your common sense, or your conscience, or whatever it is that is
involved,” she suggested.
David glanced at his watch. The hour was late, and there were but few
of the Inn guests remaining on the porches.
“I’m keeping you up,” he said shortly. “Some day, perhaps, I’ll take
the lid off and let you see the tangle inside of me; but it’s too late
to begin on as big a job as that to-night. Are you going to let me show
you over the plant to-morrow?”
“What else is there for me to do in this wilderness of a place?” she
asked in mock despair. “I shall most probably tag you around like a
meddlesome little boy until you’ll be glad to put me on the train and
send me home.”
David was still holding the hand of leave-taking. “If you don’t go
home until I send you, you’ll stay here a long time,” he said happily.
And then he went his way, forgetting, in this newest prospect of joy,
the troublesome underthought which had been growing, like an ominous
threat, around the incident of the talk with Altman, and its outcome.
XVII
The Tar-Barrel
In any descent to Avernus it is not often given to the wayfarer to
recognize the point at which he first begins to go down-hill. In the
removal of the careful Altman from the eastern tunnel boring and the
substituting of the reckless, devil-may-care Regnier, David Vallory had
succeeded in persuading himself that he had merely checked off an item
in the day’s work, and was far enough from suspecting that the item
figured as another milestone in the downward inclining path.
But certain results followed in due course, and a growth, not in grace.
For one of the results, David, being a shrewd-eyed master of his trade,
soon began to discover many of the things that Plegg was trying to
hide from him--the dishonesties large and small by which unscrupulous
Business seeks to increase the margin or profit; to discover them and
pass by on the other side with closed eyes. Another result was his
changed and changing attitude toward the Powder Can nuisance. From
regarding the wide-open mining-camp chiefly as a moral menace, he
was beginning to look upon it more as an obstacle to progress--his
own industrial progress on the job. It was sapping the strength of
his working force, and therefore--in spite of the contractor-king’s
injunction, which he took to be another of the little kindnesses
designed to make things easier for him--it was to be abolished.
In the field of the discovered dishonesties and the closed eye,
effect succeeded to cause with due celerity. The conditions on a
well-systematized undertaking like the line-shortening project are
fairly telepathic. Almost immediately it began to be whispered about
among the gang bosses and the men that the new chief was bent upon
making a record; the first assistant said so, and the first assistant
ought to know. This being the fact, the bridle might be taken
off--always with due regard for the railroad watch-dogs, and for a
decent concealment from a chief who, for the look of the thing, must be
in a position to say that he knew nothing whatever of cast-off bridles
and the substitution of loose halters therefor.
When David Vallory began to realize that his lowering of the standards
was taken as an ell for an inch by his subordinates and the rank and
file, it may be supposed that he was frankly appalled. But momentum
counts for something. And back of the push on the downward slide there
was always the debt of obligation owed to Eben Grillage. The king of
the contractors might be all that men said he was; a hard bargain
driver and a cold-blooded buccaneer of business. But at the same time
he was Virginia’s father and the savior of the Vallory good name.
If these were the inner wrestlings, David had as yet shared them with
no one. Outwardly, at least on the social side, he was measuring up
to a rather exacting standard set by Miss Virginia. Days in which he
took her on the construction locomotives and put her in touch with the
throbbings of the feverish heart of the activities were intermingled
with summer evenings on the Alta Vista porches. For some cause as yet
unexplained, the coming of his father and sister was delayed; and for
some other cause, into which his infatuation forbade him to inquire,
no one of Virginia Grillage’s retinue of suitors had thus far intruded
upon the scene.
“And still you are not entirely happy,” she laughed, one evening, when
he spoke of the comforting dearth of the suitors.
“What makes you think I’m not happy?” he shot back.
“I can tell. You have something on your mind.”
He made an attempt to turn her aside from the topic of the mind-burdens.
“Haven’t I had you to myself for days and days? I don’t know what more
a man could ask.”
“Oh, that!” she mocked. “But, just the same, you’re not happy.” Then
she added, apparently as an after-thought: “And neither am I.”
“Don’t tell me it is because you are missing the others,” he pleaded,
still intent upon warding off the more personal personalities.
“I am missing them dreadfully; especially Lord Cumberleigh and little
Freddy Wishart. But mostly it’s your ingratitude.”
“My ingratitude?”
“That is what I said. In the kiddie days you used to tell me
everything. But now you are shutting me out. You lead me along just so
far, but beyond that I find myself talking to another David, one that I
know less and less every day.”
For a time he was silent. Then he said: “You are altogether right--as
you always are, Vinnie. There _is_ another David; a man that I am
trying mighty hard to get acquainted with, myself. I don’t know him
well enough yet to introduce him to you.”
“That sounds almost uncanny. Is it meant to be?”
“It is uncanny. I can’t account for it--or him--or wholly approve him.
This other David isn’t always a pleasant person to meet. Part of the
time I seem to recognize him in a vague sort of way, and then again he
becomes a total stranger; a man of moods and impulses and perfectly
barbarous leanings.”
“I know,” she said quietly. “I’ve seen him now and then. I saw him
to-day when we were down at the Cross Gulch bridge. The foreman had
apparently been doing something that you had told him not to do. You
didn’t rave at him, but for a second or two the other David looked out
through your eyes.”
“How do you account for it--or him?”
“How should I be able to account for it--or him--if you can’t? Of
course, there are always general principles. If a watch has been
keeping good time and begins to go wrong, it is a sign that some one
has been tinkering with the works, isn’t it?”
“And you would suggest that some one has been tinkering with my works?”
“I know that you are different--and that I am sorry.”
“Have I been different this evening?”
“Yes, part of the time.”
“There is some little cause for the added grouch just now. I’ve been
neglecting a plain duty. Did you notice the thinness of the gangs
working on the lower section when we were down there to-day?”
“Not particularly.”
“They were thin. Yesterday was pay-day, and a lot of those
hand-to-mouth ‘wops’ are blowing themselves in Powder Can. When I first
came here I saw that that mining-camp would have to be cleaned up, but
I’ve been putting it off. Out of the goodness of his heart, your father
tells me to let it alone; he’d rather take his losses than to have me
shoulder another load, I suppose. But the thing has reached the limit.
I’m going after it with a sharp stick.”
On this particular evening they were sitting on the western porch, a
bit withdrawn, as usual, from the groups of idling summer people. At
the end of the porch a low-branching fir grew so close to the building
that its nearer twigs, swayed by the gentle breeze sliding down from
the heights of Qojogo, made little tapping sounds to break the silence
of the mountain night. Under the low-hanging branches of the fir the
big St. Bernard belonging to the hotel proprietor was curled up; at
least David Vallory thought it was the dog--had reason to think so
since it was the St. Bernard’s nightly sleeping-place.
“Something ought to be done,” was the young woman’s agreement with the
sharp-stick suggestion. “How will you go about it?”
It was at this conjuncture that the sleeping dog stirred uneasily, but
David Vallory did not look aside.
“A man named Dargin is the head and front of things over there. If
he were run out, the smaller fellows could be handled without much
trouble. I’ve been hesitating between two methods of getting at Dargin.
I suppose the simplest plan would be to walk over there some day and
tell him that he can have twenty-four hours in which to settle up his
affairs and vanish.”
Miss Virginia’s exclamation was a little shriek. “The idea!” she said.
“Do you suppose he would go away for anything like that?”
“He would if it were properly backed up; if I should tell him, for
example, that if I had the job to do over, I’d do it with a gun.”
“Mercy me! This is the ‘other David’ with a vengeance! Do you really
mean it?”
“Why shouldn’t I mean it? If the argument of force is the only one
that would appeal to him----”
“But you’d be killed! I’ve heard the most awful stories of this man. He
wouldn’t give you the slightest chance. Promise me that you won’t do
any such recklessly foolish thing!”
“I shan’t, if you don’t want me to; though it’s much the simpler way to
go about it. The other way is to write a personal letter to President
Ford of the railroad company. I don’t know him, but my father does, and
he is a good man--a clean man. I am practically certain that if he knew
the conditions he’d use the railroad company’s power to clean up the
camp--the power given it by the land leases. But that is enough about
the job and me and my little insanities. I must hike back down the hill
to my blankets. I know you’d be yawning if you were not too polite.”
She got up to walk with him to the porch steps, and at the good-night
moment he said: “Where are you going to let me take you to-morrow?”
“Before I pick the place I’m going to ask you once more why you have
been so persistently refusing to take me to the big tunnel. Don’t you
know that I simply adore tunnels?”
Now David had his own good reasons for not having taken Eben
Grillage’s quick-witted daughter into the big bore where Regnier was
driving his hard-rock crews. Day by day the dangerous ‘fault’ was
scattering its warnings in chips and spallings of fresh rock thrown
down from the disintegrating roof--evidences which Regnier was careful
to remove before they should attract the attention of the railroad
inspectors.
“A tunnel in process of construction isn’t a good place in which to
entertain inquisitive little girls,” David evaded. “And this particular
tunnel is wet and mucky.”
“That isn’t the reason why you haven’t taken me there,” she asserted
calmly.
“How do you know it isn’t?”
“Because I was in the tunnel this afternoon. You had been making so
many foolish excuses that my curiosity was aroused. I took advantage of
your absence at the other end of things and made Mr. Plegg take me. He
didn’t want to; he was just as gruff and impossible as he dared to be
to the big boss’s daughter. But I made him do it.”
It is easily conceivable that David felt cold chills racing up and down
his spine at the bare thought of what might have happened during this
unauthorized visit--this, be it remarked, though he fancied he had
settled it definitely with himself that nothing was going to happen.
“That was altogether wrong!” he said, in his best workmanlike manner.
“Don’t you know you shouldn’t break discipline that way?”
“Poof!” she retorted. “That is what Cumberleigh would call ‘putting
on side’. It’s a pity if I have to ask permission when I wish to go
somewhere--and of you!”
He shook his head in despair.
“You are not a bit less wilful than you used to be in the old
Middleboro days. But, really, Vinnie, you mustn’t go into the tunnel
again. It’s--it’s no place for visitors, or at least for women
visitors.”
“You have a reason for saying that, and it isn’t any of those you’ve
been giving me,” she flashed back.
“Do you think so?” He had not yet reached the point at which he could
lie to her deliberately.
“I know it. You haven’t any scruples about letting me get mucky and
grimy on any other part of the work; you have rather enjoyed telling me
that my face needed washing.”
“Never, unless it did,” he laughed, hoping to find some way of
diverting the talk from the unwelcome tunnel channel. But Miss
Virginia, with an end in view, was not of those who may be easily
turned aside.
“Then there was Mr. Silas Plegg,” she went on. “I have had a good many
escorts, first and last--and some of them unwilling, no doubt--but
Mr. Plegg capped the climax. He was as nervous as a cat after we got
inside, and if I didn’t know him so well, I should say he acted as if
he were afraid of something.”
“He was,” Plegg’s chief confirmed grimly. “I have given positive orders
that no one, other than those connected with the working shifts, be
admitted to the tunnel headings. Plegg knew he would be in for a
bawling-out when I should find out what he’d done.”
The young woman’s smile was a mocking little grimace.
“It wasn’t at all that kind of ‘afraid’; it seemed to me more like just
plain scare. While we were watching the drills, Mr. Regnier pulled him
aside and spoke to him. They probably thought the drills were making
such a clatter that I couldn’t hear what they said; but I _did_ hear.”
“Cuss-words?” David suggested. He was still trying to maintain the
good-naturedly playful attitude.
She nodded vigorously. “Perfectly hair-raising!” she assured
him. “Mr. Regnier said, ‘Why in the’--a long string of sizzling
things--‘do you bring her here? Have you not of the senses
the--blinkety-blank-blank--smallest portion?’
“I couldn’t hear what excuse Mr. Plegg made, but it was evidently not
a very good one, for Mr. Regnier broke loose again: ‘_Sacre bleu!_
you are prip-pare to get yourself deeslike. _Hein!_ you shall chase
her out of here so queek as _le bon Dieu_ will let you!’ You spoke
of discipline a minute ago. I shouldn’t think you’d allow one of the
under-assistants to talk that way to your second in command. It’s
disgraceful.”
Answering the disciplinary gibe, David sought once more to stave off
the tunnel climax--if so be the breaker of discipline were working
toward a climax. But again Miss Virginia proved herself a true
inheritor of the Grillage obstinacies and persistences.
“There is something the matter with that tunnel, David, and I want to
know what it is,” she urged gravely.
He told a half-truth merely because no plausible or practicable
falsehood suggested itself at the moment.
“It is a bit dangerous--in one place.”
“But if it is dangerous for me it is dangerous for the workmen. Why
don’t you timber the bad place?”
He laughed. “What do you know about timbering tunnels?”
“You forget that I’ve been eating the bread of the construction camps
all my life.”
“That’s so; I had forgotten.” In their excursions together over the
job it had given him a glow of superecstasy to find that she was
familiar with many of the details of her father’s trade--and his
own; details which would have been purest Greek to most women. Silas
Plegg’s commendation was amply borne out by the fact; she was, indeed,
“a pretty good little engineer, herself.” None the less his lips were
sealed in the matter of tunnel-timbering--or the lack of it. He could
not tell her that, for the sake of her father’s profit account, the
weak roof must not be timbered. Hence, he temporized.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have called it dangerous; it isn’t so bad as you
may be imagining. Timbering is an obstruction to the work, and we
always get along without it if we can.” Then, resolute to shelve the
subject so high that it couldn’t be reached again: “What has become of
your father? I haven’t seen him for two or three days.”
“He is down at the car to-night. But he hasn’t been well.”
“Not well? I can’t think of him as not being well. He always looks to
me as if he’d never known what it was to be sick.”
“He hasn’t known very often, and for that reason he never takes any
care of himself. But something over a year ago he scared me silly; he
had a touch of apoplexy. The doctors told me, but they wouldn’t tell
him. He got well in almost no time, but since, I’ve been trying to make
him take things easy. That was one reason why I insisted on coming out
here with him this summer.”
“He needs a complete rest,” said David.
“Yes; and maybe he’ll get one when your father comes. By the way--when
are they coming--your father and Lucille?”
“See how association with you makes me forget things!” he jested. “I
knew I had something to tell you. They will be here to-morrow. I had a
letter this morning.”
“Are you ready for them?” she asked.
“They are to have that cottage over there under the pines, and they can
take their meals here in the hotel.”
It was a perfect summer night, with the stars burning like
beacon-lights in the inverted bowl of the heavens, a crescent moon
hanging low over the saw-tooth outline of Qojogo, and the elevated
backgrounds sweeping in the blackest of shadow to the high horizons.
“The sublime majesty of it!” said the young woman softly, commenting on
the grandeurs. “And to think that Lucille won’t be able to see it when
she comes! It’s heart-breaking, David!”
“I think--I hope--the little sister doesn’t miss what she hasn’t had
since she was four years old,” he returned, matching her low tone.
“I know; though it seems as if she must. But you are making her miss
some of the things she needn’t miss, David.”
“I have been a poor plotter,” he confessed. “I’ll admit that in getting
them out here I was confidently counting upon breaking it off for
Oswald. But it seems that I have only made matters worse. The letter
that I spoke of was from Herbert. He has taken a partner in his law
business and is giving himself a vacation. He says Dad’s health is
still poor and it is hardly right for him to travel with the care of
Lucille; so he, Bert, is coming along. I suppose I shall be obliged to
read the riot act to him again.”
Miss Virginia was standing on the lowest porch step and she drew
herself up in combative protest.
“You will do nothing of the sort,” she declared, with a touch of her
father’s peremptory manner. “If you do, I shall let Lord Cumberleigh
and Freddy Wishart know what a perfectly gorgeous place this is in
which to spend a summer vacation. Good-night; it’s late and I’m going
in.”
When David had descended the hill to his bunk car headquarters he found
that Plegg had not yet come in. But Jean Marie François Regnier was
there, dark-faced, and with the Gallic temper coruscating.
“Thees devil of hard-rock men!” he sputtered. “They ’ave not so moch
as the courage of a mice! They say to me, ‘You s’all timber thees bad
place or shoot it down, or bygod we s’all strike.’ _Sacr-r-re!_”
As once before, in a similar crisis, David Vallory sat on the edge of
his bunk to take off his lace-boots.
“I’ll think about it, Regnier” he said slowly. “You tell your men that
you’ve put it up to me. I’ll see you to-morrow.”
After Regnier had gone, David went on mechanically with his bed-time
preparations. Then, as if at the bidding of a sudden impulse, he
hurriedly put the boots and his coat on again and went out to the rear
platform of the small car.
When he saw that the lights were still on in Mr. Grillage’s Pullman he
dropped from the step and went across the tracks to present himself at
the porter-guarded door of the _Athenia_.
XVIII
In Loco Parentis
Admitted to the office compartment of the private car, David Vallory
found its occupant preparing to go up to the hotel; but at the swing
of the corridor door Eben Grillage sat down again in the capacious
swing-chair at his desk and relighted the stub of his cigar.
“Come in, David,” he growled not unkindly; and before Vallory could
speak: “Vinnie ’phoned down a few minutes ago to tell me that you’re
looking for your father to-morrow. That sounds mighty good to me. We’ll
have another chance to renew our youth. You don’t appreciate how much
that means; you’re too young. But some day you will.”
David drew up one of the wicker chairs and sat down. The abrupt
dip into the purely friendly relations side-tracked his errand,
temporarily; but it also gave him time to gather himself for the plunge
into the weightier matter.
“Yes,” he assented; “I had a letter this morning. There will be three
of them; Dad and my sister and Bert Oswald.”
“You don’t mean John Oswald’s boy?”
“Yes, that is the one. Bert is a lawyer now, in business for himself in
Middleboro.”
Eben Grillage wagged his head as one incredulous, and the massive
features were relaxed in a reminiscent smile.
“Well, well; the idea of that little red-headed, blue-eyed chap of
Oswald’s growing up to be a man and a lawyer! How time does skip
along!” Then: “What’s he coming out here for? We don’t need any lawyers
on this job--not yet, I hope.”
“Bert says the trip is a vacation excursion for him,” David replied,
suppressing Oswald’s true motive. Then he began on his own errand. “I
came over here to bother you for a bit of advice on something that I’ve
changed my mind about half a dozen times or more. It’s that weak place
in the roof of heading Number One that Plegg wrote you about before I
came on the job.”
“Well, what about it?”
“At first I was willing to discount all the nervous stories. I spent
one entire summer in hard-rock work, and I know how prone the drill
crews are to cry ‘wolf’ when they drive through something a little
different. But latterly I’ve been a little anxious myself.”
“I shouldn’t worry, if I were you,” said the big man, with the lenient
indulgence of a master for a neophyte. “There’s a good old saying,
David, that you ought always to remember: Never trouble trouble till
trouble troubles you. I’ve had a look at that tunnel roof, myself. You
needn’t lose any sleep over it.”
“It looks a bit bad to me,” David made bold to say. “And now Regnier
tells me that the men have gone from complaining to making threats.”
“Threats?--what kind of threats?”
“They say if we don’t timber, or shoot the bad roof down, they’ll
strike on us; which will be giving open notice to the railroad people
that there is something wrong.”
David Vallory did not know that, under conditions similar to those
he was presenting, the king of the contractors was wont to explode
in volcanic wrath, consigning everybody remotely implicated to the
scrap-heap of the nerveless and the yellow-streaked. Nor did he know
that he was especially favored when his chief consented to argue the
matter with him.
“It has always been that way with the hard-rock crews,” the master
maintained; “they’re not happy if they don’t have something to kick
about. As to the threat; Lushing and his inspectors know--or ought to
know--all that anybody can tell them about that ‘fault’. It’s their
business to find out.”
David felt that he was losing ground, but he tried once more.
“It has always seemed better to me to be safe than sorry,” he ventured;
and he was going on to make the same suggestion that Plegg had made,
about taking the matter up with the railroad company for a new
contract, when the exponent of modern business success broke in.
“‘Safety first’ is a good idea, but it has been run into the ground,
like a lot of other good things, David. You were telling me that your
college vacations were spent working for the railroads, and there you
would naturally get the safety idea rubbed into you good and hard. I’ve
seen railroad engineers spend thousands of dollars--of other people’s
money--on precautions that will never be tested while the world stands.
When you are working for your own pocketbook it’s different.”
“Yet I suppose we ought not to take too many chances,” David
constrained himself to say.
“That is where you are wrong,” was the prompt contradiction. “All
business is a taking of chances. The merchant who buys a stock of
goods in spring that he hopes to sell in the fall is taking a chance.
The lawyer who expects to charge a fat fee if he wins his cause is
taking a chance. The farmer who plows and plants is taking a mighty
long chance on what the season and the weather will do to him. Don’t
you see how it runs through everything a man can do?”
“Yes, but----”