card-table in a mad-bull charge, carrying the table with him in his
eagerness to close with his antagonist. For a few breathless seconds
the battle was obstructed. David’s rush had borne Lushing backward,
tilting the chair in which he was sitting until it brought up against
the wall and was crushed under his weight and David’s and that of the
overturned table. Too furious to fight coolly, David tried to snatch
the wreck of the broken chair out of the way so that he could get at
the man entangled in it and held down by the tipped table. One good
punch he got in, or thought he did, and then there was a stunning
crash, a fleeting whiff of powder smoke, and the light went out.
XX
In the Ore Shed
When David came to his senses he found himself lying on bare ground in
the dark. There seemed to be a weight like that of an elephant’s knee
pressing upon his chest, and it was with the greatest difficulty that
he could get his breath. Somewhere near at hand he could hear sounds as
of a woman sobbing. Next he realized vaguely that his boots had been
taken off. Groping aimlessly in the dark, his hand found the woman. She
was kneeling beside him, and at his touch the sobs became a choking cry.
“Davie, dear; is it yourself that’s alive?” The voice seemed to come
from an immense distance, but he heard it and recognized it.
“You, Judith?”--then, jerkily: “What’s--happened--to me?”
“’Tis killed dead you are!” she whimpered.
“Nothing like it.” The words were coming a bit easier now and he did
not have to stop and gasp between each pair of them. Also, he was
beginning to remember some of the events precedent. “Did--did the house
fall down on me?” he asked.
“Jim Lushing--the black curse be upon him!--he shot you; didn’t you
know that?”
“I don’t remember. Whereabouts am I hit?”
“I wouldn’t be knowing that at all, Davie; I’m just this minute here.
The shed watchman came and told me that Lushing had killed you in
Jack’s place down the street. ’Twas scared they were to have you found
dead in that place, so they carried you here.”
“Scared?” said David.
“For what your men might do; there’s a many of them in town, and they’d
have wrecked the place. Where is it hurting you, Davie, dear?”
“I feel as if somebody had given me the heart punch--I believe that’s
what the ring-fighters call it. But it’s letting up a bit now. Where am
I?”
“In the Murtrie ore shed. They’d be putting it up to Mike Drogheen, the
watchman, to say he’d shot you--taking you for an ore thief.”
“And paying him well for it, I suppose.” He was groping carefully for
the wound and found only a rip in the left breast of the brown duck
shooting-coat. There was no blood; only a tremendous soreness. He
raised himself and sat up. “If we only had a light of some sort,” he
muttered.
“Wait,” she said, and ran away to come back within the minute with the
watchman’s lantern. “Poor old Mike’s hiding beyond in the blacksmith
shop, scared trembling at the lie he’s thinking he’s got to tell. Don’t
sit up, Davie; you might be bleeding to death.”
David was groping again, and this time, out of the ripped pocket of
the brown coat he fished an engineer’s field-note book. Then he knew
why there was no blood, and why the body area behind the pocket was as
painful as if it had been beaten with a hammer. Lushing’s shot had been
a glancing one, and the thick note-book had turned it aside. There was
little left of the book save the perforated leather cover and a mass of
torn leaves.
“The fellows who carried me off must have been pretty badly rattled,
not to have found out that I wasn’t even scratched,” he commented.
“’Tis no wonder. When Mike brought me here, the doctor himself would
have said you were dead. There was no breath in you at all, and your
heart had stopped entirely.”
“What became of Lushing?”
“’Tis little I know, or care--the black dog! Mike says they told him
you’d half killed him.”
“I think I meant to,” said David soberly. “And after this, I suppose
I’ll have to kill him--or let him kill me. But that’s a future. He
knows what he’s got to do if he wants to keep on living. Where are my
boots?”
She found the boots with the help of the lantern and gave them to him.
He put them on, though the effort, and the lacing of them, made him
grit his teeth and swear.
“What did they want to take my boots off for?” he growled.
“Don’t you know?” she asked. “’Tis that way in the camps. They wouldn’t
be letting anybody die with his boots on, if they could help it.”
“Rotten superstition!” he complained, and swore again.
The woman heard wonderingly.
“’Tis you that have changed, Davie, till I’d hardly be knowing you,”
she said.
“Yes; I’ve changed. And so have you, Judith. Are you living with
Dargin?”
“I am not!”
“But from what they tell me, you might as well be. You’ve taken help
from him.”
“And if I have; ’tis nothing I’ve taken that an honest woman might not
take.”
“You’re telling me the truth?”
“I am. When did I ever lie to you, Davie?”
“Never,” he conceded. But the main question was yet untouched. “I know
how you came here to Powder Can--Plegg told me,” he went on bluntly.
“It’s no place for you, here in Powder Can. You know that, don’t you?”
“Where would I be going, then?”
David held his head in his hands and tried to think. With the return
of his faculties the spirit of morose disheartenment and impatient
resentment which had brought him to the mining-camp, and had been the
chief factor in precipitating the quarrel with Lushing, was reasserting
itself. Since the bitter moods grow by what they feed upon, he could
see nothing in just perspective. What a fool’s Paradise he had been
living in since the Grillage private car had come to anchor in the
construction yard! He had been crying for the moon, and the moon had
been kind enough to shine for him--when there was no one else to shine
upon. But now there were others....
“I don’t know,” he said abstractedly, in answer to her question as to
where she should go. “It’s a pretty tough old world, Judith.” Then,
suddenly: “Are you still blaming me?”
“For what would I be blaming you?”
“For chasing around with you in the old days and giving you the idea
that I was going to marry you some time?”
“That’s all past and gone, Davie, dear.”
“Past and gone, maybe, but that doesn’t let me out. I know you’ve got
your father, but I can’t help feeling more or less responsible for you.
It has worried me a lot.”
“You shouldn’t be worrying.”
“I can’t help it. Last year, after I went to Wisconsin, I had a sort of
plan worked out, and I wrote you twice before I found out that you’d
left Middleboro. What you need--what you’ve always needed, Judith--is
something that you could put your whole heart into, like--well, like
music. My notion was that you could go to some good conservatory
and study, and I was ready to help you. Is it too late to consider
something of that kind now?”
She shook her head. “’Tis much too late, Davie.”
“You mean that you’re tied up with this man Dargin?”
“We’ll leave Jack Dargin be. There’s the old father; he’s not what he
used to be, Davie; what with mother dying, and me----”
“I know,” he interposed hastily. “Plegg told me about that, too. But
here’s more trouble, Judith. This man Dargin is your friend, or at
least I’m trying to believe that he has befriended you, and I’ve got to
chase him and his bunch out of Powder Can. I came over here to-night to
tell him so. That muddles things still worse.”
“You’d better be letting Powder Can alone.”
“No, I can’t do that; it’s cutting too much out of the efficiency
record on the job. I can’t fight Lushing and his outfit, and a booze
joint as well. And right there, you break in. From what you’ve
admitted, a lick at Jack Dargin is going to hurt you worse than it will
him. And I don’t want to hurt you, Judith.”
“You shouldn’t be thinking so much about me.”
“Yes, I should; you need somebody to think about you. I wish you’d
consider that notion of mine. You could take your father with you.
He is too good a workman to be throwing himself away in a mine
repair shop. He can get a better job anywhere he goes. I could get
Mr. Grillage to help a bit in that direction. He knows everybody,
everywhere.”
“He’d be wanting to know why,” she objected.
“What if he does? I’ll tell him why.”
“Tell him that you’re trying to help a poor girl back to her feet?--and
you wanting to marry his daughter?”
“Who told you I wanted to marry his daughter?”
“There’s little goes on in the camps that we don’t hear in Powder Can.
There’s never a man of yours to come over here without having his say
about you and the daughter of the man you’d be working for. ’Tis well
I know it was Vinnie Grillage you were telling me about that night at
home when you were leaving. I’d not be messing up your life and hers,
Davie.”
He forced a sour smile. “My part of it is already messed up. Vinnie has
been good to me--chiefly because we were kiddies together, long before
I knew you, Judith. But that’s all there is to it. There are two other
entries now, and I’m out of the race. Does that make it any easier for
you to think of my plan?”
“It does not!” she flashed out, almost vindictively, he thought.
Since there seemed to be nothing more to be said, he got upon his feet,
scarcely realizing that the girl stooped and put her arms around him
and half lifted him. For a few seconds the dimly lighted interior of
the ore shed spun around in dizzying circles, and the bullet bruise
throbbed like a whirlwind of hammer blows. But he found he could
breathe better standing.
“I must get back to camp,” he said. “Have you any idea what time it is?”
“’Tis early yet.” Then, anxiously: “You couldn’t be walking all that
way, Davie!”
“Yes, I can; I’ll be all right in a few minutes more. Can you show me
the way out of this place? I don’t want to go through the town unless I
have to.”
She did not show him; she led him, with a strong arm under his to
steady him. At the wagon gate at the rear of the ore yard he would
have sent her home, but she would not go. “’Tis not fit you are to be
going alone,” she said; and in spite of his urgings she went on with
him, choosing a path that skirted the shoulder of the hill and left the
town to the right. In sober silence they walked on until half of the
distance between Powder Can and the construction camp lay behind them.
Then David Vallory made his urgings mandatory.
“You must go back,” he insisted. “I’m quite all right, now. If Dargin
should hear of this----”
“What is it Jack Dargin can do to you?” she interrupted shortly.
“It is something about the work; something that he knows. If he should
tell Lushing----”
She interrupted again. “What has Jack got against you that would make
him be giving you away to Jim Lushing?”
“I told you a little while ago. I’m trying to wipe him and his
man-traps off the map, and he doubtless knows it.”
“Jack Dargin would only be respecting you the more for that. Sure, it’s
himself that knows how bad Powder Camp would be needing a cleaning up.”
“But, good heavens, girl! Dargin is the head and front of the
lawlessness himself!”
“’Tis so; but that makes no difference. You can’t tell what’s in the
heart of a man, Davie--and I know Jack Dargin; that side of him that
not you, nor any one else knows. He’d fight you; maybe he’d kill you.
But he’d respect you the more.”
There was a grim humor in the paradox, but David Vallory was not in the
mood to appreciate it.
“He’ll be gunning for me; and so will Lushing. But I don’t care; I’ll
fight the whole outfit, if I have to. I was fool enough to go into
that dive to-night unarmed, but that won’t happen again. Lushing had
pulled a gun on me; that was one reason why I jumped him. The next
time----”
“’Tis little you’d know about the shooting, Davie.”
“What I don’t know I can learn. Now you are going straight back home
from here ... no, not another step with me. Good-night--Glory--and--God
bless you!”
Once again, if David Vallory could have had a small modicum of the
gift of omniscience; could have detached his astral body, let us say,
to send it back over the road he had just traversed; there would have
been revelations, puzzling, perhaps, but still not without interest
to one fighting against the powers of darkness. At the side of the
road the detached messenger would have found a woman, crumpled in a
forlorn heap on the cold ground, and sobbing as if her heart would
break. Still farther back, in the mining-camp itself, the astral David
might have looked into a shabbily luxurious upper room where a curious
confirmation of Judith Fallon’s prediction touching the contradictory
motives which may lie side by side in the human heart was staging
itself.
After the fight in the card-room and its supposed tragical outcome,
the down-stairs game-room had been hastily closed. As on the night of
Plegg’s eavesdropping, the upper room held two occupants, and they were
the same two whose voices had reached the first assistant through the
partly opened gallery window. And, as before, the lop-shouldered man
was the bearer of news.
“By cripes! I guess I know what I’m talking about?” he snarled. “I’ve
just come from there. He’s gone, I tell you; lit out--skipped. The
watchman swears he don’t know nothin’ about it--didn’t go near the shed
after they took him there.”
The master gambler, again with his hands in his pockets, and again
tilting gently in the wooden-seated chair, nodded his approval. “I’m
glad of it,” he said.
“The hell you are! And him tryin’ to butt in on your game and run you
out?”
“That’s what I said”--curtly.
“And you ain’t goin’ to use that dope that you pulled out o’ me at the
end of a gun?”
“Not in a thousand years, Simmy. Haven’t you been with me long enough
to know that I’m no damn’ worm to crawl up a man’s leg and bite him to
death? You say the young duck’s alive and has made his get-away. That’s
all right. If he comes at me like a two-fisted man, maybe I’ll send
him word that he’d better come heeled. But that’s all.”
“You won’t take the dope and do him up the way I was tellin’ you?”
“Nothing doing.”
“Well, then, by cripes! I know somebody that will take it--and pay good
money for it!” shrilled the disappointed one.
“Grillage, you mean?”
“No; I tried him, and what do I get? He tells that big, black nigger
porter of his to put me out of the car. I’ll show him--him and Vallory
at the same clatter!”
The master gambler got up, as if to signify that he had heard enough.
“Better look out that you don’t get stepped on--like other
worms--Simmy,” he warned; and then, reaching for the hanging lamp over
the table to turn it out: “Get a crawl on you; I’m going to shut up
shop.”
XXI
The Other David
When David Vallory, plodding doggedly, reached the construction camp
upon his return from Powder Can, he found Herbert Oswald waiting for
him at the steps of the office bunk car.
“Everybody had gone to bed in the hotel, and I thought I’d straggle
down to see if I could find your headquarters,” was the way in which
the young lawyer accounted for himself. “If you are tired and want to
turn in, you are at liberty to shoo me away.”
“No,” said David crisply. “Come on in.”
Oswald groped his way into the dark interior of the car at the heels
of his crusty welcomer and found a seat on Plegg’s unoccupied bunk
while David was lighting a lamp. At the blowing-out of the match, the
lamp-lighter stood staring gloomily down upon his late-in-the-evening
visitor.
“I know pretty well what you’ve come to say,” he thrust in gruffly.
“Suppose you say it and have it over with.”
Oswald looked up in mild surprise.
“I didn’t come here to scrap with you, David. And, so far as I know,
I haven’t done anything to make you run at me with a chip on your
shoulder. Of course, I know you are thinking I ought not to have come
out here, but----”
“What I may think doesn’t seem to cut any figure,” said David, with the
air of a man who would rather precipitate a quarrel than avoid one.
“I told you exactly and precisely what I thought a year ago as I was
leaving Middleboro, and I haven’t had any reason to change my mind.”
Oswald, ready enough in any legal matching of man against man, seemed
helplessly nonplussed.
“You have changed rather ferociously,” he remarked. “I don’t quite know
how to take you. If you are giving me a fair shot at your present self,
you are not the David Vallory I used to know.”
“No, I am not the same. A little while ago I was trying my best to kill
a man; I shall do it yet, one of these days, if he doesn’t keep out of
my sight. But go on and say what you’ve got to say.”
“It amounts to this: for a whole year I’ve kept faith with you--honest
faith--and every day of that year has been a day of heartburnings and
regrets. Your attitude toward your sister is entirely unreasonable.
There have been blind wives before this, and they have been happy
wives--and mothers, for that matter; at least, their blindness hasn’t
necessarily been a bar to happiness. A year ago, if I had spoken, I
should have spoken only for myself: now I am speaking for Lucille as
well as for myself.”
“All of which is entirely beside the question,” was the irritable
rejoinder. “I know Lucille, and however far she has allowed herself to
go in the matter of learning to care for you or for any man, it’s a
sure thing she has never thought of marriage, even as a possibility. If
you propose it, two things will happen; she will wake up to the fact
that she has been mistaking love for friendship; and she will realize
that she has to refuse the love. After that, her life will be nothing
but a miserable, repining blank.”
“I can’t agree with you at all,” objected the lover, argumentatively
ready to defend his own point of view. “If you were the David Vallory
I once knew, you would listen to reason; at least, to the extent of
giving your sister a voice in ordering her own future. I have come to
the fork of the road, David, and I am here to say it to you, face to
face. I need Lucille, and she needs me. When the time is fully ripe
I shall ask her to be my wife. You put me under bonds of a certain
sort a year ago, but now I shall refuse longer to be bound by them; I
repudiate them absolutely.”
David Vallory sat down, and for a time the silence of the small car
interior was broken only by the clash and jangle of a shifting-engine
in the upper yard. Finally the decision came.
“Oswald, Lucille is my sister, and I am going to stand between her and
the life of heartbroken wretchedness you are planning for her. You
give me your word that you will not break over while you are both here
together, and upon that condition you may stay in Powder Gap as long as
you see fit.”
Oswald stood up and his lips were pale.
“And if I refuse to submit to any such unreasonable and humiliating
condition--what then?”
David Vallory frowned up at his one-time schoolmate.
“You say that you have been bound by your promise of a year ago, but
that you now repudiate it; as a man of honor, you are bound by it until
I release you.”
“You are not answering my question.”
“I’ll answer it. The stub train going east leaves here every morning
at seven-thirty; I’ll give you a day or two in which to think it
over--with the promise still holding good.”
“And if, at the end of the day or two, I still refuse to recognize your
right to interfere?”
“This is not Middleboro; and, as you have remarked, I am not the David
Vallory you used to know. If you still decline to listen to reason,
you’ll take that train and get out of here--if I have to hog-tie you
and throw you into the baggage-car!”
“_David!_”
“You needn’t beg; I mean it. I am neither drunk nor insane. You have
said your say and I have said mine, and that settles it.”
The young lawyer took a step toward the door. But with his hand on the
knob he stopped and faced about.
“So this is what Eben Grillage has done for you, is it?” he grated.
“Like master, like man; with the doctrine of brute force for your code.
I wouldn’t have believed it possible for the son of your father, David.”
“I have had the brute force all along, only I haven’t had sense enough
to apply it,” was the surly rejoinder. “But it’s never too late to
mend. Good-night--if you’re going.”
“I am going, but not before I have finished saying my say. For the
present, and purely because I don’t consider the time fully ripe, I
shall postpone asking your sister to marry me. But I refuse utterly and
definitely to be bound by your tyrannical conditions.”
Shortly after Oswald had gone, David Vallory rummaged in Plegg’s
kit-locker until he found a blued service revolver in its holster. He
hung it under his coat by the shoulder-strap, and then dug further for
a supply of cartridges. Thus armed, he took to the open again. The
shock of the bullet bruise was still unsteadying him, and the bruise
itself was hurting savagely, but he would not give up to it. At Brady’s
Cut he found Plegg.
“The war is on,” he announced briefly, when he had taken the first
assistant aside.
“You have seen Lushing?” Plegg asked.
“Yes; and he gave himself away: says he means to break us. We had it
back and forth for a few minutes, and then he pulled a gun on me.”
“Good Lord!” said Plegg. “Where were you?”
“In one of Dargin’s card-rooms. We mixed it. I couldn’t stand for the
gun-pulling--and some other things. He tried to plug me, but I’m hoping
he got as good as he sent. Anyhow, I’ve cleared the air a bit. I’ve
taken the liberty of borrowing your extra forty-five, and I’m going
loaded for him after this. I’ve told him what he may expect if he shows
his face on this job again while I’m here.”
“For heaven’s sake! I--well, it isn’t my put in, but you’ve rather got
me going, you know. Can you--er--do you know how to use the forty-five?”
“Not very well; I did a little pistol-practice in Florida. But
to-morrow you’ll take me back in the hills and show me a bit. Just now
we’ve got other fish to fry. We’re going to fight Lushing on his own
ground. He says we’re a gang of thieves, and if we have the name, we
may as well have the game.”
“But even if you’ve bluffed him into staying off the job, he still has
the ear of the railroad people.”
“That’s all right; I’ll fight him to a knockout, all the way up to Mr.
Ford--if he wants to carry it that far. In the meantime we’ll show
him, and the men who are paying his salary, that we know how to hit
back when they call us thieves. Pass the word to our staff, and let
the fellows pass it on to the foremen and subcontractors. They’ll know
how to cut the corners, and how to keep the railroad inspectors from
finding out--no coarse-hand work, you know, Plegg, but every dollar
that can be squeezed out of this job from now on. That’s what we want.”
Plegg was shaking his head like a man in a maze; and the new chief--new
now in his attitude as well as in the shortness of his service--went on.
“About that weak spot in the tunnel; have you found out who gave it
away to Dargin?”
“Yes; a fellow named Backus, who worked in one of the muck shifts. The
men say he was a steerer for Dargin’s faro-game.”
“What has become of him?”
“He’s fired: I suppose he’s in Powder Can.”
“He is the man we want. I’m going to put it up to you, Plegg, to find
him and grab him before he gets next to Lushing. When he is found, buy
him, and shoot him out of the country--anywhere where he’ll be out of
Lushing’s reach until we get this job done.”
“And if he can’t be bought?”
“Lock him up somewhere and keep him from talking. Now about the bad
roof itself: that is where Lushing can hit us the hardest. Give Regnier
his tip, and do it to-night. Tell him to have the tunnel re-wired for
lights so there won’t be a bulb anywhere near that soft spot. Tell
him to keep his men quiet if he has to raise the pay of every man in
the three shifts. Then make him understand that the rule against the
admission of outsiders must be rigidly enforced, if he has to maintain
an armed guard at the portal.”
“That won’t keep Lushing’s inspectors out,” Plegg suggested mildly.
“I’m coming to that. Regnier must see to it that some man of ours who
can be trusted is within reach every time an inspector goes in. We
don’t care to hurt anybody needlessly, but if one of our hard-rock
bullies should happen to get into a scrap with the man who chances to
discover that ‘fault’--well, you know what I mean. Mr. Grillage says
that place is perfectly safe, and we’re going to take his word for it.”
The first assistant nodded, and the slow smile bared his teeth and
wrinkled at the corners of his eyes.
“I certainly owe you an apology,” he said, with the faintest suggestion
of irony in his tone; “several of them, in fact. There was a time when
I fancied you were going to be too good--to revert to that morning in
the Pullman a year ago; and I imagine Mr. Grillage harbored the same
inadequate notion. You’ll want to be getting back to headquarters,
I suppose: there is an engine due down from the tunnel--there it
comes--I’ll flag it for you.”