and I haven’t needed to. You have been showing very plainly that you
have broken with the ideals--all of them. Why couldn’t you stay up on
the pedestal, David? It was such a nice pedestal!”
He laughed mirthlessly. “You are such a queer mixture of good, hard
sense and back-number romanticism,” he commented. “Can’t you realize
that I’ve got to be a man among men?”
“That is what you ought to be--in the other and better meaning of the
phrase. You won’t make a very successful villain, David.”
“Perhaps not; but I shall try mighty hard not to let the other man make
a wooden Indian of me,” he returned grimly.
“And you haven’t stopped, even at--murder.” She shuddered over the
final word, but she would not qualify it.
He was regarding her through half-closed eyes. “Having said that much,
you ought to say more, don’t you think?” he suggested.
“I am going to say more; lots more. That man in the tunnel last night:
he wasn’t blown up by a blast.”
“How do you know he wasn’t?”
“One of your men carried or dragged him half-way to the mouth of the
tunnel before the blast was fired.”
“Well?” he prompted.
“It comes to this; either it was a sheer accident--a stone falling
from the roof--or there was foul play. Mr. Lushing says it was foul
play.”
“Lushing? You don’t mean to say that he has had the brazen effrontery
to come to you!”
“No; he didn’t come here. He sent me a note; an unsigned note, because
he is a coward. He did it once before, when he was dis--when he left
the Grillage Company. He says you will be tried for murder if the man
dies, and he throws it in my face.”
David got upon his feet rather unsteadily, but the unsteadiness was of
rage.
“There wasn’t any murder last night, but there is going to be one when
I can find this man who writes anonymous letters to you!” he broke out.
“No; sit down again, please. I am not nearly through. It makes very
little difference what Mr. Lushing, or anybody else, may write or
say to me, David; but there are other things that do make a world of
difference. What special thing is there in that tunnel that you don’t
want Mr. Lushing or his engineers to find out?”
He stared at her gloomily. “If you were your father’s son instead of
his daughter, I might tell you.”
“You will tell me anyhow,” she declared quickly. “If you don’t, I shall
find out for myself.”
“I believe you are quite capable of it. But there is nothing to be told
more than I have already told you. You may remember that I admitted
that there was a place in the tunnel that may be called dangerous.
If Lushing finds out about it, he will immediately insist that it is
dangerous, and the railroad people will make us spend a lot of money
needlessly. Your father didn’t put me here to bankrupt the Grillage
Engineering Company, Vinnie.”
She ignored the clause in condonation.
“So, accordingly, you have given orders to our men to have an accident
happen if the secret seems likely to be discovered. This is simply
horrible, David!”
“It is rather primitive, I’ll admit. But it’s business--in the modern
meaning of the word. More than that, I owe it to your father.”
“You don’t owe him _anything_ that ought to be paid with such a
frightful price! What ought to be done with that place in the tunnel?
What would be done if you were not blind to everything but profit and
loss?”
David shrugged his shoulders and turned his face away. “I suppose the
bad piece of roof would be shot down.”
“And you are deliberately allowing it to stay up--if it will--and
endangering the lives of your workmen every hour of the day and night?”
“Hard-rock men always take a chance. It is a part of their trade. And
Regnier, or some other member of the staff, is always there to take it
with them.”
“You are hopeless--absolutely and utterly hopeless, David! Don’t you
see what you are forcing me to do?”
“No.”
“I have some little conscience, if you haven’t. I can’t say anything
to Mr. Lushing, of course, and I wouldn’t if I could. But I can write
to Mr. Maxwell, the general manager of the railroad at Brewster. It so
happens that I know him, and his wife.”
“Hold on; you wouldn’t do anything like that! Think a minute of the
position in which it would place your father.”
She shook her head despairingly.
“You drive me into a corner and then beat me!” she cried. “It is all
wrong, wrong! And you have broken my heart, David, because I thought
you were different. You lay this horrible burden upon me one minute,
and tie my hands the next. What if this man who was hurt last night
should die?”
“He won’t die; but neither will he talk,” was the gritting reply.
The young woman had risen and her color was coming and going in hot
little flashes.
“You think because I am my father’s daughter you are safe in saying
anything you please, and in going on in any hard-hearted way you
choose! It is what I might have expected of a man who would deny his
only sister her one little chance of happiness. You are worse than
other men, because you know the right way and you won’t walk in it!”
He sprang up suddenly and caught her hands in both of his.
“You are right, Vinnie; I do know better. Every word you have been
saying has cut like a knife!” he burst out, smashing all the barriers
of insincerity at a single blow. “I know where I stand, and what I’ve
been doing, and I have been a conscious hypocrite every time I have
pleaded the way of the world as my excuse. But a man _must_ be loyal
to something. For the obligation, the immense obligation, I owe your
father. I have put my hands between his knees as the old-time vassals
used to do, and sworn to make his cause my cause. He knows about that
bad tunnel roof; knows more than I do; and when I spoke to him, he
told me to forget it. I can’t be disloyal to him--and keep even a
thief’s sense of honor!”
She released her hands quickly. It was early for any of the porch
loungers to be out, but they were standing fairly in front of the lobby
windows.
“That is better; much better,” she commended with a little sigh. “I
thought you were gone, David; honestly, I was afraid that the good old
David I used to know and--and think a lot of--was dead and buried--and
it hurt me as much as it would if you had been my own brother. Now, if
I could only forget what happened last night----”
“You may set your mind at rest about Strayer,” he put in quickly. “He
won’t die; and he wasn’t assaulted, as you seem to think he was, though
I won’t say what might or might not have happened in another minute or
two. He was testing the bad roof with the point of an iron bar, and a
loose rock came down upon his head.”
“But now you will pull the roof down, or timber it, or do whatever is
needful to make it safe?” she said, half pleading with him.
“No; my hands are tied, too. I can’t saddle the company with the added
expense after your father has told me in so many words to let it
alone. Neither must I let Lushing find out and force it upon him if I
can help it. We must just trust to luck, Vinnie; there is no help for
it.”
“There is going to be help for it,” she asserted, with true Grillage
resolution. Then: “One more word before you go, David: you won’t
fi--quarrel with Mr. Lushing again?”
But at this his eyes grew hard. “I owe him something more, now, for
that anonymous letter. Besides, he’s out for my scalp, personally, and
I shall certainly try to hold up my end if he starts anything. You
can’t blame me for that, Vinnie. But that is a future. There is Wishart
coming out of the breakfast-room, and I suppose he is looking for you.
Anyway, my job is yelling for me and I must go. Don’t you worry a
single minute about anything; do you hear?”
“Not even about Herbert and Lucille?” she threw in quickly, as one
thrusts an antagonist who is helplessly off his guard.
“Oh, say; that isn’t fair!” he retorted, with a frown that turned
itself into a grin in spite of the reluctances. “I’m right about Bert
and the little sister--I’m practically certain I am; but you’ve got me
going, and you know it. Do whatever you think is best. Good-by.”
What Miss Virginia thought was best was not to stay and meet the
short-sighted heir of the breakfast-foods who was rambling aimlessly in
her direction. Instead, she went into the lobby and sent a telegram. It
was addressed to her father at Red Butte, and it was short and to the
point:
“Highly important that you return at once.
“V.”
XXV
Cataclysmic
Notwithstanding his chief’s angry assertion that he did not need
safeguarding, Silas Plegg had contrived to keep track of the goings
and comings of “the little big boss” on the job, and his vigilance was
increased after the near-tragedy in the tunnel. The gossip of the camps
made much of the little war which had developed between the Grillage
Company’s chief and Lushing, and it was quickly passed from lip to
lip that the enmity between the two men had now become actively and
vindictively personal; had, in the phrase of the unfettered desert
country, reached the stage in which each was “looking” for the other
with vengeful intent. In spite of the assertion, often repeated and
as often contradicted, that Strayer’s injury was purely the result of
an unlucky accident, there were many to speak of it with an eyelid
drooped, and to intimate that Lushing would go far to even up the
account with David Vallory, an account which carried its largest debit
item in the blow which had disfigured him.
For Plegg there was a small lessening of one of the many stresses when
David, on the day after the accident, had modified the order given in
the battle night when he had so promptly backslidden into the field of
things elemental.
“About keeping that tunnel situation dark, Plegg: I’ve been thinking
that some of our men might take me too literally--that possibly you
did,” was the way the modifying clause was introduced. “I was pretty
savage that night. I told you that Lushing shot at me, but let you
infer that he missed. It was a miss, but it wouldn’t have been if my
field-note book hadn’t turned the bullet.”
“I saw the hole in your coat afterwards,” said Plegg quietly.
“Yes; the shock stopped the clock for me, and the gambling house people
carried me out for dead--thought I was dead. Naturally, when the clock
got to running again, I was hot; was still pretty warm when I talked
with you at Brady’s. Of course, I didn’t mean to convey the idea that
Lushing, or any member of his staff, was to be massacred out of hand.”
“Of course not,” the first assistant agreed, readily enough. “But we
are not to let them find out about the ‘fault,’ are we?”
“Not if we can help it without going to extremes. Mr. Grillage will
be back before long, and I’m going to put that tunnel-roof question
up to him again good and hard. I know what it will mean to us if we
have to dig that hollow tooth out and fill it, but just the same, the
responsibility is getting too heavy for me, Plegg. It’s got so I wake
up in the night to think about it, and that’s bad medicine.”
Plegg offered no comment on this, but he made haste to pass the word
to Regnier that guile, and not violence, was henceforth to be used in
preserving the secret of the bad roof. Shortly after the word-passing
Regnier had a deduction of his own to proffer. It was to be inferred
that the secret had finally escaped, through the man Backus, or
otherwise, and that Strayer’s accident had been taken as a warning.
None of the railroad inspectors were venturing into the tunnel since
Strayer had been injured, Regnier reported.
Beyond this, there was a plot of some sort afoot, so Regnier told
Plegg. An attempt had been made to bribe one of the portal watchmen
posted to keep unauthorized visitors out of the tunnel, and the briber
was one of the Powder Can dive-keepers--not Dargin, but one of his
concessionaries, who was also known as “Black Jack.” The watchman had
proved incorruptible, and had reported the attempt to Regnier. His
story was that he had been offered a certain sum of money if he would
find out when Vallory was to be in the tunnel at any shift-changing
time, and would use the working telephone to notify the briber
beforehand.
Plegg said nothing of this to his chief, but it made him doubly
watchful. Also, it made him fertile in excuses to keep Vallory from
making any but strictly unannounced visits to Heading Number One.
Time was all the first assistant hoped to gain. It was reported that
Mr. Grillage’s private car was on its way back from Red Butte, and
there was the slender chance that, with the president on the ground
again, something might be done to clear the air and quiet the various
gathering menaces.
This was the situation at the close of the day when the private Pullman
_Athenia_ came in and was shunted to its former position on the spur
track. At the moment of its arrival David Vallory was making a tour of
the lower camps. Plegg was in the construction yard, and he saw Eben
Grillage and his fishing companion leave the car and go up to the Inn
together. And after dinner he saw the king of the contractors come back
to the car alone. Later still, the first assistant, smoking his pipe on
the platform of the office bunk car, saw a woman descending the path
from the hotel. Recognizing the big boss’s daughter, Plegg dutifully
went across the yard tracks to meet her.
“Thank you, Mr. Plegg,” she said, as he came up. “I imagine I was just
about to lose myself. Whereabouts is the _Athenia_?”
“I’ll show you,” he offered, and he led her around an obstructing
material train and over to the spur-track, where he helped her up the
steps of the private car. As he was lifting his hat to go away she
stopped him to ask a question.
“Do you happen to know where Mr. Vallory is?”
Plegg gave such information as he had, or thought he had: the chief was
somewhere down the line at one of the lower camps; or at least he had
gone down earlier in the evening and he had not come back to supper.
The young woman appeared to be satisfied with the answer, and when
the porter had admitted her to her father’s car, Plegg went his way,
wondering if anything new had developed. The conclusion was negative.
Miss Virginia’s question was natural and casual; one that need have no
bearing upon the threatening conditions--doubtless had none. But if he
could have been a listener at the door of the office compartment in
the _Athenia_, he would have known better how much was at stake in the
matter of keeping in close touch with his chief’s movements.
Miss Virginia found her father planted in his great chair behind the
glass-topped table-desk. The fishing absence was responsible for a
huge accumulation of mail, and he was slitting the envelopes with
a nimble dexterity curiously at variance with his massive bulk and
knotty-knuckled, square-fingered hands.
“Hello, little girl; you down here?” he rumbled; and before she could
speak: “I got your wire--two days late. What is it?--something that
won’t keep until I have read my mail?” Then, with a chuckling laugh:
“Which one is it you’re going to spring on me--Wishart, or the ‘belted
earl’?”
“Neither,” she replied succinctly. “I have come to talk business.”
“Oho! business, is it? Well, I guess I’m a business man. Go ahead and
open up your samples.”
“The reason why I telegraphed you to come back was because you haven’t
kept your promise.”
“Which one?” he inquired, with large indulgence.
“The one you made me when you were sending David out here. You promised
me that he wasn’t to be spoiled.”
“Oh, that’s it, is it?”--with another of the deep-chested chuckles.
“All right; let’s have it: what do you think you’ve found out?”
“You know, well enough,” she returned coldly. “For a time, I think, Mr.
Plegg was able to keep the crooked things hidden from David--as you
doubtless instructed him to. But of course David soon found out what is
being done, and that it is being done by your orders. And now you are
about to make a criminal of him. I don’t see how you can ever look his
father in the face.”
Eben Grillage wagged his big head sorrowfully.
“You’re all I’ve got in the world, Vinnie, girl, and there’s mighty
little I wouldn’t do for you; but it’s terribly hard to live up to your
notions, sometimes. You’ve been a business man’s daughter all your
life, and yet you haven’t the faintest idea of what business means.”
“I have a very clear idea of what it means to cheat, to lie, to put
human life in jeopardy, and to take a clean, straightforward young man
like David Vallory and turn him into a potential murderer.”
“Oh, pshaw!” grunted the king of the contractors. “I suppose somebody
has been scaring you about that tunnel and the few cracks it has in the
roof. Was it David?”
“No, it wasn’t David; I found out about it myself, before you went
away. And the ‘few cracks’ have nearly killed one man, already.”
“Strayer, you mean?--I had David’s report of that. Strayer is a pretty
good engineer, and he ought to have known better than to pry a rock
loose and let it fall on his own head. Vinnie, I’m getting sore about
this thing. That tunnel roof will stand up all right if they’ll only
quit monkeying with it and let it alone.”
“I’m not here to argue with you about the tunnel as a tunnel,” said the
daughter, with a touch of the true Grillage bluntness. “I merely wish
to find out if you’re going to try to patch up that broken promise.”
“What in the name of common sense can I do--more than I have done? I
wrote Plegg to keep David on the windward side of the little economies
we have to make, and I’m sorry if he hasn’t been able to do it. I’ll
haul Plegg over the coals, if that will make you feel any better.”
“Mr. Plegg doubtless did his best, and it wasn’t good enough. David is
a graduate engineer and a grown man. He would be singularly stupid if
he could be your chief of construction and not know what was going on
right under his eyes. But that is not the point now. Are you, or are
you not, going to give David authority to do what he, and Mr. Plegg,
and every member of your own engineering staff, know ought to be done
to that dangerous place in the tunnel--a thing that is endangering the
lives of the men every day? That is what I came to ask.”
It was a rare thing for Eben Grillage to refuse his daughter’s demands,
even when they were unreasonable; but the habits of a ruthless
life-time were too strong to be set aside, even at the bidding of
indulgent fatherly affection.
“You are my daughter, Vinnie, but you are just like other women when
you get your head set on anything. If I should let you run my business
for me, there wouldn’t be any business left after a little while, and
we’d both join the bread line. If you’ve made up your mind that David
is the man you want, just say so and I’ll take him off the job and set
him up in any kind of business you pick out--if you can pick one that
measures up to your Utopian notions of honesty. That’s fair, isn’t it?”
She did not answer the question. There was one more arrow in her quiver
and she fitted it to the string and drew the bow.
“The tunnel isn’t the only thing, as you know. James Lushing makes it
an open boast that he will break you, and you know best what reasons he
may have for thinking such a thing possible. Beyond that, David has met
him and they have quarreled--fought. I have been told that Lushing’s
first blow will be struck at David, to get him out of the way.”
“Who told you any such thing as that?”
“No matter; I have heard it, and I have no reason to doubt the truth of
the report. David is so loyal to you that he is the biggest obstacle in
Lushing’s way. Everybody knows that Lushing can command the help of any
number of desperate characters in Powder Can. It wouldn’t be beyond him
to----”
--“To have David killed off out of the way?” supplied the big man, with
another chuckle. “If you go much deeper, you’ll be telling me that
David is the man, after all. But don’t you worry. When you marry David
Vallory, Vinnie, you’ll marry a man. If he is half the scrapper I take
him to be, he’ll be well able to take care of himself in any mix-up
with Jim Lushing--or with any of Lushing’s paid blacklegs.”
The special pleader’s eyes grew suddenly weary.
“Then you will do nothing about the tunnel?” she asked patiently.
“Not until I have some better reason than a foolish little girl’s
notion--no.”
“Hasn’t David told you what he thinks ought to be done?”
“Oh, yes, of course; the hard-rock men got him rattled, right at the
start, and he came to me about it, boy-like.”
“And you told him to let it alone?”
“Sure I did. We are going to lose money enough on this job, as it is.”
The fine persistence was broken at last. The daughter of the
luxuries--and the ideals--rose and moved toward the door. As she
reached the vestibule exit she turned and gazed at the big man filling
the great arm-chair, and there was neither anger nor impatience in her
eyes; only a profound depth of shocked disappointment and reproach.
“I never knew you _could_ be so hard and pitiless,” she said slowly.
“If this is what money and the love of it can do to you----” The swing
door of the vestibule yielded under her hand and she went out, leaving
the sentence unfinished.
At the car-steps the negro porter had placed his carpeted foot-stool,
but Silas Plegg was not there to see the president’s daughter safely
across the tracks. It is conceivable that she did not mark the
omission. From childhood she had known construction yards and the
paraphernalia of the contracting trade, and her father was fond of
boasting that she was as self-reliant as any boy.
Picking her way in the gathering dusk around the obstructing cars
filled with building material, she came presently to the foot of the
path leading up to the Inn. Out of the first clump of scrub pine on
the hill trail a woman darted into the path and blocked it. Virginia
Grillage stopped short with a little gasp of apprehension. Then she saw
who it was.
“You--Judith? were you looking for me?”
“I was. They couldn’t tell me at the hotel, and I was that frightened I
thought I’d be choking. Jack Dargin sent me, and the other Jack--Black
Jack Runnels, he is--would be killing me if he knew I came. You’ll
remember what I was telling you yesterday. David is to be murdered--in
the tunnel some way--I don’t know how. They’re to get him in between
the shifts; when the day men have come out and before the night men
have gone in. Dargin says there’d be a clock of some kind in a box--he
said to tell you that, and you’d understand.”
“But David isn’t at the tunnel; he is at one of the lower camps. Mr.
Plegg told me so just a few minutes ago.”
“Maybe he was, but he isn’t now; he went up on an engine not ten
minutes ago. It was Simmy Backus’s job to get him there--to ’phone
him there was a man hurt in the tunnel. He’d fall for that--David
would--and he went. I saw the engine when it passed me, going up. What
must we do? ’Tis you that would be loving David, Vinnie Grillage, and
that I know well, but you’re not the only one: I--I’d die for him this
minute!”
For a moment Virginia Grillage, quick-witted and resourceful as any
daughter of Eve since the world began, stood shocked and irresolute,
fighting desperately for some shreddings of the capability to act which
had suddenly deserted her. Then the lost self-control came back with a
bound.
“The telephone!” she gasped. “You run back to the hotel, Judith, and
find Bert Oswald--tell him what you’ve told me and he’ll know what
to do! While you’re doing that, I’ll try to find a ’phone here in
the yards. Run!” and she set the example by flying down the path and
dodging around the obstructing cars to reach the _Athenia_.
To her utter dismay, she found the private car untenanted. The lights
were still on, and the recently opened mail lay on the desk, but the
big swing-chair was empty. Twice, and again, she called her father,
and when there was no answer she caught up the telephone set from the
desk and tried to make somebody hear. But the set was dead; the wires
connecting it with the working system had not been restrung since the
_Athenia_ had returned from Red Butte.