magnet to electrify and hold him rigid, Simeon Backus, ex-cattle
rustler, ex-yeggman, and now a manslayer hiding from justice, sat erect
and motionless, pouring forth a stammering story. There was little in
the story that was new to the listening ear at the window. Chiefly it
was made up of the facts concerning the weak roof in the tunnel--facts
still unknown to the railroad people; wherein lay their value to one
who could trade upon them. Plegg heard Altman’s talk with Vallory
repeated; then, almost word for word, his own talk with Vallory,
with the emphasis laid upon the consequences which he, himself, had
predicted would follow any leakage of the facts in Lushing’s direction.
Plegg waited until he was measurably certain that he had heard all that
Backus had to spill, and when there were signs that the talebearer was
about to be released, he hastened to make his retreat, retracing his
steps through the dark cross hall and locking the doors behind him
with his skeleton key. Safely down the outside stair and afoot in the
street he hesitated. The facts about the dangerous tunnel roof were
no longer a secret to be carefully guarded by the Grillage staff. They
were weapons in the hands of a man who would use them instantly in his
own behalf. There were two ways in which they might be used. Dargin
might go to Grillage and buy the immunity which the contractor-king
would doubtless assure by laying positive orders upon Vallory to let
the Powder Can man-traps alone. Or, if by some unheard-of chance,
Virginia Grillage could succeed in swinging her father over to her
side and Vallory’s, Dargin could use his information to make capital
with Lushing, and at one stroke entrench himself with the railroad
management and--through the loss which would be saddled upon the
Grillage company--square his account with Vallory.
All this the first assistant saw, and saw clearly, in the momentary
halt made upon the street corner. Holding his watch in the light
streaming from the windows of the Dargin bar-room he found that it
stiff lacked a few minutes of eleven. There was a chance and he took
it, walking rapidly up the street toward the place where, a few nights
before, he had drawn aside to become charitably blind and deaf while
David Vallory was talking to Judith Fallon.
XV
Plegg’s Back-Fire
For good and sufficient reasons Silas Plegg did not wish to show
himself in the dance-hall opposite the Murtrie Mine ore sheds. On all
accounts he would have been glad to be assured that he had thus far
gone unrecognized through the ill-lighted Powder Can street. Standing
before the wide-open doors of this other outreaching of Dargin’s, he
could pass the shuffling dancers in review. The woman he was looking
for was not among them, and neither was she at the piano.
Turning away with a sigh of relief he crossed the street, circled the
ore sheds, and came upon the row of shack cottages belonging to the
Murtrie company. Only one of the cottages showed a lighted window, and
here, again, Plegg made careful reconnaissance before he knocked on the
door. It was Judith Fallon who opened to him.
“Oh, ’tis you, is it?” she said, when the light fell upon him. “If it’s
my father you’re wanting, he’ll be over at the mine. ’Tis his week to
be on the night shift.”
“No, I don’t want to see your father, Judith,” he said quietly. “I came
to see you. May I come in?”
The black eyes snapped and their light was unfriendly. “’Tis an honor
to the likes of me. The door is open.”
Plegg accepted the scant welcome and went in. The interior of the
cottage was plain almost to poverty. Since the young woman would not
sit down he was forced to plunge bluntly into his errand.
“I’ve come to you, Judith, because I am David Vallory’s friend,” he
began. “Have I made a mistake?”
Her attitude was still antagonistic. “You needn’t be worrying,” she
snapped. “I know my place. ’Tis not I that will be running after Davie
Vallory.”
“You misunderstood me completely,” he hastened to say. And then: “Won’t
you please sit down?”
She moved toward the lighted window. “’Tis better that I don’t--and
that you don’t,” she flung out; and Plegg was quick to take the hint.
She was expecting some one else, and the some one would doubtless be
Dargin, the man who had constituted himself her protector.
“I’ll take a chance, Judith--for Vallory’s sake,” he thrust in boldly.
“Won’t you do the same?”
“’Tis himself would kill you if he found you here. But what is it
you’ll want to be saying about Davie?”
There was neither time nor opportunity for a guarded approach to his
object, and Plegg plunged again.
“Listen, Judith: Black Jack has just been told something that gives
him a strangle hold on Vallory; if he uses it, it will cost Vallory
his place on this job, to say the least. I’m not saying that Dargin
wouldn’t be justified, from his own point of view. Vallory would clean
up these Powder Can joints if he had the authority--which he hasn’t,
and won’t have. But he has said he would, and Dargin knows it.”
“How would Jack be using this thing that you haven’t tied a name to?”
she asked.
“By passing it on to Lushing.”
“That black-hearted devil!” she burst out. “’Tis little but the back of
my hand that I’m owing him!”
Plegg saw his opening and drove the wedge promptly.
“We all know Lushing,” he said; “you probably have good reasons for
hating him.”
“Reasons, it is? Do you know what he’d be doing to me? For shame I
can’t tell you. But if Jack Dargin had listened to him, it’s not here
that I’d be, keeping house for my father!”
“Dargin wants to marry you?” said Plegg quickly.
The woman’s hard black eyes grew suddenly tender. “’Tis not all bad he
is, Mr. Plegg. Show me the man like him that would do what he’s done.”
Plegg had never faced a problem requiring swifter or more skilful
handling. In the very nature of it he had to take much for granted;
to assume the values of the unknown quantities where he could not
demonstrate them.
“You knew Vallory before you came here, didn’t you?” he asked.
Her eyes fell. “I grew up with him--in Middleboro.”
Plegg smiled. It was easier now.
“I’m not going to ask you why you refused to talk with him the other
night; we’ll let that go. I’m going to leave this thing with you,
Judith. David Vallory stands to get a knife in the back. Jim Lushing
will do the stabbing, but it will be Dargin who will hand him the
knife. Your woman’s heart will tell you what to do, and how to do it.”
She covered her face with her hands. “I can’t--_I can’t!_” she
shuddered. “Himself would kill me, and I’d not be blaming him--after
what he’s done for me in this place. Think of what you’d be asking
me to do--to put the double-cross on the one man who would be caring
anything for me!”
Plegg caught his breath and took his last long leap in the dark.
“Dargin is Dargin,” he said, speaking slowly, “but--you love David
Vallory, Judith. That’s all I had to say; good-night.” And he opened
the door and vanished.
Having thus done his best to avert a possible tragedy--at the possible
cost of another tragedy--the first assistant owned but one pressing
anxiety, namely, to get out of the mining-camp speedily, and without
stumbling upon some one of the late-hour stragglers who might recognize
him.
Leaving the Fallon cottage, he was at first minded to climb the steep
slope of Gold Hill, thus making his exit without passing again through
the town street. But the night was dark, and there was no path over the
hill shoulder that he could recall. Dismissing the alternative, he
faced about to return as he had come; but before he had taken a dozen
steps toward the street the lights of the dance-hall opposite showed
him a man turning the corner at the ore sheds and coming toward him.
Though the distance was too great and the light too uncertain to enable
him to identify the man, there could be little doubt that it was
Dargin. Judith Fallon had shown plainly that she was expecting him.
Instantly Plegg realized that there were likely to be consequences
if Dargin should meet him. The Fallon house was the only one in the
shack-cottage group that showed any signs of life, and Dargin would be
swift to draw conclusions. But there was even a greater danger than
this to be feared. Plegg had left Judith Fallon in tears, wrestling
with the sharpest problem that can confront any woman, gentle or
simple. If Dargin should find her thus, and before she was given time
to compose herself....
Plegg’s hand flew to his hip pocket and his resolve was taken. Of the
two evils he would choose that which seemed to be the lesser. Half-way
down the little hill he met the master gambler and blocked his path.
Dargin stopped and thrust his head forward for a better sight of the
obstructionist. Then: “Oh, it’s you, is it? What the hell----”
“I was looking for you, Dargin,” Plegg said promptly, turning fugitive
expectation into aggressive fact. Then he added the whole-cloth lie.
“Somebody said I’d find you at John Fallon’s.”
“Well, now that you’ve found me, what of it?”
It may be imagined that never, in a life-time that had not been in any
manner devoid of exciting moments, had Silas Plegg been more sorely
put to it to fill a suddenly yawning gap. But at any cost time must be
gained.
“It’s a personal matter, Dargin,” he explained coolly. “Word has been
passed in camp that you’re out gunning for Vallory. I’d like to believe
that it’s nothing but camp gossip; some of the hard-boiled eggs talking
just to make a noise. How about it?”
“What business is it of yours?”
“I’m making it my business, Jack. Vallory’s my boss and my friend.
He isn’t a gun-toter, and you know it. He’d stand just about as much
show with you as these pick-and-shovel men do betting against your
faro-game.”
“I haven’t said I was after him, have I?”
“Not to me, you haven’t. And I don’t ask you either to say it or deny
it. All I want to say is this: if you go gunning for Vallory, you’ve
got to include me. You understand?”
The giant grunted. “Perhaps you’d like to try it out right now?” he
suggested.
“As you please,” said Plegg calmly. “I’m heeled, and I know you are. If
you think you can get to it quicker than I can, the bars are down.”
This time the “killer’s” grunt lapsed into a chuckle.
“I don’t need a man for breakfast to-morrow morning,” he said. “When I
do, I’ll let you know. S’pose you get out o’ the way and let me pass.”
“With pleasure,” snapped Plegg. “Only what I say, goes. If you hit
Vallory, you hit me. And it will be safer if you hit me first, and you
always know where to find me.”
Judith’s saving interval having thus been bought and paid for, Plegg
stood aside and let Dargin have the path. But after he had left the
town behind and was plodding across the basin on his way back to
the headquarters camp and his long-deferred rest, he was weighing
judicially the value of the expedient to which he had resorted. To
which extreme of the arc would the pendulum of a woman’s emotions be
carried? Would Judith Fallon be true to whatever feeling she still
cherished for David Vallory? Or would she refuse to betray the man
who, so far as his limitations had permitted, had stood between her and
utter degradation?
“I guess it’s on the knees of the gods,” was the first assistant’s
final summing-up of the matter; the conclusion reached as he was
crossing the yard tracks to the isolated bunk car. “There may be some
man living who can tell what a woman will do under given conditions,
but the good Lord knows I’m not that man.”
And so leaving it he swung up the steps of the car and crept to his
bunk, quietly, so as not to disturb his sleeping chief.
XVI
Master and Man
On the day following the arrival of Mr. Grillage’s private car at
Powder Gap, word was passed from camp to camp that the big boss was
about to make an inspection round with the new chief of construction,
and the activities automatically speeded themselves up to grace the
occasion.
At the bridge sites the clank and grind of the concrete mixers, the
upshoot and dumping tip of the hoist buckets, and the clattering
descent of the concrete into the forms played the industrial
quick-step. In the hill cuttings the intermittent clamor of
steam-shovels and the strident exhausts of locomotives dragging the
spoil to the fills made deafening discords. In the short tunnel
under Dead Man’s Ridge the hard-rock men timed their forenoon blasts
accurately to make a thunderous crash of dynamite salute the upcoming
of the light engine and way-car bearing President Grillage and his
chief engineer.
So far as any routine-changing result was concerned, the inspection
trip was conspicuously barren. It was rather a triumphal progress
for the new chief. At each stopping-place the big boss climbed down
dutifully from the way-car to look on and listen while David explained
some new method of cost-cutting, and there was always the word of gruff
approval, coupled with the suggestion that they move along.
“I’m taking all your little economies and short-cuttings for granted,
David,” said the tamed tyrant, as the way-car special shot around the
curves of approach to the main tunnel. “I got it pretty straight from
Coulee du Sac that you were up in all the late kinks in money-saving
and systematizing. You are doing good work, and I’m right proud of you.”
Again David’s heart warmed to the big man who had been so grossly
misrepresented as a hard boss. Thus far, there had been no single word
of criticism; nothing but hearty appreciation and praise. David knew
well enough that his work couldn’t be beyond criticism; that to a
master workman as experienced as Eben Grillage the shortcomings must
surely be apparent. Yet there had been nothing said that would lead him
to believe that the contractor-king was making anything but the most
perfunctory duty trip over the job.
At the tunnel portal they found Plegg, who was apparently waiting for
them. There was a halt of a few minutes while the first assistant, in
obedience to a signal which David was not permitted to see, held his
chief to ask some routine question about a proposed re-sloping of the
approach cutting. Eben Grillage walked on into the tunnel alone. The
great black bore was lighted only by a string of inadequate electric
bulbs hung at hundred-foot intervals, and the massive figure of the
president was soon lost to view in the depths. David Vallory answered
Plegg’s queries impatiently, the more so because they seemed to be
peculiarly trivial and ill-timed. It was something less than respectful
to allow the president to go stumbling into the tunnel unattended.
When they finally overtook him the big boss had penetrated to the
working heading, and was looking on quietly while the drillers and
their helpers removed the drill-columns and prepared for a blast. Again
there were words commendatory of the discipline and the industrial
systematizing.
“Fine!” was Eben Grillage’s comment, when David came up with Plegg at
his elbow. “I’ll be losing you two fellows to the efficiency squad
one of these fine days; that’s a fact.” Then to the black-eyed,
black-mustached little French-Canadian who had taken Altman’s place:
“Hello, Regnier! So they’ve got you on the mole job, now, have they?”
Regnier came across to join the onlooking group.
“Eet is moz’ in’ospitable, but in five minute ze men will fire
ze blast,” he announced. “Me, I am _désolé_ to ’ave to h’ask you
zhentlemen to go h’out, _mais_----”
“But we’d better go out if we don’t want to get our necks stretched,
eh?” laughed the visiting overlord. “That’s all right, Regnier; we’ve
seen all we need to, I guess.” And the retreat was made so hurriedly
that David had no chance to inspect the dangerous spot in the roof, or
to call the president’s attention to it, as he had fully intended doing.
These were the commonplace incidents of the day of inspections, and
there were no other kind. But when the day was ended, and David Vallory
was once more finding a reward for duty done in an ecstatic hour with
Virginia on the Inn porch, it is conceivable that the joy-nerve might
have lost some of its thrills if he could have been endowed with the
gift of double personality, enabling him to see and hear what was
transpiring coincidently in the Grillage private Pullman at the foot
of the ridge. In the open central compartment of the car Plegg was
once more under fire, and the special target of the bombardment was his
estimate of the bad roof in tunnel heading Number One.
“You are losing your sand, Plegg, the same as young Altman did,”
Grillage was asserting bluntly. “I took the chance you made for me this
morning and had a good look at that ‘fault’ while you were holding
Vallory at the portal. In spite of your test-borings, and all that
you’ve had to say about it, I say the roof will stay up while we’re
driving. If the railroad company wants to concrete it after we’re
through, that’s a horse of another color. We’re not hunting for a
chance to throw good money away.”
“I know,” said Plegg, almost humbly.
“How did you manage to get Altman out and Regnier in?”
“The change was made to-day and Vallory authorized it. Altman went over
my head last night and took his complaint to Vallory, though I had
warned him not to. A little later Vallory fell upon me and wanted to
know why I hadn’t ordered the weak spot timbered. I smoothed it over as
well as I could; gave him a hint of the use Lushing might make of it if
we should advertise the weak spot by timbering it. He saw the point
after a while and told me to shift Altman and put Regnier in. But I had
to lie to him to bring it about.”
“Bosh! That roof isn’t coming down. You’ve been letting Altman’s nerves
put one across on yours!”
It was just here that the first assistant took his courage in both
hands.
“I know what I know; and you know it, as well, Mr. Grillage,” he said.
“The test drillings showed up the conditions plainly enough, as I wrote
you at the time. That entire crevice is filled with loose material that
is certain to come down, sooner or later. Why not go to the railroad
people frankly, show them what we’re up against, and try to persuade
them to let us concrete that break on force account, with the cost of
doing it added to our estimate?”
Eben Grillage’s answer to this was brutally direct.
“I’m running the business end of this company’s affairs, Plegg, and
when I want your help I’ll call on you. But since you’ve gone this far,
I’ll tell you a thing or two. Lushing hasn’t been idle since he climbed
over the fence into the railroad pasture. He’s been building prejudice
against us to beat the band. If we’d make the break you suggest, I
wouldn’t put it beyond him to claim that we’d shaken that roof up
purposely with dynamite to get an excuse to run a force account job in
on them. Such things have been done, on other jobs, and I shouldn’t
wonder if Lushing had helped do some of ’em. No; our safe play is to
let sleeping dogs lie.”
“But if somebody should take the trouble to wake this particular dog?”
Plegg put in quietly.
“Put Lushing on?” queried the big man at the desk.
“Yes.”
“Who would do it?”
“The bad roof is an open secret. The men in the tunnel shifts all know
about it.”
“But none of our men will go to Lushing. They hate him too well.”
“There is one other man who knows about it, too.”
“Who is that?”
“Black Jack Dargin.”
“Huh! How did he find out?”
“That door is pretty wide open, isn’t it? A good many of the hard-rock
men blow their money in Dargin’s dives.”
“Are you sure he knows?”
“Yes, quite sure.”
“He’d sell the tip to Lushing?”
Plegg shook his head. “No, I don’t believe he’d sell it. But he might
give it.”
“Spit it all out--don’t beat around the bush, Plegg! What’s the inside
of the deal? You know more than you’re willing to tell, and that isn’t
a safe play for you to make at me!”
Plegg ignored the implication and the threat and answered only the
direct question.
“I don’t know the inside of the deal. But one man’s guess is as good as
another’s. Lushing goes all the gaits in Powder Can; he did it while
he was with us, and he does it now, when he’s here. I’ve thought, more
than once, that he might have some sort of a stand-in with Dargin. As
the matter stands now, Dargin can give us away any time he feels like
it.”
As was his habit when he was putting his back to the wall in any fight,
Eben Grillage caught up the paper-knife from his desk and began to test
the edge of it with a spatulate thumb.
“I’m beginning to get at the inwards of this thing,” he said slowly.
“David was saying something last night about wanting to clean out the
Powder Can messes. Dargin is going to hold this tunnel business as a
club. Vallory mustn’t meddle with the nuisances; you must see to it
that he doesn’t.”
“Vallory doesn’t take ‘seeing to’ very submissively.”
“That’s all right; you keep him from meddling with Dargin’s affairs.”
“You won’t consider my suggestion about making a clean breast of the
tunnel situation to Mr. Ford? As I’ve said, I am firmly convinced that
the stuff in the crevice will come down, sooner or later. If it slides
while we are still driving the heading, no man who happens to be behind
it will get out alive.”
“I don’t want your suggestion--or your convictions either, for that
matter.”
“Very well. It is your risk and you see fit to take it. I have nothing
more to say.”
“Never mind the risk. Have you stopped the calamity talk among the men?”
“For the time being, yes. I raised the pay of the shift bosses, and
told them what it was for. That is all in the game, and I’m crooked
enough by this time not to mind an additional bit of bribery. But there
is one thing that I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again: it’s a
damned shame to hoodwink a fine young fellow like Vallory the way I’ve
been doing ever since he came on the job. He has no idea that we are
not playing square with the railroad people; none whatever. And it’s
just as I told you last night; if a smash should come, it will hit him
harder than it will anybody else.”
“We’ll take care of all the smashes,” growled the tyrant, who was no
longer tame. “All you have to do is to keep your mouth shut and go on
sawing wood. You know very well why I want Vallory kept in the dark; or
at least, you know the business reason, anyway. He is valuable on this
job only so long as he _is_ kept in the dark. You are the man to do it,
Plegg, and you’ve got it to do.”
Plegg’s thin lips curled in a dog-like grimace.
“If I don’t do it, you’ll revive that old criminal charge against me on
the Falling Water dam and get me jugged--the charge that made me the
scapegoat for the use of rotten cement when you and your man Homer were
the responsible people,” he said bitterly. “I know perfectly well where
I stand with you--and with the courts--Mr. Grillage. But there are
limits. One of these days I may decide to tell you to go to hell--and
take whatever may be coming to me. Vallory trusts me and I am abusing
his confidence every day and resorting to all kinds of shifts to keep
him from finding out the thousand-and-one crooked things we’re doing
to beat the specifications on this job. You say I know the business
reason why he was sent out here, but I don’t. Why you wanted to put a
clean young fellow like David Vallory in charge of this job is beyond
me.”
“You’re duller than usual to-night, Plegg, and that’s needless,” was
the tyrant’s unfeeling retort. “The chief reason is that David has put
some capital into this thing. President Ford knows Adam Vallory, and
the Vallory connections generally. We’re capitalizing that knowledge.
But that’s a side issue. Coming back to this tunnel business: we’re
into it and we’ve got to go through with it. The secret of that ‘rotten
spot,’ as you insist upon calling it, must be kept quiet so far as the
railroad people are concerned. Jack Dargin must keep it, too, if you
have to go and buy him outright. Lushing will be out here in a few
days, loaded for bear. He has given it out cold that he is going to do
us up, and he wouldn’t ask for any better chance than this tunnel roof
tempest in a teapot would give him. You may go now; that will be all
for to-night.”
It was at this precise moment, when Plegg was leaving the private
Pullman in the construction yard, that David Vallory was asking the
daughter of profitable contracts a pointed question.
“Is there ever such a thing as a middle course between absolute right
and absolute wrong, Vinnie?”
“What a question!” she laughed. “Is that what you’ve been thinking
about all this time that you’ve been letting me do the talking?”
“But I’d like to know,” he persisted.
“I imagine you have as much common sense, and rather more conscience,
than most men, David. Why do you ask me?”
“Because I know you are honest, and altogether fearless.”
“So are you,” she returned quickly.
“No. I was once, I think; but, somehow, things are changing for me.
The old anchorages are slipping away, and I can’t seem to find any
new ones. For example: I did a thing last night which seems perfectly
justifiable on one side, and almost criminal on the other. I’ve been
trying all day to make up my mind as to whether I ought to pat myself
on the back, or go to jail.”