Vallory’s good-natured retort; “I admit it. When you find anything
wrong, we correct it, don’t we? And you’re here to find the wrong
things, aren’t you? If we should toe the mark all the time, you’d be
out of a job. I’ll look after the cutting. What next?”
“Next I’ll have a squint at this bridge of Crawford’s. When you fellows
take to pouring concrete, you need to have a man standing over you day
and night. If you’re headed my way, get on the car and I’ll give you a
ride.”
David Vallory accepted the invitation, climbing into the second seat of
the three-wheeled car. At the approach to the temporary wooden trestle
over which the construction track ran, the car was halted and they
crossed to the new structure.
The machinery was grinding again by this time and David Vallory
stood aside while the railroad engineer went carefully over the job.
The big, bearded inspector took nothing for granted. The “mix” was
examined, samples of the cement were taken, a handful of the sand
was put into a bottle with water, shaken, and allowed to settle to
determine its purity. On the work itself nothing escaped him; he even
counted the steel reinforcing bars whose ends stuck up out of the
rising tide of soft concrete, checking the number against the figures
in his field-notes.
“Something radically wrong here,” he grinned, when the final item had
been checked. “It’s the first time I haven’t found Jimmy Crawford
trying to put something over on me. What’s the matter, Jimmy--got
religion?”
“Sure!” said Crawford, with a sly wink for his chief. “Didn’t you know
Mr. Vallory holds revival meetings in his bunk car every little while?
You ought to come up some night and we’ll convert you.”
“I’m going up, right now,” Strayer announced; and it was thus that
David got a motor-car ride all the way to the Gap, the railroad
watch-dog enlivening the journey with additional criticisms as they
went along.
It was after they had reached the headquarters camp, and David had
invited the railroad man into his office bunk car for an intermission
smoke, that the bluff inspector dipped abruptly into the personalities.
“I like you, Vallory,” he said, “and I’ve been wondering for a solid
month how you ever came to tie up with this Grillage outfit. Would you
mind telling me?”
“Not in the least. Mr. Grillage and my father are old friends; they
were schoolmates.”
“That stops me dead,” was Strayer’s rejoinder. “I shan’t say any of the
things I was going to say.”
“It needn’t stop you,” was David’s surrejoinder.
“But it does. Under such conditions you have personal relations with
Father Eben; you can’t help having them. And that reminds me, he is in
Brewster now, on his way up here. Did you know he was coming?”
“Yes; I heard of it through the hotel people.”
“He’s got his daughter with him. Did you know that?”
“Not positively, no.”
“Leaving her father entirely out of it, she’s a mighty fine young
woman,” said Strayer. “I met her when she was here last September. She
didn’t seem to think that a railroad inspecting engineer was merely a
new kind of dog to be kicked off the door-step.”
“Neither do I,” David asserted. “You think we are a bunch of crooks on
our side, and we know you want to get something for nothing on yours.
There needn’t be anything personal about it.”
The big man’s grin bared a marvelously fine set of teeth.
“You _are_ crooks, Vallory; so crooked that it would break a snake’s
back to try to keep up with you. If Eben Grillage wasn’t your father’s
friend, I’d say that he ought to have a middle name beginning with the
letter ‘S’ for----”
“But he is my father’s friend--and mine,” interrupted David, with a
little of the emphasis belligerent on the verb.
“Sure! I’ll quit. And to make up for the implied slam, I’ll give you
a little pointer, Vallory. This business of systematically dodging
specifications has about run its course, and it’s going to get you
in bad. Our people have been taking it rather easy and contenting
themselves with checking you up in spots and making you make good. Do
you get me?”
“I’m listening.”
“All right. That was the way it ran along at first. But now it’s
beginning to be whispered around in our headquarters that the Grillage
company is out for blood on this contract; that no amount of
inspection can keep you from skinning us alive--which the same you are
doing. That isn’t a healthy state of affairs, and it ought to be cured
before the whisper spreads, let us say, to the Executive Board in New
York. Are you on?”
“No,” David challenged stubbornly. Then he fell back upon the seller’s
time-worn argument: “You are getting all you pay for, and more.”
“Enough said,” laughed Strayer, getting up to go. “No offense meant,
and none taken, I hope. But you say Mr. Grillage is your friend,
and--well, it’s just a word to the wise, that’s all. So long, till I
see you again.”
Somewhat later in the day, returning from a trip to Brady’s Cut, David
paused on the sheltered side of the office bunk car to light his pipe.
A window was open, and he heard voices within; the voices, namely, of
young Jimmy Crawford and Silas Plegg. Crawford had come to camp for a
missing detail drawing of some part of Bridge Number Two, and Plegg was
getting it for him out of the blueprint locker.
“A close squeak,” Crawford was saying. “If Bittner hadn’t been
thoughtful enough to ’phone, I’d have been caught red-handed. I lost my
head for a minute and ran down the track to flag Strayer, meaning to
choke the big stiff if I couldn’t think of any other way of keeping him
off. Just then the material train came along and the boss dropped off
right at my feet. He was a Godsend, and I used him, got him to stay and
flag Strayer while I ran back and got busy.”
Then Plegg’s voice: “Did you tell Mr. Vallory what you were going to
do?”
“Not hardly!” was Crawford’s laughing denial; “not after the song and
dance you gave us fellows a while back, just after the boss came on the
job. I just told him that Strayer was coming, and that I’d like to have
him hindered until I could make sure everything was ship-shape for an
inspection. He seemed to be thinking pretty hard about something else,
but he was good-natured enough to sit down on a tie-end and wait for
Strayer.”
David’s pipe was alight and he moved away. What he had overheard merely
confirmed his former assumption that Crawford had been tamping dry
concrete to make it appear wet, and he thought no more of it. But if
his match had gone out and he had been obliged to light another on the
windless side of the bunk car....
Plegg seemed to be having trouble in the search for the missing
drawing, and Crawford rattled on.
“When I got back to the bridge I turned the whole gang loose on the
stage-setting. It was some swift job, believe me, and I didn’t know
what minute Strayer’s car’d come chugging around the curve. I’ve got
so I keep a bunch of short steels handy, and we stuck ’em up in the
concrete to look as if they grew there. Strayer counted ’em when he
came, as he always does, and they checked out right, of course. But
say, Plegg, if he’d touched one of the dummies it would have tumbled
over! The concrete had been running a bit thin, and it was all we could
do to make the short pieces stand up long enough to be counted. As it
was, two or three of ’em fell down just as Strayer and the boss were
climbing to their places in the inspection car. That’s why I say it was
a close squeak.”
This, then, was what David missed by not having to light a second
match. Instead of a practically harmless ramming of dry concrete,
Crawford had been covering up another item of the cost-cutting. One of
the commonest economies in concrete construction is the scanting of
the steel which binds the mass together and adds its strength to that
of the cement. The contract specifications called for a stated number
of these bars in Bridge Number Two. Following the Grillage practice,
certain of these bars had been left out--to save their cost. Crawford
had made his dummy bars figure as permanences for Strayer, and the
trick was turned.
But of all this David Vallory knew nothing; and since his pipe was
now drawing freely, he mounted to the cab of one of the construction
locomotives to have himself conveyed to the tunnel mouth on the eastern
slope of the great mountain.
XII
Under the High Stars
It was in the evening of the day in which David Vallory had been
twice told that his president was on the way to Powder Gap that the
stub train forming the connecting link between the main line and the
construction headquarters came in with a private Pullman for a trailer.
David was four miles away, in the eastern heading of the big tunnel,
at the moment, but the service telephone line quickly transmitted the
news of the big boss’s arrival. An hour farther along, after a hurried
supper in the mess-tent at Brady’s cut, David took a short path across
the basin and climbed the forested ridge to the Alta Vista Inn.
He had his reward for the haste, the primitive meal, and the rapid
climb when he came in sight of the Inn and its rustic porches. The
radiant daughter of profit-gaining contracts was there in visible
presence; David singled her out instantly among the people lounging on
the westward-facing porch. She stood at the railing, leaning against
one of the rough tree-trunk porch pillars and gazing out upon the
sunset which was painting itself in colorings known only to the high
altitudes. David drew near, treading softly. It was a lover’s fancy
that the glories of the sunset were reflected in the starry eyes, in
the ripe lips parted a little as if in the rapture of the vision, and
in the warm tintings of neck and cheek.
When he finally stood beside her she gave him her hand without loosing
her eye-hold upon the crimson-shot glories.
“Isn’t it perfectly exquisite!” she breathed, accepting the fact of his
presence quite as if their parting in the lakeside mansion had been but
the day before.
“The sunset? Naturally; they are built that way out here. But you
mustn’t expect me to rhapsodize over the scenery when I can look at
you.”
“Please don’t be frivolous,” she chided. “There are plenty of others
to say the silly things; and besides, it isn’t your--it isn’t in
character. Stand here and enjoy this with me while it lasts, and then
we’ll go somewhere and talk.”
David acquiesced willingly enough, and after the sunset had faded,
and they had found chairs in the corner farthest removed from the
chattering groups of summer people, he told her of his few weeks of
strenuous work, enlarging in boyish enthusiasm upon the magnitude of
the job and the possibilities of man-sized growth it offered to those
who were driving it.
“And you haven’t had any trouble?” she interrogated, after the story
was told.
“Not what you would call trouble; no. Of course, the railroad
inspectors make life miserable for us when they can, but that is all in
the day’s work. It amuses them and keeps them out of mischief, and it
doesn’t hurt us.”
“Why should they make life miserable for you?”
“You ask me that?--and you the only daughter of the king of the
contractors?” he laughed. “That is what they are hired for; to find
fault, and to get us to give them something for nothing if they can.”
At this point it pleased Miss Virginia to play the part of the innocent
and the uninformed.
“How should I know anything about it?” she queried. “Could you explain
it so that a woman could understand?”
“I can explain it so that this one woman I’m talking to can understand.
Have you ever happened to read a contract and specifications?”
“What a question!”
“I didn’t suppose you had. They are like the Congressional
Record--nobody reads them unless it’s a necessity. But they are
fearfully and wonderfully constructed. One of the clauses in the
regulation form reads something like this: ‘The engineer of the
party of the first part’--that’s the railroad company in the present
instance--‘reserves the right to pass upon all work and material, and
to reject either if found, in his judgment, to be unsatisfactory.’ Mark
the wording and you’ll notice that it leaves an open door wide enough
to drive a locomotive through. And up here we have a man against us who
would like to hitch a whole train of cars to the locomotive.”
“Mr. Lushing, you mean?”
“The same.”
“Have you met him yet?”
“Not yet; he hasn’t been on the job in person since I came. I
understand he has gone East. But he has left some pretty able
fault-finders to represent him, I can assure you. If there is anything
in the category of crime that they don’t accuse us of committing, it is
something they have temporarily forgotten. But you mustn’t make me talk
shop all the time. I’m sure it bores you, only you are too good-natured
to say so.”
“A man’s work, if it is at all worth while, ought not to bore anybody.
It is your life, isn’t it?”
“It was, up to just a little while ago.”
“What happened a little while ago?”
“You came.”
“That is another of the sayings that doesn’t fit,” she warned him.
“All right; we’ll talk about something else. How long can you stay?”
“I don’t know. Father is calling it his vacation, and threatens to go
trout-fishing in the mountains.”
“That will be fine. If I didn’t have to watch Lushing’s outfit so
closely, I’d like to go with him.”
She looked up quickly. “Have you ever had a real vacation, David?”
“I suppose not; not in your sense of the word. I was out on field work
during the four college summers. I’m saving up for my honeymoon.”
“I thought you said that was only a dream; a ‘pipe-dream,’ you called
it, didn’t you?”
“I did; and it is. I was only joking. The only thing I can talk
seriously about is the big job. And you are not interested especially
in that--or are you? Plegg said one day when we were speaking of you
that you were a pretty good little engineer. I’m quoting him literally.
He meant it as a compliment.”
“Mr. Plegg,” she said, with a touch of abstraction which the mention of
the first assistant’s name seemed to evoke. “Do you like him?”
“Immensely; though he always gives me the feeling that there are nooks
and corners in him that he never allows anybody to explore. I met
him first a year ago. It was in the Pullman, when I was going home
from Florida. He had the upper berth in my section, and we scraped an
acquaintance of a sort just as the train was pulling into Middleboro,
though neither of us learned the other’s name. I remembered him chiefly
on account of his sardonic smile, and a queer thing he said to me.”
“Will the queer thing bear repeating?”
“To you, yes. He made a running commentary on my face--like one of
those street-corner physiognomists, you know; eyes, nose, jaw, and so
on, and said I’d probably go far in my profession if I wasn’t too good.”
“What an exceedingly odd thing for a stranger to say to you!”
“Wasn’t it? But he was so genial about it that I couldn’t take
offense.”
“What did he mean by not being ‘too good’?” she questioned gravely.
“I didn’t know at the time, but I’ve found out since. I grew up with
a good many old-fashioned notions, I guess, and I’m not sure that I
haven’t got some of them yet. One of them that I’ve been trying to
modify was the belief that a man might set up his own standards and
live by them.”
“I have that same belief now,” asserted the daughter of the luxuries.
“Why are you trying to modify it? Isn’t it reasonable?”
“It is reasonable enough, and it is right and proper that you
should have it. It is your woman’s privilege to believe the best of
everything. But the man has to take the world as he finds it.” Thus
far he was merely skirting judiciously upon the safer edges of the
generalizations. But the next moment he found himself yielding to the
temptation which so easily besets the average man--to confide in a
woman. “I’ll tell you, Virginia; I’ve done things in the past year that
I would never have dreamed of doing in my callow days; things that
would make my father gasp if he knew about them.”
“Wicked things?” she suggested.
“There was a time when I should have called them wicked, without a
shadow of doubt. But that was before I had come to realize that
business--all kinds of business--is a sort of war; a fight in which, if
you don’t ‘get’ the other fellow, he’ll get you.”
“You are all wrong--hideously wrong!” she broke out in a sudden passion
of vehemence. “I don’t mean in the statement of fact--that is only too
true. But in your own attitude. It is the first of the downward steps:
if you take that step deliberately, there is no reason why you should
stop at anything!”
There was only soft starlight on the sheltered porch, and David could
smile in safety. The little outburst of generous indignation carried
him swiftly back to the childhood days, reviving his memory picture of
a hot-hearted little girl whose anger had always flamed fiercely at any
spectacle of wrong or oppression, and whose defending of stray kittens
and homeless dogs had more than once made him fight in blind boyish
rage--not for the dogs and kittens, but for her.
“You haven’t changed much, inside, since we were babies together, and
I’m glad of it,” he said, after the momentary pause ushered in by the
indignant protest. “It is good of you not to make me always think of
you as the grown-up Miss Virginia--the little sister of the luxuries.”
“There are times, David, when I hate the luxuries--knowing so well the
source of so many of them,” she declared; and then: “Are you trying to
tell me that you have thrown all of the ideals overboard?”
The appeal in her tone sobered him suddenly.
“No, I hope not, Virginia. What I’ve been saying applies only to
business; the business conscience, if you want to call it that. I have
plenty of the other kind left. And it’s giving me a lot of trouble.”
“Is the trouble like the professional things you were talking about a
few minutes ago?--explainable to this woman?”
“No; at least, not yet. It is a question of duty, and how much duty.
It is as if you had incurred a debt and didn’t know the amount of it.
You’d be willing to pay, perhaps, if you only knew how much to pay.”
“That sounds entrancingly interesting,” she said. And then: “To whom do
you owe the debt, David?”
“I’m not sure that I owe it to any one; or if there really is a debt. I
shall have to think it out, and when I know, I’ll tell you.”
From this their talk slipped back to the big job and its askings and
drawbacks, and so led up to the moral cancer whose lights they could
see twinkling in the distance at the foot of Gold Hill. David spoke
of the demoralizing effects of the cancer upon his working force, and
told of his futile effort to enlist the railroad people on the side of
reform.
“Mr. Ford would do something, if he knew,” the young woman suggested,
naming the president of the P. S-W. system.
“I believe he would; but it is like climbing a ladder a mile high
to get to him. From what Jolly said, I gathered that the Brewster
officials are absolutely indifferent, and to get at Mr. Ford I’d have
to go over their heads.”
“You have been in the mining-camp?” she asked.
“Once, only, after dark. Some day you are going to tell me the name of
the man who took your slumming party there last fall and I’ll go and
beat him up.”
“Never mind the man. Did you see Judith Fallon?”
“Yes; but only for a moment. I tried to get a chance to talk to her,
but she wouldn’t have it.”
“She is still living with her father?”
“Yes.”
“You needn’t be afraid to tell me all of it, David.”
At that he repeated Plegg’s short account of the manner in which Judith
Fallon had come to Powder Can, and its near-tragic outcome.
“How terrible!” she said. “I remember Tom Judson, just vaguely, as a
handsome little kiddie with light curly hair and the bluest of blue
eyes. And he’s grown up into _that_!”
“Yes; and he didn’t take long about it, either,” said David. “Long
before he was expelled from college he was Middleboro’s most shining
example of depravity.”
“But this other man; Dargin, did you call him? Isn’t Judith worse off
than if she had no protector at all?”
“God knows,” said David, solemnly. “Except for the single fact that he
seems to have some respect for her, he is the crudest of crude brutes,
according to Plegg’s story. It’s going to be mighty hard to run him out
of Powder Can.”
“Are you going to try to run him out?”
“It’s up to me, I guess. The railroad people won’t do anything, and
the place has got to be cleaned up. This job of ours demands it. But
see here; can’t we keep this talk from stumbling into the sink-holes?
Tell me how long you are going to be content to stay away from the
luxuries?”
“I told you there were times when I hated the luxuries. You must be
awfully good to me if you don’t want me to run away to the lavishnesses
that I use and despise in the same breath. I shall put on a khaki skirt
and leggings, and you’ll have to show me everything that is going on.
Have you seen father?”
“No, not yet.”
“Mercy me! I was to tell you to report to him at the car down in the
railroad yard if I saw you first. I’m afraid I haven’t been a very
obedient call-boy.”
David got out of his chair reluctantly.
“I’m trying to realize that you are sending me away--and that just as
we were beginning to get down to the real heart of things. May I come
back after your father is through with me? It is so soul-satisfying not
to have to divide time with half a dozen other men.”
“The ‘other men,’ as you call them, will probably be here after a
while; or some of them, at least,” she laughed. “And that reminds me;
what have you done about sending for your father and sister? Nothing, I
hope.”
“Oh, but I have; I have done precisely what you said I ought not to
do. They are coming, and they will be here next week. I have taken one
of the hotel cottages for them.”
“That was downright cruel, and you need to be punished,” she retorted
brightly. “And you will be, too; you see if I’m not a true prophet.”
Then: “I think you needn’t come back this evening. I shall probably be
in bed and asleep long before father lets you escape. Now don’t you
wish you hadn’t sent for your father and Lucille?”
XIII
Altman’s Nerves
If David Vallory were reluctant to leave the hotel and make his way
down the wooded ridge to the gridironing of tracks in the railroad
yard, it was only because his duty was shortening the evening with
Virginia. Without being unduly puffed up with a sense of his own
efficiency, he felt sure that his work would show for itself and that
there was no reason why he should hesitate to spread the results before
the president.
Not knowing where Mr. Grillage’s car had been placed, it took him some
few minutes to find it in the crowded material yard, which was not too
well lighted by the widely spaced masthead electrics. When he did find
it, on the single unobstructed spur-track, the nearest electric showed
him the figure of a man dropping from the car step to become quickly
lost in the shadows of the surrounding material trains. In the brief
glimpse David recognized the alert poise and swinging stride of his
first assistant; but since neither jealousy nor suspicion had any part
in the Vallory make-up, the recognition evoked no wondering query as to
why Plegg had anticipated him in calling upon Eben Grillage.
A moment later the porter had admitted him and was standing aside to
let him pass through the vestibule to the open compartment in the
rear of the luxurious car. At the heavy, glass-topped desk he found
the contractor magnate sitting alone, with the inevitable black and
shapeless cigar clamped between his teeth.
“Hello, David--come in!” was the brusque greeting; and then with a
grim chuckle: “By George! I was beginning to think you were lost out
completely.”
“I was up at the tunnel when your train got in,” David explained,
judiciously slurring over the interval which had elapsed since the
early-evening hour of the arrival.
“And when you crawled out of the tunnel you found your way to the hotel
and promptly forgot all about the old duffer who has to dig down into
his jeans for the pay-roll money,” laughed the man-driver in jovial
humor. “It’s all right, my boy; I was young once, myself. How goes the
job?”
“I think you will find it moving along all right,” David ventured.
Then he said a good word for the first assistant. “Plegg had things in
fine shape when I took hold; good organization, good distribution, and
no friction. All that was needed was a little pace-setting.”
“And you’ve been setting the pace, eh? How about the railroad
inspectors?--are they giving you much trouble?”