VIIA Reward of Merit
IT was after city office hours when David Vallory reached Chicago, arriving in obedience to the telegram from headquarters, and he was preparing to go to a hotel for the night when a brisk young fellow in livery singled him out to ask his name and to tell him that Mr. Grillage’s car had been sent for him. In the waiting automobile, to his unbounded surprise and delight, he found Miss Virginia. The lapse of something over a year had only made her more ravishingly beautiful in David’s eyes, and his welcome was all that he could ask—and more.
“You ought to feel highly honored,” she said, making room for him in the limousine. “I ran away from a houseful of people to come in town for you.” And then, lest he should be too unreasonably happy: “It issogood to be reminded of dear, old, study Middleboro again!”
“I wish to goodness I might remind you of something besides Middleboro,” David complained, laughing; “of myself, for example, orPalm Beach, or—well, in fact, almost anything. Do you realize that it is over a year since we last met?”
“I do, indeed. Also, I realize that you have never, by any chance, written a line or happened to come to Chicago at any time when I’ve been at home. Or perhaps you’ve been here and didn’t think it worth while to let me know.”
“Nothing like it,” said David, matching her mood. “I haven’t been in the city since your father sent me to Coulee du Sac, unless you count the car-changing times when I went home at Christmas. You don’t realize that I have become a workingman since I left the Government service. I have, and I’ve had a laudable ambition to stick to the job and earn my wages honestly.” Then, as the car began threading its way through the traffic to the northward: “Where are you taking me?”
“Home, of course; to The Maples.”
“To the houseful of people? I shall disgrace you.”
“No clothes?” she suggested, with a smile that made him tingle to his finger-tips.
“Absolutely nothing to wear!”
“How shocking! But never mind; I shall tell them all that they are lucky not to have you inoveralls and mining-boots—or don’t you wear mining-boots on bridges? However, you needn’t worry; you won’t have any chance to be social, unless it’s at dinner. Father will monopolize you.”
“What is he going to do to me; fire me?”
The limousine had reached the northward lake drive, and the king’s daughter pressed the bell-push for more speed. “Dinner will be waiting,” she explained. Then she answered his question. “It’s a perfectly profound secret, of course, but I really believe youaregoing to be ‘fired.’”
“That is a nice, comforting thing to be told—just before dinner!” he laughed. “But my obsequies are of no special consequence; tell me about yourself. Is the English lord still hovering upon the horizon?”
“Cumberleigh? What do you know about him?”
“Oh, nothing much; I merely heard last summer that you were going to marry him.”
“When I do, you shall have a handsomely engraved invitation to the wedding—for the sake of the past-and-gone kiddie times in old Middleboro. Won’t that console you?”
“I am consoled speechless. Weddings and funerals always affect me that way, and the Cumberleighoccasion will be both, from my point of view.”
There were some miles of this light-hearted foolishness; brief miles, to be sure, since the big limousine was both powerful and speedy. At the end of the miles the car turned in past the gate lodge of a lakeside estate, an establishment princely in extent, landscaping and architecture; and the gap which a disparity of worldly possessions digs between hope and fruition suddenly yawned wide for David Vallory.
“Why the sphynxian silence?” inquired the princess of the magnificences, gibing amiably at David’s lapse into speechlessness.
“Too much money,” he returned half playfully, waving an arm to include the display of the Grillage fortune. “I was just wondering what it means to you, individually.”
“I have often wondered, myself,” was the half musing rejoinder. “Sometimes I think it means a lot. It grips one that way, now and again. But there are other times when I’m simply obliged to run away from it, just to convince myself that I’m not one of the lay figures in the stage-setting. Can you understand that?”
Her answer gave David another of the ecstatic little thrills. It was not the first time that shehad let him see that the quick-witted, clear-sighted girl-child of his boyish adulation had been only overlaid, and not spoiled, by the lavishnesses.
“I think I understand it perfectly,” he assured her. “Money, in and of itself, is nothing. It is only a means to an end.”
The limousine was stopping under the carriage entrance of the great house and they had but a moment more of the comradely isolation. It was the young woman who seized and made use of it.
“I hope you will always remember that, David—and let it be clean money,” she said soberly; and then, with a quick return to the playful mood: “Here we are, just in time for dinner. I shall introduce you to the houseful as my cradle-brother—may I?—and after dinner you may go your way with father and get yourself properly ‘fired.’”
Drawing pretty heavily upon the simplicities, David won through the social preliminaries without calling any marked attention to himself. Miss Virginia’s “houseful” made an even dozen at the rather resplendent dinner-table, and the naïvely inquisitive young wife of an elderly stock-broker, who was David’s elbow companion, and who kept him busy answering childish questions about his profession, saved him from particularizing too curiously as to the others, though he was observantenough to note that none of the many competitors he had had at Palm Beach was among them. At the table dispersal he found himself at once in the clutches of the master of the house.
“Come on into my den and we’ll break away from all this hullaballoo,” growled the king of the man-drivers; and when the coveted privacy was secured: “Pull up a chair and smoke. You’ll find cigars in that sponge-box, or pipes and tobacco on the mantel. How did you leave the bridge?”
“We are working on the closing span, and two months more ought to see the rails down and the trains running over them,” David reported, settling himself in a deep chair with one of the long-stemmed pipes. “Now that the cold weather is over, there is nothing to hold us back.”
“Lose much concrete in the freezing?”
“No; very little. We used your idea of tarpaulin coverings and a perforated steam-pipe and saved practically every yard we put in place. There was some little kicking on the part of the inspectors, but we got by with nearly all of it.”
“Huh!” grunted the big man. “A bunch of inspectors wouldn’t be happy if they couldn’t find something to kick about! That’ll do for the bridge. We’ll call it a back-number for you andpass it up. I’ve been letting you alone at Coulee du Sac; wanted to see what you were going to make of yourself—what you were made of.”
“I hope I haven’t disappointed you too badly,” David ventured.
“You haven’t; if you had, you wouldn’t be here to-night. Now then; are you ready to tackle something a good deal bigger than an assistant’s job on a concrete bridge?”
“I’ll tackle anything you give me; though I’m not asking you to push me any faster or farther than the good of the service will warrant.”
“Don’t you lose any sleep over that,” was the gruff retort. “You’ll never get any plums from me merely because you happen to be Adam Vallory’s son. For that matter, the shoe’s on the other foot. I’m thinking about giving you a hard job—a damned hard job. What do you know about the Nevada Short Line new-alignment project out in the Timanyoni country?”
David shook his head in token that he knew little.
“Practically nothing more than the technical articles in the engineering journals have told me.”
“Well, it’s a right sizable job, and we have the contract. We had a fellow named Lushing out there as chief, but I had to let him go.”
“Incompetent?” said David.
“No; competent as the very devil. But he welshed; let himself be bought up by the railroad company.”
“How was that?”
“Just plain crooked; gave us the double-cross; chummed in with the railroad staff; took favors, and all that. Any time he wanted a special to run down to Brewster for a night off, he got it—and we paid for it.”
Having his recent experience in mind, David Vallory understood perfectly. With a man of the Lushing type in charge as chief constructing engineer there would naturally be no cutting of corners on the hard-and-fast specifications; no saving of money for the Grillage treasury.
“It seems to me that plain business loyalty is one of the things you buy, or ought to buy, with the salaries you pay,” was his disposal of the Lushing case.
“Lushing is a fise-dog, and he has proved it by going over to the railroad engineering staff as chief inspector,” rasped the man-driver. “What do you think about that?—going over to the other side and carrying with him all the information that his job with us had given him?”
David was by this time sufficiently partisan tolose sight of the fact that a discharged man might be excused for taking the first place that might offer.
“It was unprofessional, to say the least,” was his comment.
“There was more to it than that, but we needn’t go into the contemptible whys and wherefores,” Grillage went on, with a portentous frown. “I let him out, and for a month or more we’ve been rocking along without a chief—and with a man against us who knows all the tricks of the trade. I’ve called you in to ask if you think you are big enough to swing the job and hold up our end of the pole. Grimsby says you are.”
David Vallory gasped. It was a tremendous promotion for a young man less than four years out of college, and he was wise enough to discount his lack of experience.
“I am only an apprentice, as you might say, Mr. Grillage, and many a man with my equipment, or more, is still carrying a transit,” he said, after a momentary pause for the breath-catching. “But I’m going to leave it with you. If you think I am equal to it, I can only say that I’ll do my level best not to disappoint you.”
The big man’s laugh was like the creaking of a rusty door-hinge.
“You’re modest, David, and that isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a young fellow in his beginnings. But I’ve been keeping cases on you, and I go a good deal on what Grimsby says. He gives you a good send-off; says you know the engineering game, and can keep your head and handle men. The Timanyoni job won’t ask for much more, unless it’s a little of this loyalty you talk about. If you need an older head, you’ll have Plegg, who’s been first assistant on the job since it began. Plegg has the age and the experience, and you can lean on him for everything but initiative—which is the one thing he hasn’t got. Now we’ll get down to the lay-out,” and he took a huge roll of blue-prints from its case and began a brittle outlining of the realignment project in the Hophra Mountains.
David Vallory, still a trifle dazed by the suddenness and magnitude of the promotion, bent over the drawings and became a sponge to soak up the details. In the construction of the Nevada Short Line over the Hophras in the day of the great gold discoveries, haste had been the watch-word of the builders. With the golden lure ahead to put a premium upon speed, the engineers had eliminated cuts, fills and tunnels, so far as possible, and had made the line climb by a series of reversedcurves and heavy grades to the surmounting of the obstacle mountain range at Hophra Pass.
Now, since the Short Line had become an integral part of the far-reaching P. S-W. system, a campaign of distance-shortening and grade-reducing had been inaugurated. There were bridges to be built, hills to be cut through, tunnels to be driven. Powder Can, a mining town nestling in the shadow of the mountains, was the center of the activities, but the work extended for some miles in either direction from the town, with the heaviest of the hill-cutting and tunnel-driving climaxing in the big bore which was to form the needle’s eye for the threading of the mountain range.
Again modestly discounting his lack of experience, David Vallory was doubtful of his ability to plan and carry out such a vast undertaking from its inception. But the trail was already broken for him, and he had only to walk in the technical footsteps of his predecessors. And with a good assistant who had been familiar with the work from the first, this should be comparatively easy.
“I’m your man, Mr. Grillage,” he said, after the maps and plans had been duly considered. “I’ll lean on Plegg, as you suggest, and give you the best there is in me. I’ll say frankly that I don’t believe I’m big enough yet to swing a thinglike this as a new proposition. But with the lay-out all made and the work in progress, I ought to be able to pick it up and carry it to the finish.”
“That’s up to you,” said the big man shortly. “You may take this set of blue-prints with you and check yourself into the job on your way to Colorado. Grimsby says you’re good for the engineering end of it, and I’m taking his word for that. But there is another angle that you mustn’t lose sight of. It is a big job, and there were half a dozen bidders. We had to cut mighty close to get in, and any bad breaks on our part are going to shove the profits over to the other side of the books and write ’em down in red ink.”
“There mustn’t be any bad breaks; that’s all there is to that part of it,” said David, with youthful dogmatism.
“That’s the talk. And more than that, we must shave all the foolish frills out of the specifications. You know how that goes, or, if you don’t, Matt Grimsby hasn’t done his duty by you. On a job like this the railroad engineers would have us gold-plate every spike we drive, if they could. You’ve been in the contracting business long enough now to know what I mean.”
David made the sign of assent without prejudice to any of the standards of uprightness andfair play, the undermining of which he was still far from suspecting in his own case.
“I shall be working for the Grillage Engineering Company, first, last and all the time,” he asserted. “The company’s business is my business, and I haven’t any other.”
At this, the contractor-king’s gruffness fell away from him as if it were a displaced mask.
“There spoke your father, David, and a better man never lived. I was only trying you out a while back when I said that you needn’t look for the plums just because you happen to be Adam Vallory’s son. After you get a little farther up the ladder and find that you have to depend on the man or men lower down, you’ll be willing to pay high for a little personal loyalty of the sort that looks an inch or two beyond the next pay-day. I’m putting you right where I’d put a son of my own, if I had one, out yonder in the Timanyoni country, boy—and for the same reason. I want to have somebody on the job that I can bank on and swear by.”
It was the one touch needed to put the fragrant flower of personal relationship upon the juggler-grown tree of promotion. David Vallory was still young enough to take the oath of allegiance without reservations to any master strong enoughand generous enough to command his loyalty, and Eben Grillage could have found no surer way to light the fires of blind, unreckoning fealty.
“A little less than a year ago, Mr. Grillage, you loaded me with the heaviest obligation a man can carry. You are adding to it now by giving me a boost big enough to make a much older man light-headed. I’d be a mighty poor sort of a son to Dad if I didn’t——”
“Never mind the obligations,” the master broke in, with a return to the brittle abruptness. “There is an old saying that the quickest way to make an enemy of a man is to do him a favor. If it isn’t working out that way in your case, why, so much the better. Now you may go back to the dinner people, if you want to. I’ve got to dictate a bunch of letters.” And the king of the contractors jabbed his square-ended thumb on a push-button to summon his secretary.