women you
see in there are the miners’ wives and daughters. It hurts us chiefly
because it attracts men who would neither gamble nor drink if they
didn’t start in here on a sort of social plane.”
David nodded and was turning away when a hand was laid on his arm and
he wheeled quickly.
“Judith!” he gasped. Then, as Plegg stood aside and pretended not to
see or hear; “My God!”
“Yes,” she said, “’tis ‘Judith’ now, and never ‘Glory’ any more. What
brings you here, Davie?”
“You--partly,” he blurted out. “Put something on and come outside. I
want to talk to you.”
“No,” she refused bluntly; and then, to temper the bluntness: “’Tis no
good it can do now, Davie, and ’twould do you harm. There be tongues to
wag, even in Powder Can, and you’re the chief on the big job.”
“But I must see you and talk with you!” he insisted.
“’Twill do no good,” she repeated. “I’ve made my bed, Davie, and I’ve
got to lie on it.”
The bar-room throng was jostling them as they stood, and David saw the
bartender marking them through half-closed eyes. He fancied there was
crafty suspicion in the look, but at the moment he was thinking chiefly
of the obligation that he must not shirk.
“I shall come again, in daytime,” he said. “You are living on the
Murtrie claim?”
“You must not!” she forbade quickly. “’Twould be--it might be as much
as your life’s worth! Nor must you stay here talking to me. Go now,
or the Plegg man will be asking questions that you can’t answer!” And
with that she slipped aside and lost herself in the throng on the
dancing-floor.
David Vallory was gravely silent on the remainder of the round of
investigation; and Plegg, knowing that something sobering had happened
at Dargin’s dance-hall, respected his chief’s mood. But on the way back
to the construction camp the silence was broken by David himself.
“You saw the woman I was talking to in that place across from the
Murtrie ore yard?”
“Yes, I saw her.”
“Do you know who she is?”
Plegg nodded. “She is the one I was talking about.”
“I know it. And the hound who brought her here? I believe you didn’t
mention his name.”
“It was Hudson--no, that isn’t quite it--Judson; Thomas Judson.”
To the astonishment of the reticent, self-contained first assistant,
David Vallory lifted his clenched hands to the stars and swore
savagely. But as Plegg had respected his chief’s former silence, so
now he respected the wrathful outburst. Farther along, when they
were crossing the tracks in the material yard, David offered niggard
explanation.
“I knew the woman, back home, Plegg; I grew up with her. If ever a man
needed killing, Tom Judson is that man.”
“They were not married?” said Plegg.
“I have no reason to believe that they were. But that doesn’t excuse
Judson.”
“Of course not; it makes it worse--if he was the original sinner.”
“He was,” said David; “but he was not the only one.” And with that he
shut his mouth like a trap and did not open it again until they reached
the steps of their bunk car. Then he said shortly: “I am going up to
Brady’s Cut. You needn’t leave the lamp burning for me when you turn
in; I don’t know when I’ll get back.”
In naming the place to which he was going, David gave the first
assistant only the outward husk of the kernel of truth. As he tramped
his stumbling course over the unevenly spaced cross-ties of the
construction track in the general direction of Brady’s, he was thinking
little enough of the work at the cutting or of anything connected with
the affairs of the Grillage Engineering Company. Taking their revenge
for a long period of banishment into a limbo of things conveniently
pushed aside, the thoughts that had once harassed him into something
like a congestive chill of moral remorse assailed him afresh.
The woman he had unconsciously led up to the brink of the chasm had
not only gone over; she had sunk to a depth perilously near the
bottom. There could be no doubt of what the end would be. For some
inscrutable reason of his own, Dargin, “the killer,” was according her
such a measure of respect as his cave-man attributes were capable of
entertaining for anything in the shape of a woman. But that was the
most that could be said. Poor Gloriana! What a bitter price she was
paying! And with what portion of that price must he, David Vallory, in
justice charge himself?
Reaching the approach to Brady’s Cut, a huge gash torn through the
side of one of the rounded basin hills, David turned to his left and
climbed steadily until he attained the sparse growth of trees crowning
the hill at the edge of the great cutting. Below him the ordered
pandemonium of industry was in full stride. Under the light of masthead
arcs, two mammoth steam-shovels rattled and clanked, the sharp staccato
of their exhaust pipes echoing from the surrounding heights like the
cachinnations of some invisible and mocking giant of the immensities.
Between the shovels rooting like prehistoric monsters into the banks on
either hand, a grunting locomotive pushed its train of dump-cars for
the spoil, moving them so accurately that the circling shovel buckets
to right and left never failed of an empty hopper into which to drop
the three-ton torrent of mingled clay and broken stone.
David Vallory cast himself down at the edge of the cutting with
his back to one of the little trees. The chattering clamor of the
industries floated up to him on a thin nimbus of coal smoke; but when
the senses are turned inward the near and the actual lose their appeal.
Once more the fair structure of David’s imaginings was preparing to
topple--a structure that he had thought Judith’s disappearance from
Middleboro, leaving no trace, gave him leave to rear. But now their
paths had crossed again; she was here, almost within rifle-shot of
the tree against which he was leaning. And in a day or two Virginia
Grillage would come. Was it mere chance, or an avenging fate, that was
about to place him at the converging point of a great happiness and an
equally great reckoning with a past that could never be recalled?
It was far past midnight when he got up and shook himself as one
awaking from a troubled dream. Down on the construction track he saw a
train of flat-cars bringing the two-o’clock shifts to relieve the gangs
which had gone on in the early evening. Above the mechanical clamor
in the cutting at his feet he could hear the upcoming men singing
raucously.
“Bellow it out--it’s little enough you have to trouble you!” he grated,
apostrophizing the singing workmen. Then he turned his steps toward
the distant material yard, avoiding the approaching train, and closing
sullen ears to the noisy human atoms who had no troubles.
XI
Bridge Number Two
Since he was now able to argue from a personal knowledge of the Powder
Can facts, David Vallory was ready to go to the railroad officials
with a plea for intervention and relief. But with his own president’s
visit impending he was unwilling to absent himself for the needful trip
to the railroad headquarters in Brewster. In this small dilemma a bit
of gossip trickling in over the construction line wire from Agorda,
the point at which the new grade diverged from the old, offered an
alternative. There was a right-of-way claim to be adjusted at Agorda,
and the gossiping wire said that the Short Line’s legal representative
had come up from Brewster on the morning train to settle with the
claimants.
Seizing the opportunity, David Vallory boarded an empty material train
backing out of the Powder Gap yards and in due time was set down at the
desolate little junction station at the foot of Mount Latigo. There was
a private car standing on one of the side-tracks, and inquiry at the
telegraph office developed the fact that the right-of-way claimants had
already had their day in court, and Mr. Jolly was in his car, waiting
for the afternoon train to come along and tow him back to Brewster.
Walking down the tracks to the occupied siding, David presented himself
at the door of the private car and was welcomed effusively by a
round-bodied little gentleman with a face like a full moon.
“Vallory, hah!--do I get the name right?--always want to get a man’s
name right--demned awkward to find that you’ve been calling Smith
Jones, when his name is Smith,” bubbled the welcomer. “Sit down--sit
down, Mr. Vallory, and be at home. Of the Grillage Engineering Company,
you say? Big job you’ve got on your hands here--tre-mendous job! How’s
it coming along?”
David Vallory braced himself as one stepping out of shelter into a
blustering March wind. Gusty talkers had always been his pet aversion,
and he seemed to have encountered the original of the type. By taking
persevering advantage of the lulls between the gusts he contrived to
explain his errand. The Powder Can situation was thus and so. The
Grillage company had no jurisdiction, and he understood that the Short
Line company, in its capacity as owner of the town site, might possibly
be able to intervene on the side of law and order. How about it?
“Why, hah! my dear Mr. Vallory! what do you take us for?” cackled the
gusty one. “We’re not an eleemosynary institution, any more than you
are! Why, hah! bless your heart, if we should go into the moral-issue
business in these mountains we’d last as a railroad corporation just
about as long as it would take an indignant State legislature to repeal
our charter!”
“I must have stated the case clumsily, Mr. Jolly; I’m not asking you to
do more than any respectable landlord ought to be willing to do,” David
persisted firmly. “Your property in Powder Can is being put to uses
which were never contemplated when the leases were signed. A public
nuisance harmful to your neighbors has developed, and you ought to be
willing to help abate it.”
“Nothing to be done, I assure you, my dear young man. Those Powder Can
leases are mere matters of form, to enable us to hold what land we may
need for railroad purposes after the new line is opened. I’m not sure,
but I think the consideration was the usual one dollar, or something
of that sort. We can’t police Powder Can for you.”
“All right; we’ll drop the moral argument and take up another,” said
David, stubbornly. “The railroad company has set a time limit on the
completion of this new line. The Powder Can nuisance is delaying the
work.”
“That, hah! is up to your people, Mr. Vallory. The contract provides
for forfeitures if you don’t come within the time limit, and a bonus if
you better it. You can’t stand it on that leg.”
It was just here that David lost his temper.
“I’m not making any charges, Mr. Jolly, but an unprejudiced outsider
might take the view that the railroad company, or some of its
officials, are profiting by the continued existence of a wide-open town
where our men are robbed.”
Instantly the moon-like face of the railroad attorney became a blank.
“No; I shouldn’t make any such charge as that, if I were you,” he
barked. And then, abruptly: “Have you taken this matter up with your
own president? Or are you going it alone?”
“There is no reason why I should take it up with Mr. Grillage. He holds
me responsible for the work, and for the conditions under which we are
working.”
“That’s all very well,” snapped the lawyer. “But if you are ever
tempted to make that charge you speak of, Mr. Vallory, you’d better
think twice. The natural counter-charge would be that your own
officials have a much better chance for a Powder Can rake-off than ours
have. Like yourself, I’m making no accusations; but I’ll say this:
when you see Mr. Eben Grillage next, you ask him plainly what he wants
you to do about this Powder Can business. If he tells you to clean it
up, maybe our people can be induced to help.” Then, as if some secret
spring had been touched, the full-moon face lightened up and the gusty
joviality slipped into place again: “But, hah! that’s enough of these
disagreeable topics. You’re my guest, Mr. Vallory: you’ll stop and take
a noon bite with me, won’t you? I’ve, hah! got a fairly good cook on
the car.”
Wishing nothing less than to be entertained by a verbal March wind,
David Vallory pleaded a press of work, escaped, and was fortunate
enough to catch the loaded material train as it was starting up the new
line. He was soberly depressed, not so much by the lawyer’s attitude,
which he had partially discounted before the interview, as by the seed
which had been planted by Jolly’s retort to his own small outburst
of temper. The thought that his employer and the Vallory benefactor
could be profiting, however indirectly, by sharing with the Powder
Can pirates was grossly incredible--a thought to be cast down and
indignantly trodden upon. Yet it is the fashion of planted seeds to
germinate quite irrespective of the wishes of the soil into which they
have been thrust. David Vallory could not help recalling the brief
reference made to Powder Can as the contractor-king was threshing
out the details with him on the eve of his outsetting: “A tough
mining-camp, running wide-open; but that’s no affair of yours,” was the
curt phrase in which Eben Grillage had dismissed it.
It was on Crawford’s section of the new work that David roused himself
out of the depressive reverie. The material train was rounding a long
curve on the approach to Bridge Number Two, and the engineer checked
its speed to slow for the crossing of the little river on the temporary
trestle just beyond the bridge-building activities. Dropping from the
moving train a few hundred yards from the bridge location, David was
immediately pounced upon by the square-shouldered young athlete who was
driving the work on Bridge Number Two.
“By George! Mr. Vallory--you’re like an angel sent from heaven!” was
the athlete’s enthusiastic welcome. “Bittner has just ’phoned from down
the line that Strayer, of the railroad inspecting force, is on his way
up here in a gas-car. Will you flag him when he comes along and hold
him for a few minutes until I can get back to the bridge?”
David, thinking pointedly of his late encounter with the railroad
attorney, nodded abstractedly. “Yes, I’ll stop Strayer, if you want me
to. But what’s the object--what are you trying to cover up?”
“N-nothing,” Crawford explained hurriedly. “I just want to make sure
that those concrete fellows are carrying out instructions. Strayer’s
got an eye like a hawk, and if so much as a single piece of reinforcing
steel happens to be an inch out of line, he’ll see it and report that
we’re not living up to the specifications.”
“I see,” said David; “go to it,” and he sat down on a projecting
cross-tie end to wait for the railroad inspector’s gas-velocipede to
come in sight.
From the cross-tie waiting-place on the inner side of the long curve
the bridge under construction was in plain view. It was a single
short arch spanning the stream; the false-work and wooden forming
were in place, and from the aërial spout of the distributing tower a
continuous trickle of concrete was pouring into the box-like forms.
David Vallory’s half-absent gaze followed Crawford’s retreating figure.
When it reached the bridge the distance-softened grind of the concrete
mixer and hoist stopped abruptly, and the absent-minded onlooker a few
hundred yards down the line saw Crawford climb to the bridge-head and
wave his arms.
The precise object of what followed was not clearly apparent to a man
thinking soberly of something else. Other figures, silhouetted against
the sky-line, appeared, crawling out upon the forms. When they erected
themselves they seemed to be tamping the concrete into place. The young
chiefs conclusion was the most obvious one that offered. “Humph!” he
muttered, “he’s been letting his ‘mix’ go too dry, and he’s ramming it
so the water will come up. Strayer would jump him for that, of course.”
It was a measure of the distance that one Matthew Grimsby had led David
along the road to “salt” loyalty that he made no mental note to “jump”
Crawford himself for the forbidden practice of ramming dry concrete
into bridge forms; and when the motor-driven inspection car appeared
at the farther end of the curve he got up to flag it. As it chanced,
the big, bearded engineer who was driving the car was no less ready to
stop than David was to have him stop. With the brakes locked he sprang
out and fired his battery.
“I was hoping I’d find you somewhere this side of the Gap,” he rasped.
“There’s no use talking, Vallory, you fellows have got to hew closer to
the line or you’ll hear something drop. If you think, because Lushing
happens to be away, you can put something across on us every day or
two, you’ve got another guess coming.”
“I’ve met you before, Strayer,” said David, with his slow smile. “I
worked with a round half-dozen of you all last summer and fall in
Wisconsin. What’s gone wrong now?”
“That fill at Havercamp’s. The specifications call for solid work
on the fills. Your man is burying unbroken chunks of clay in that
embankment as big as he can pick up with his steam-hog. The first heavy
snow that melts back of that fill will make it look like a toboggan
slide!”
“We’ll look into the Havercamp fill,” said David mildly. “Anything
else?”
“Yes; the cutting just below Havercamp’s, where they’re getting the
spoil for the fill. I asked the foreman just now if he considered that
the lower side of the cutting was worked back to the required angle.
He said that he did, and it was; but when I put my instrument on it, I
found that there is still a good six-foot slice to come off. It won’t
do, Vallory; you’ve got to quit this business of cost-shaving at every
twist and turn that offers.”