personally; they go to Plegg. One of them--Strayer--took me into
his confidence a bit to-day. He professes to believe that we are
deliberately burking the railroad company and threw out a hint to the
effect that the railroad Executive Board might take some action.”
“Did you get back at him?”
“I did; there hasn’t been a single instance where we’ve failed to make
good when they have called us down, and I told him so. Strayer is
acting chief of the inspection staff in Lushing’s absence. I haven’t
seen Lushing yet. They tell me he has gone East.”
“I can add something to that,” said Lushing’s former employer, with a
sour smile. “He went to New York to appear before the Executive Board
of his railroad--at his own request. We’ll hear from him a little
later.”
“I suppose he’s trying to make more trouble for us,” said David.
“He is. He is trying to force legal proceedings to get our contract
canceled. He threatened to do that when we dropped him. He’s a
vindictive cuss, if ever there was one.”
David Vallory shook his head in sympathetic deprecation. He was too
loyal himself to be able to understand how a man, even if he were
enraged, could turn upon the hand that had fed him.
“He can’t do anything like that,” he asserted confidently. “I’ve
specialized a good bit in the law of contracts--took it as a part of
my college course. As I see it, the railroad company has absolutely
no grounds whatever for cancellation. As I’ve said, when Lushing’s
inspectors bring up a specific charge, we make good, and that’s the end
of it.”
Since being in love with a man’s daughter is the poorest possible
preliminary to any accurate reading of face signs when the subject
chances to be the father of the daughter, the slow drooping of an
eyelid on the part of the big man in the desk chair opposite was quite
thrown away upon David Vallory.
“Of course,” agreed the contractor-king, with a suppressed chuckle
which he turned into a forced clearing of his throat; “we’re up to all
the little methods of pacifying the enemy, eh, David?” And then: “I’ve
just had Plegg here, making him tell tales out of school. Naturally, he
didn’t want to say much about his chief, but you’ve got his vote, all
right. He tells me you’ve made good with the force, and that you’re a
home-grown miracle in the pace-setting. That is what I wanted to hear;
but it is also what I expected to hear.”
“More kindness,” said the beneficiary of the kindness, with a
comforting glow warming him. “Before I went to Coulee du Sac I used to
hear that you were a hard man to work for. I shall feel like scrapping
with the next man who says anything like that to me.”
“You go right on believing that I’m a hard man,” said Eben Grillage,
with a ferocious twinkle of the shrewd eyes; “it’s safer. Now there’s
another little thing, while I think of it: Plegg was telling me
something about these dives and speak-easys over in Powder Can; said
you’d got stirred up about ’em and wanted to give ’em the high kick.
You take a word of advice from me, David, and let ’em alone. After
you’ve handled grade laborers and hard-rock men as long as I have,
you’ll realize that they’re bound to have their fling after pay-day. If
you were an angel from heaven you couldn’t stop it. And you’ll only
get your hands muddy if you try.”
“But it’s such a tremendous drawback to the work!” David protested,
feeling, in his inmost recesses, that this argument, rather than the
moral, would be more likely to appeal to Eben Grillage.
“That’s one of the things you have to figure on,” was the man-driver’s
reply. “Pad your gangs with a few extras to make up for the pay-day
absentees. Labor’s fairly plentiful just now, and in the contracting
business you’ll find that man-muscle is about the cheapest material you
handle. But that’s enough about business. What do you hear from your
father?”
“Mighty good news, just now. He hasn’t been very well this spring, so I
have persuaded him to come out here for a while. I shall be looking for
him and my sister next week.”
“That’s the talk!” exclaimed the Vallory benefactor. “I’ll make him go
trout-fishing with me. And that drags us back to the business matter
again. I’m not out here to stand over you and tell you what to do on
the job, David; I’ve told Vinnie it’s my vacation--something that I
haven’t had for so long that I’ve forgotten what it looks like. I’ll
make a little round of the work with you to-morrow, just to let the
outfit see that you’ve got the boss on your side, and after that you
can count me out. Vinnie probably won’t let you off so easily, but you
can settle that with her.”
With this program for a sort of stirrup-cup, David Vallory left the
president’s car with the warm glow at his heart bursting into a
generous flame. In an age in which filial piety has come to be more
or less regarded as a hold-over from an emotional elder generation,
he found himself inclining toward the savior of the good name of the
Vallorys with an affection akin to that which he felt for the father
who had begotten him. That the industrial world held Eben Grillage as a
hard master, and the world of business looked a trifle askance at his
huge fortune and the manner of its acquiring, were matters subsidiary
to the main question. Under the gruff exterior, the grasping exterior,
if his detractors would have it so, David told himself there dwelt a
giant of generosity and loving-kindness; a man whose very crudities and
bluntnesses were lovable; a man for whom his grateful beneficiaries
could never go too far, so long as the saving spark of gratitude
remained alive in the human breast.
It was with these exalted emotions stirring him that he swung up to the
step of his bunk car. Since the car was lighted, he expected to find
Silas Plegg at work on his customary evening task of checking the books
of field-notes. But the only occupant of the car proved to be young
Altman, who was driving the rock-blasting in the eastern heading of
the great tunnel; a sober-minded young mining engineer only a year out
of college, but yet with the lines of responsibility already graving
themselves visibly in his boyish face.
“I’m disobeying orders, Mr. Vallory,” he began. “Plegg tells us we
mustn’t bother you with our complaints, but in justice to my men I’ve
got to break over this one time. You know that weak spot in the tunnel
roof?--the one I showed you the first time you were in?”
David nodded. The “weak spot” was a section of the big bore which had
been driven through a prehistoric gash in the granite; a huge vertical
crack which had been filled with softer rock in some later earth
upheaval. “What about it?” he asked.
“It’s getting my goat. It is growing worse every day, and I’m afraid it
will come down on us. Since we’re working three shifts, with a gang in
the heading all the time, you know what a cave-in would mean; the shift
that happened to be caught behind it would die to the last man before
it could be dug out. There’s enough of that slippery marl hanging up
in the ‘fault’ to bury an army, and, sooner or later, it’s going to
come down. But I can’t make Plegg see it that way at all. He says I’ve
got too many nerves.”
“You think the weak spot ought to be timbered?”
“I know it ought; and the men think so, too. There has been a good bit
of grumbling and some little strike talk among them, and I can’t blame
them. They say the company has no right to ask them to take their lives
in their hands for the sake of saving a few dollars’ worth of timbers.
It was my shift off this afternoon, but if I had known you were going
to be up there, I should have stayed and asked you to take another look
at the roof for yourself.”
“I’ll go up to-morrow,” was David’s prompt offer. “We mustn’t take
chances on the lives of your men. At the same time, it doesn’t pay to
let a thing of that kind get on your nerves, Fred. The responsibility
is up to Plegg and me, and we’ll take care of it. Now you’d better hike
back to the bunk shack and catch up on your sleep.”
It was less than a quarter of an hour after Altman had gone when Silas
Plegg came in and found David Vallory preparing to go to bed.
“About that weak place in the tunnel roof in heading Number One,” said
David, pausing with one lace-boot off. “Have you examined it lately?”
“I’ve been keeping an eye on it ever since we drove through it,” was
the first assistant’s answer. Then: “Has Altman been worrying you about
it?”
“He was here a few minutes ago. He seems to think it’s dangerous, and
says his men are protesting.”
“Altman is a fine young fellow, and an expert in the rock-blasting,
but he is a little inclined to be nervous,” Plegg threw in. “That sort
of thing is always contagious, and Altman’s personal scare has been
spreading itself. That roof stood up while we were driving through the
fault, and I guess it will continue to stand.”
“If there is any doubt about it, it ought to be timbered,” was David’s
decision. “I’m looking to you, Plegg, for the carrying out of these
routine details.”
“We can’t afford to timber it,” said Plegg, shortly.
“Why not? The cost would be nothing compared with what we’d lose in a
strike of the hard-rock men.”
“I’ll guarantee the men won’t strike. And as for the cost of the
timbering; have you considered what it would mean to us if we should
call the attention of the railroad inspectors to that bad spot by
propping it up?”
“Do you mean to say that the railroad engineers, and Lushing among
them, don’t know about that ‘fault’?”
“We’re hoping they don’t,” said Plegg, with the sardonic smile
wrinkling slowly at the corners of his eyes. “It would give Mr. James
B. Lushing the one big chance he is looking for. The day in which we
haul the first car-load of props into the tunnel will be the day when
he’ll fall on us like a thousand of brick. We’ll get a peremptory
order from the railroad headquarters to shoot that bad roof down and
plug the hole with concrete. That will mean a delay, maybe of weeks, a
forfeiture of our time-limit bond for the completion of the job, and
a bill of costs for the additional work that will turn the Grillage
company’s profit into a loss heavy enough to make the big boss sweat
blood.”
David said nothing while he was slowly removing the remaining
lace-boot. When he spoke it was to ask a curt question.
“Does Mr. Grillage know about this bad spot in the tunnel.”
“Sure he does. I sent him photographs when we were driving through
it. He’s an old hand at the rock-blasting, and he isn’t losing any
sleep over the cracked roof--which is cracked chiefly in Altman’s
imagination.”
In some vague sense David Vallory felt that he was confronting a crisis
and another test of the ideals. Before he realized it the battle was
joined between a just regard for human life on one hand, and strict
loyalty to Eben Grillage on the other. Should he heed Altman’s warning
and order the timbering, regardless of the possible consequences to the
Grillage Engineering Company? Or should he take Plegg’s assurances at
their face value and discount the fears of an overanxious subordinate?
The daughter of the luxuries had possibly spoken better than she knew
in saying that the first downward step in the ethical ladder makes all
the others easy. As David Vallory rolled himself into the bunk blankets
and turned his face away from the light of the hanging lamp under which
Plegg was squaring himself for the nightly task of field-note checking,
the decision came.
“Perhaps you are right about Altman’s nerves, Plegg. Suppose you shift
him to the quarry work in Dixon’s Cut and put Regnier in the tunnel
heading. If I’m any judge of men, Regnier won’t let the spalling roof
trouble him. He’ll be too busy trying to break Altman’s record of so
many feet advance a day, and that will be some job.”
“That’s better,” said Plegg, bending lower over the checking. But when
David’s regular breathing began, as it did almost at the instant of
eye-closing, the first assistant straightened up, shaking his head
regretfully.
“It’s a damned shame!” he muttered under his breath. And then: “If I
were half as loyal to him as he is to Grillage, I’d blow the whole
gaff--tell him exactly what he is up against on this crooked job, and
at least give him a chance to fight with his eyes open. Maybe I shall,
some day--after it’s everlastingly too late.”
XIV
The Mucker
For some little time after his chief had gone to sleep, Silas Plegg
bent thoughtfully over his task at the trestle-table. It was said of
him that he could live and work with less sleep than any other man on
the staff, and his nightly vigils proved it. Now and again the midnight
workers on some remote section of the job would look up to find the
first assistant staring down at them from some coign of vantage, and
the shirkers never knew at what moment the cool, crisp voice of the
under-boss would come crackling out of the shadows with a snap like
that of a whip lash.
With the slipping of the rubber band over the last of the field-books,
Plegg rose noiselessly and left the car as if to begin another of his
nocturnal rounds. In the shadow of the cement sheds he overtook the
yard watchman.
“Anything stirring, Mac?” he asked.
“Nothin’ but that tunnel mucker they call ‘Simmy’. Early in the evenin’
I caught him prowlin’ ’round the big boss’s private car. I asked him
what he was doin’ and he said he couldn’t sleep. I wouldn’t ’a’ thought
nothin’ of it if you hadn’t told me to keep an eye out for him.”
“Anything else?”
“Nothin’ much, ’cept that the next time I come around I catch him
snoopin’ under the windows of yours and Mr. Vallory’s sleep-wagon. This
time I takes him by the ear and runs him over to his bunk shack and
tells him to stay there till his shift’s called.”
“How long ago was that?” Plegg inquired.
“’Bout a half-hour, I reckon. He--Well, I’ll be dog-goned! Look yonder!”
Plegg had already seen. The sputtering light of a distant masthead
showed a lop-shouldered figure making off across the yard, dodging as
it went to keep within the shadows cast by the scattered material cars.
“I’ll go after him,” said the watchman; but Plegg stopped him.
“No, Mac; stay on your job. I think this may be what I’ve been waiting
for.” And as craftily as if he had been trained in Indian warfare, the
first assistant set out to trail the dodging figure.
After the first few hundred yards down the tracks it was not difficult
to guess the tunnel mucker’s destination. He was heading across the
basin to the mining-camp at the foot of Gold Hill. Plegg did not try to
keep him in sight after his direction was assured, contenting himself
with closing the gap when the man ahead was entering the single street
of the town. Even then the pursuer made no haste and paid no special
attention to the lop-shouldered one. It was as if he had known in
advance where his quarry would alight, and when the dodging figure was
lost finally among the late roisterers still obstructing the planked
sidewalks, Plegg pushed on steadily until he reached the corner
occupied by Black Jack Dargin’s gambling resort.
At the corner, the first assistant changed his tactics suddenly.
Flattening himself against the side of the building he edged his way
cautiously down the short side street. Being the headquarters of a
leading industry, Dargin’s “place” enjoyed the distinction of standing
as the only two-storied building in the camp. With its ground floor
devoted strictly to the business of relieving restless or thirsty souls
of the hard-earned dollars, the second floor was the living apartment
of the master gambler. It was approached by an outside stair, and up
this stair Plegg crept on his toes and finger-ends.
The door at the stair-head was closed, but the first assistant seemed
to know his ground. Noiselessly a skeleton key was slipped into the
lock, there was a faint click, and the door swung inward, opening into
a dark hall running crosswise of the building. Again Plegg showed
his familiarity with his surroundings. Closing the door, and thus
shutting himself into the Egyptian darkness of the narrow upper hall,
he felt his way carefully to the opposite end of the passage, found and
unlocked another door, and stepped out upon a railed gallery running
the full length of the building at the second-story level. A few steps
to the right two windows and a door gave upon the gallery, and the
windows were lighted.
Once more resorting to the Indian tactics, Plegg crouched in the shadow
and worked his way silently on hands and knees to the nearest window.
The shade was partly drawn down, but since the night was unusually warm
for the season and the altitude the window was open a few inches at the
bottom.
The view from the gallery was unobstructed. Plegg saw an interior
gaudily furnished, a costly carpet, ill-kept and soiled by muddied
boots, yellowed lace hangings at the windows, heavy mahogany chairs,
scarred and with their leather upholstering chafed and abused, a
marble-topped table littered with cigar stubs, an ash tray, a
scattered deck of cards and an open box of cigars; the whole lighted by
a hanging lamp with a cheap tin reflector.
There were two men in the room and they sat on opposite sides of the
table. One was the master gambler; he had selected the one wooden chair
in the room, and he sat back with his hands in his pockets, rocking the
chair gently on two legs. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and the black,
Indian-like hair fell forward in a lock that shaded the coldly staring
eyes.
The other man was the “mucker” of the yard watchman’s report, the
man Plegg had been following. On the Grillage pay-roll he appeared
as Simeon Backus, serving on the day shift as a muck shoveler in the
eastern heading of the great tunnel. He sat in one of the upholstered
chairs with a deep seat, and his deformities--the lopped shoulder and
arms much too long for his body--were accentuated. His face, with its
lines half obliterated by a ragged beard, lacked none of the villainous
characteristics of the ingrained criminal; beady eyes that would look
at nothing steadily, a retreating chin, a thin-lipped, acrid mouth.
When Silas Plegg reached his spying place on the gallery, Dargin was
speaking.
“Cut it out, Simmy; cut it all out and get down to brass tacks!” he was
growling. “Your hard job in the tunnel isn’t any skin off of me; and
you get paid twice for it, at that.”
“What little rake-off you give me for steerin’ the money-burners down
here don’t cut no ice with me!” snapped the smaller man. “I’ve got
bigger game to-night.”
“Shoot,” said Dargin.
“I’ve got a line on the new boss. Did you know he was down here lookin’
you over the other night?”
“I saw him,” was the brief reply.
“Well, he’s goin’ to run you out--clean up the shop--wipe off the
slate.”
“Who says he is?”
“He says so, by cripes! I’ve got it straight. This here hell-hole’s got
to be took off the map. It’s bu’stin’ up his gangs and robbin’ his men,
and he ain’t goin’ to stand for no such. And say, Jack--_he’s got the
old geezer behind him_!”
“Grillage? Not in a thousand years, Simmy.”
“I’m tellin’ you I got it straight. There’s a skirt in it this time.”
“Cough it up.”
“It’s this-away; that young cock-o’-the-walk’s goin’ to marry
Grillage’s daughter--see?”
“How do you know he is?”
“There ain’t much that a bunch as big as ours don’t know about its
bosses--or that it can’t find out if it tries. Vallory hadn’t hardly
lit down on the job before ever’body knew that he got his boost from
the inside--that it was all in the family. Why, hell; he’s nothin’ but
an overgrowed kid!”
“You talk too many, Simmy,” was the gruff interruption. “Get down to
the face-cards and aces.”
“All right, I will. Did you know Grillage is here?”
“I knew he was coming.”
“Well, he’s come--and he’s fetched the girl with him. You know what
she tried to get him to do last fall, after Lushing was fool enough to
bring that look-see crowd down here from the hotel?”
“I know,” said Dargin. “She tried to get the old man to put the kibosh
on us. He wouldn’t do it then; and he isn’t going to back Vallory now.”
“Don’t you believe it! The girl will make him back Vallory, if she
feels like it. I’m tellin’ you again--I got it straight. The minute
Vallory hears she’s here, he makes a straight shoot for the hotel, and
sits most o’ the evenin’ on the porch with her. I kep’ cases on ’em.”
“That doesn’t prove anything.”
“It proves what I’m sayin’. You’re goin’ to get the hook, Dargin, and
I’m the one man that can keep it out o’ your liver.”
Silas Plegg, from his cramped spying place on the gallery, saw a bleak
smile flicker for a moment in the cold eyes of the master gambler.
“You get your pay, don’t you, Simmy?”
“For leggin’ for your skin game down-stairs, yes. But this time I’ve
got somethin’ to sell--somethin’ that Grillage’ll pay for, if you don’t
want it.”
“Suppose you tell me what it is, Simmy.”
“I’ll tell you this much: s’pose you could go to Grillage and say,
‘Look-ee here, old sport; I’m wise to somethin’ that’ll knock all the
money out o’ this railroad job o’ yours, and then some; you keep this
here Vallory hook out o’ me, and I’ll keep mine out o’ you.’ How does
that hit you?”
Again Plegg saw the vanishing smile.
“Where did you get all this flim-flam dope, Simmy?”
“Some of it I’ve had a good little spell. The rest of it I got to-night
listenin’ under the windows of Vallory’s bunk car.”
“Who was doing the talking?”
“Three of ’em, first and last: young Altman and Vallory, and then
Vallory and that gun-totin’ under-boss o’ his’n, Plegg.”
“Supposing I say that I’m not in the market; then what?”
The lop-shouldered man struggled up in his chair and spat his reply out
viciously. “Then, by cripes, I’ll go to Grillage himself! _He’ll_ buy!”
“I see,” said Dargin softly. “You’ll sell this thing to me or to
Grillage, whichever one of us bids the highest. Is that it?”
“You’re shoutin’ now. I’m tired o’ hidin’ out and dodgin’ Hank Bullock
in these dam’ mountains. Some o’ these days he’s goin’ to hike up
this-away and get the drop on me; and then”--the misshapen man made a
gesture pantomiming the clicking of handcuffs upon wrists. “I want to
skip down yonder to Honduras, ’r some o’ them places where they never
heard o’ me ’r the croakin’ business in Gunnison. And you lissen to me,
Jack; I’m goin’ to have a wad big enough to stake me when I get there,
and don’t you forget it!”
The swarthy giant on the opposite side of the table was still tilting
his chair and still had his hands deeply buried in his pockets.
“Let’s see if I’m getting it straight, Simmy,” he said gently. “You’ve
thought it all out, and you’re going to sell this thing you’ve got hold
of--and which you haven’t named for me yet--either to me or to the big
boss. If I get it, I can make the hook miss; and if Grillage beats me
to it--what happens then?”
“Why, then Grillage plays safe on his profit by gettin’ me out o’ the
country; see? And then, if Vallory wants to stick his fork into you----”
The man in the deep chair stopped short. The other made no move. His
dark face with its leaden eyes and the heavy drooping mustaches was as
impassive as the face of the Buddha. The lop-shouldered “mucker” seemed
to be trying to read the Buddha face, and when he failed he gave a
gulping swallow.
“I--I reckon I’m talkin’ through my hat, Jack,” he wavered. “Grillage
ain’t in the deal; I’m goin’ to sell my stock to you.”
Plegg, looking on at a distance of not more than half the width of the
room would have sworn that no man of Dargin’s build could have moved so
swiftly. At one instant he was swaying gently in the tilted chair. At
the next he was leaning across the table and thrusting the muzzle of a
pistol against the shrinking body of the talebearer. When he spoke his
voice was like the whistling of the north wind. “No, Simmy, you’re not
going to sell it to me; you’re going to _give_ it to me, _now_!”