Chapter V: Part 5

“I suppose he’s trying to make more trouble for us,” said David.

“He is. He is trying to force legal proceedings to get our contract canceled. He threatened to do that when we dropped him. He’s a vindictive cuss, if ever there was one.”

David Vallory shook his head in sympathetic deprecation. He was too loyal himself to be able to understand how a man, even if he were enraged, could turn upon the hand that had fed him.

“He can’t do anything like that,” he asserted confidently. “I’ve specialized a good bit in the law of contracts--took it as a part of my college course. As I see it, the railroad company has absolutely no grounds whatever for cancellation. As I’ve said, when Lushing’s inspectors bring up a specific charge, we make good, and that’s the end of it.”

Since being in love with a man’s daughter is the poorest possible preliminary to any accurate reading of face signs when the subject chances to be the father of the daughter, the slow drooping of an eyelid on the part of the big man in the desk chair opposite was quite thrown away upon David Vallory.

“Of course,” agreed the contractor-king, with a suppressed chuckle which he turned into a forced clearing of his throat; “we’re up to all the little methods of pacifying the enemy, eh, David?” And then: “I’ve just had Plegg here, making him tell tales out of school. Naturally, he didn’t want to say much about his chief, but you’ve got his vote, all right. He tells me you’ve made good with the force, and that you’re a home-grown miracle in the pace-setting. That is what I wanted to hear; but it is also what I expected to hear.”

“More kindness,” said the beneficiary of the kindness, with a comforting glow warming him. “Before I went to Coulee du Sac I used to hear that you were a hard man to work for. I shall feel like scrapping with the next man who says anything like that to me.”

“You go right on believing that I’m a hard man,” said Eben Grillage, with a ferocious twinkle of the shrewd eyes; “it’s safer. Now there’s another little thing, while I think of it: Plegg was telling me something about these dives and speak-easys over in Powder Can; said you’d got stirred up about ’em and wanted to give ’em the high kick. You take a word of advice from me, David, and let ’em alone. After you’ve handled grade laborers and hard-rock men as long as I have, you’ll realize that they’re bound to have their fling after pay-day. If you were an angel from heaven you couldn’t stop it. And you’ll only get your hands muddy if you try.”

“But it’s such a tremendous drawback to the work!” David protested, feeling, in his inmost recesses, that this argument, rather than the moral, would be more likely to appeal to Eben Grillage.

“That’s one of the things you have to figure on,” was the man-driver’s reply. “Pad your gangs with a few extras to make up for the pay-day absentees. Labor’s fairly plentiful just now, and in the contracting business you’ll find that man-muscle is about the cheapest material you handle. But that’s enough about business. What do you hear from your father?”

“Mighty good news, just now. He hasn’t been very well this spring, so I have persuaded him to come out here for a while. I shall be looking for him and my sister next week.”

“That’s the talk!” exclaimed the Vallory benefactor. “I’ll make him go trout-fishing with me. And that drags us back to the business matter again. I’m not out here to stand over you and tell you what to do on the job, David; I’ve told Vinnie it’s my vacation--something that I haven’t had for so long that I’ve forgotten what it looks like. I’ll make a little round of the work with you to-morrow, just to let the outfit see that you’ve got the boss on your side, and after that you can count me out. Vinnie probably won’t let you off so easily, but you can settle that with her.”

With this program for a sort of stirrup-cup, David Vallory left the president’s car with the warm glow at his heart bursting into a generous flame. In an age in which filial piety has come to be more or less regarded as a hold-over from an emotional elder generation, he found himself inclining toward the savior of the good name of the Vallorys with an affection akin to that which he felt for the father who had begotten him. That the industrial world held Eben Grillage as a hard master, and the world of business looked a trifle askance at his huge fortune and the manner of its acquiring, were matters subsidiary to the main question. Under the gruff exterior, the grasping exterior, if his detractors would have it so, David told himself there dwelt a giant of generosity and loving-kindness; a man whose very crudities and bluntnesses were lovable; a man for whom his grateful beneficiaries could never go too far, so long as the saving spark of gratitude remained alive in the human breast.

It was with these exalted emotions stirring him that he swung up to the step of his bunk car. Since the car was lighted, he expected to find Silas Plegg at work on his customary evening task of checking the books of field-notes. But the only occupant of the car proved to be young Altman, who was driving the rock-blasting in the eastern heading of the great tunnel; a sober-minded young mining engineer only a year out of college, but yet with the lines of responsibility already graving themselves visibly in his boyish face.

“I’m disobeying orders, Mr. Vallory,” he began. “Plegg tells us we mustn’t bother you with our complaints, but in justice to my men I’ve got to break over this one time. You know that weak spot in the tunnel roof?--the one I showed you the first time you were in?”

David nodded. The “weak spot” was a section of the big bore which had been driven through a prehistoric gash in the granite; a huge vertical crack which had been filled with softer rock in some later earth upheaval. “What about it?” he asked.

“It’s getting my goat. It is growing worse every day, and I’m afraid it will come down on us. Since we’re working three shifts, with a gang in the heading all the time, you know what a cave-in would mean; the shift that happened to be caught behind it would die to the last man before it could be dug out. There’s enough of that slippery marl hanging up in the ‘fault’ to bury an army, and, sooner or later, it’s going to come down. But I can’t make Plegg see it that way at all. He says I’ve got too many nerves.”

“You think the weak spot ought to be timbered?”

“I know it ought; and the men think so, too. There has been a good bit of grumbling and some little strike talk among them, and I can’t blame them. They say the company has no right to ask them to take their lives in their hands for the sake of saving a few dollars’ worth of timbers. It was my shift off this afternoon, but if I had known you were going to be up there, I should have stayed and asked you to take another look at the roof for yourself.”

“I’ll go up to-morrow,” was David’s prompt offer. “We mustn’t take chances on the lives of your men. At the same time, it doesn’t pay to let a thing of that kind get on your nerves, Fred. The responsibility is up to Plegg and me, and we’ll take care of it. Now you’d better hike back to the bunk shack and catch up on your sleep.”

It was less than a quarter of an hour after Altman had gone when Silas Plegg came in and found David Vallory preparing to go to bed.

“About that weak place in the tunnel roof in heading Number One,” said David, pausing with one lace-boot off. “Have you examined it lately?”

“I’ve been keeping an eye on it ever since we drove through it,” was the first assistant’s answer. Then: “Has Altman been worrying you about it?”

“He was here a few minutes ago. He seems to think it’s dangerous, and says his men are protesting.”

“Altman is a fine young fellow, and an expert in the rock-blasting, but he is a little inclined to be nervous,” Plegg threw in. “That sort of thing is always contagious, and Altman’s personal scare has been spreading itself. That roof stood up while we were driving through the fault, and I guess it will continue to stand.”

“If there is any doubt about it, it ought to be timbered,” was David’s decision. “I’m looking to you, Plegg, for the carrying out of these routine details.”

“We can’t afford to timber it,” said Plegg, shortly.

“Why not? The cost would be nothing compared with what we’d lose in a strike of the hard-rock men.”

“I’ll guarantee the men won’t strike. And as for the cost of the timbering; have you considered what it would mean to us if we should call the attention of the railroad inspectors to that bad spot by propping it up?”

“Do you mean to say that the railroad engineers, and Lushing among them, don’t know about that ‘fault’?”

“We’re hoping they don’t,” said Plegg, with the sardonic smile wrinkling slowly at the corners of his eyes. “It would give Mr. James B. Lushing the one big chance he is looking for. The day in which we haul the first car-load of props into the tunnel will be the day when he’ll fall on us like a thousand of brick. We’ll get a peremptory order from the railroad headquarters to shoot that bad roof down and plug the hole with concrete. That will mean a delay, maybe of weeks, a forfeiture of our time-limit bond for the completion of the job, and a bill of costs for the additional work that will turn the Grillage company’s profit into a loss heavy enough to make the big boss sweat blood.”

David said nothing while he was slowly removing the remaining lace-boot. When he spoke it was to ask a curt question.

“Does Mr. Grillage know about this bad spot in the tunnel.”

“Sure he does. I sent him photographs when we were driving through it. He’s an old hand at the rock-blasting, and he isn’t losing any sleep over the cracked roof--which is cracked chiefly in Altman’s imagination.”

In some vague sense David Vallory felt that he was confronting a crisis and another test of the ideals. Before he realized it the battle was joined between a just regard for human life on one hand, and strict loyalty to Eben Grillage on the other. Should he heed Altman’s warning and order the timbering, regardless of the possible consequences to the Grillage Engineering Company? Or should he take Plegg’s assurances at their face value and discount the fears of an overanxious subordinate?

The daughter of the luxuries had possibly spoken better than she knew in saying that the first downward step in the ethical ladder makes all the others easy. As David Vallory rolled himself into the bunk blankets and turned his face away from the light of the hanging lamp under which Plegg was squaring himself for the nightly task of field-note checking, the decision came.

“Perhaps you are right about Altman’s nerves, Plegg. Suppose you shift him to the quarry work in Dixon’s Cut and put Regnier in the tunnel heading. If I’m any judge of men, Regnier won’t let the spalling roof trouble him. He’ll be too busy trying to break Altman’s record of so many feet advance a day, and that will be some job.”

“That’s better,” said Plegg, bending lower over the checking. But when David’s regular breathing began, as it did almost at the instant of eye-closing, the first assistant straightened up, shaking his head regretfully.

“It’s a damned shame!” he muttered under his breath. And then: “If I were half as loyal to him as he is to Grillage, I’d blow the whole gaff--tell him exactly what he is up against on this crooked job, and at least give him a chance to fight with his eyes open. Maybe I shall, some day--after it’s everlastingly too late.”

XIV

The Mucker

For some little time after his chief had gone to sleep, Silas Plegg bent thoughtfully over his task at the trestle-table. It was said of him that he could live and work with less sleep than any other man on the staff, and his nightly vigils proved it. Now and again the midnight workers on some remote section of the job would look up to find the first assistant staring down at them from some coign of vantage, and the shirkers never knew at what moment the cool, crisp voice of the under-boss would come crackling out of the shadows with a snap like that of a whip lash.

With the slipping of the rubber band over the last of the field-books, Plegg rose noiselessly and left the car as if to begin another of his nocturnal rounds. In the shadow of the cement sheds he overtook the yard watchman.

“Anything stirring, Mac?” he asked.

“Nothin’ but that tunnel mucker they call ‘Simmy’. Early in the evenin’ I caught him prowlin’ ’round the big boss’s private car. I asked him what he was doin’ and he said he couldn’t sleep. I wouldn’t ’a’ thought nothin’ of it if you hadn’t told me to keep an eye out for him.”

“Anything else?”

“Nothin’ much, ’cept that the next time I come around I catch him snoopin’ under the windows of yours and Mr. Vallory’s sleep-wagon. This time I takes him by the ear and runs him over to his bunk shack and tells him to stay there till his shift’s called.”

“How long ago was that?” Plegg inquired.

“’Bout a half-hour, I reckon. He--Well, I’ll be dog-goned! Look yonder!”

Plegg had already seen. The sputtering light of a distant masthead showed a lop-shouldered figure making off across the yard, dodging as it went to keep within the shadows cast by the scattered material cars.

“I’ll go after him,” said the watchman; but Plegg stopped him.

“No, Mac; stay on your job. I think this may be what I’ve been waiting for.” And as craftily as if he had been trained in Indian warfare, the first assistant set out to trail the dodging figure.

After the first few hundred yards down the tracks it was not difficult to guess the tunnel mucker’s destination. He was heading across the basin to the mining-camp at the foot of Gold Hill. Plegg did not try to keep him in sight after his direction was assured, contenting himself with closing the gap when the man ahead was entering the single street of the town. Even then the pursuer made no haste and paid no special attention to the lop-shouldered one. It was as if he had known in advance where his quarry would alight, and when the dodging figure was lost finally among the late roisterers still obstructing the planked sidewalks, Plegg pushed on steadily until he reached the corner occupied by Black Jack Dargin’s gambling resort.

At the corner, the first assistant changed his tactics suddenly. Flattening himself against the side of the building he edged his way cautiously down the short side street. Being the headquarters of a leading industry, Dargin’s “place” enjoyed the distinction of standing as the only two-storied building in the camp. With its ground floor devoted strictly to the business of relieving restless or thirsty souls of the hard-earned dollars, the second floor was the living apartment of the master gambler. It was approached by an outside stair, and up this stair Plegg crept on his toes and finger-ends.

The door at the stair-head was closed, but the first assistant seemed to know his ground. Noiselessly a skeleton key was slipped into the lock, there was a faint click, and the door swung inward, opening into a dark hall running crosswise of the building. Again Plegg showed his familiarity with his surroundings. Closing the door, and thus shutting himself into the Egyptian darkness of the narrow upper hall, he felt his way carefully to the opposite end of the passage, found and unlocked another door, and stepped out upon a railed gallery running the full length of the building at the second-story level. A few steps to the right two windows and a door gave upon the gallery, and the windows were lighted.

Once more resorting to the Indian tactics, Plegg crouched in the shadow and worked his way silently on hands and knees to the nearest window. The shade was partly drawn down, but since the night was unusually warm for the season and the altitude the window was open a few inches at the bottom.

The view from the gallery was unobstructed. Plegg saw an interior gaudily furnished, a costly carpet, ill-kept and soiled by muddied boots, yellowed lace hangings at the windows, heavy mahogany chairs, scarred and with their leather upholstering chafed and abused, a marble-topped table littered with cigar stubs, an ash tray, a scattered deck of cards and an open box of cigars; the whole lighted by a hanging lamp with a cheap tin reflector.

There were two men in the room and they sat on opposite sides of the table. One was the master gambler; he had selected the one wooden chair in the room, and he sat back with his hands in his pockets, rocking the chair gently on two legs. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and the black, Indian-like hair fell forward in a lock that shaded the coldly staring eyes.

The other man was the “mucker” of the yard watchman’s report, the man Plegg had been following. On the Grillage pay-roll he appeared as Simeon Backus, serving on the day shift as a muck shoveler in the eastern heading of the great tunnel. He sat in one of the upholstered chairs with a deep seat, and his deformities--the lopped shoulder and arms much too long for his body--were accentuated. His face, with its lines half obliterated by a ragged beard, lacked none of the villainous characteristics of the ingrained criminal; beady eyes that would look at nothing steadily, a retreating chin, a thin-lipped, acrid mouth.

When Silas Plegg reached his spying place on the gallery, Dargin was speaking.

“Cut it out, Simmy; cut it all out and get down to brass tacks!” he was growling. “Your hard job in the tunnel isn’t any skin off of me; and you get paid twice for it, at that.”

“What little rake-off you give me for steerin’ the money-burners down here don’t cut no ice with me!” snapped the smaller man. “I’ve got bigger game to-night.”

“Shoot,” said Dargin.

“I’ve got a line on the new boss. Did you know he was down here lookin’ you over the other night?”

“I saw him,” was the brief reply.

“Well, he’s goin’ to run you out--clean up the shop--wipe off the slate.”

“Who says he is?”

“He says so, by cripes! I’ve got it straight. This here hell-hole’s got to be took off the map. It’s bu’stin’ up his gangs and robbin’ his men, and he ain’t goin’ to stand for no such. And say, Jack--_he’s got the old geezer behind him_!”

“Grillage? Not in a thousand years, Simmy.”

“I’m tellin’ you I got it straight. There’s a skirt in it this time.”

“Cough it up.”

“It’s this-away; that young cock-o’-the-walk’s goin’ to marry Grillage’s daughter--see?”

“How do you know he is?”

“There ain’t much that a bunch as big as ours don’t know about its bosses--or that it can’t find out if it tries. Vallory hadn’t hardly lit down on the job before ever’body knew that he got his boost from the inside--that it was all in the family. Why, hell; he’s nothin’ but an overgrowed kid!”

“You talk too many, Simmy,” was the gruff interruption. “Get down to the face-cards and aces.”

“All right, I will. Did you know Grillage is here?”

“I knew he was coming.”

“Well, he’s come--and he’s fetched the girl with him. You know what she tried to get him to do last fall, after Lushing was fool enough to bring that look-see crowd down here from the hotel?”

“I know,” said Dargin. “She tried to get the old man to put the kibosh on us. He wouldn’t do it then; and he isn’t going to back Vallory now.”

“Don’t you believe it! The girl will make him back Vallory, if she feels like it. I’m tellin’ you again--I got it straight. The minute Vallory hears she’s here, he makes a straight shoot for the hotel, and sits most o’ the evenin’ on the porch with her. I kep’ cases on ’em.”

“That doesn’t prove anything.”

“It proves what I’m sayin’. You’re goin’ to get the hook, Dargin, and I’m the one man that can keep it out o’ your liver.”

Silas Plegg, from his cramped spying place on the gallery, saw a bleak smile flicker for a moment in the cold eyes of the master gambler.

“You get your pay, don’t you, Simmy?”

“For leggin’ for your skin game down-stairs, yes. But this time I’ve got somethin’ to sell--somethin’ that Grillage’ll pay for, if you don’t want it.”

“Suppose you tell me what it is, Simmy.”

“I’ll tell you this much: s’pose you could go to Grillage and say, ‘Look-ee here, old sport; I’m wise to somethin’ that’ll knock all the money out o’ this railroad job o’ yours, and then some; you keep this here Vallory hook out o’ me, and I’ll keep mine out o’ you.’ How does that hit you?”

Again Plegg saw the vanishing smile.

“Where did you get all this flim-flam dope, Simmy?”

“Some of it I’ve had a good little spell. The rest of it I got to-night listenin’ under the windows of Vallory’s bunk car.”

“Who was doing the talking?”

“Three of ’em, first and last: young Altman and Vallory, and then Vallory and that gun-totin’ under-boss o’ his’n, Plegg.”

“Supposing I say that I’m not in the market; then what?”

The lop-shouldered man struggled up in his chair and spat his reply out viciously. “Then, by cripes, I’ll go to Grillage himself! _He’ll_ buy!”

“I see,” said Dargin softly. “You’ll sell this thing to me or to Grillage, whichever one of us bids the highest. Is that it?”

“You’re shoutin’ now. I’m tired o’ hidin’ out and dodgin’ Hank Bullock in these dam’ mountains. Some o’ these days he’s goin’ to hike up this-away and get the drop on me; and then”--the misshapen man made a gesture pantomiming the clicking of handcuffs upon wrists. “I want to skip down yonder to Honduras, ’r some o’ them places where they never heard o’ me ’r the croakin’ business in Gunnison. And you lissen to me, Jack; I’m goin’ to have a wad big enough to stake me when I get there, and don’t you forget it!”

The swarthy giant on the opposite side of the table was still tilting his chair and still had his hands deeply buried in his pockets.

“Let’s see if I’m getting it straight, Simmy,” he said gently. “You’ve thought it all out, and you’re going to sell this thing you’ve got hold of--and which you haven’t named for me yet--either to me or to the big boss. If I get it, I can make the hook miss; and if Grillage beats me to it--what happens then?”

“Why, then Grillage plays safe on his profit by gettin’ me out o’ the country; see? And then, if Vallory wants to stick his fork into you----”

The man in the deep chair stopped short. The other made no move. His dark face with its leaden eyes and the heavy drooping mustaches was as impassive as the face of the Buddha. The lop-shouldered “mucker” seemed to be trying to read the Buddha face, and when he failed he gave a gulping swallow.

“I--I reckon I’m talkin’ through my hat, Jack,” he wavered. “Grillage ain’t in the deal; I’m goin’ to sell my stock to you.”

Plegg, looking on at a distance of not more than half the width of the room would have sworn that no man of Dargin’s build could have moved so swiftly. At one instant he was swaying gently in the tilted chair. At the next he was leaning across the table and thrusting the muzzle of a pistol against the shrinking body of the talebearer. When he spoke his voice was like the whistling of the north wind. “No, Simmy, you’re not going to sell it to me; you’re going to _give_ it to me, _now_!”

For possibly five minutes, as if the pressing pistol muzzle were a 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.”

“If you should tell me what you did, perhaps I might be able to help 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