VIThe Henchman
THE great concrete railroad bridge at Coulee du Sac was nearing completion, and for David Vallory, who had spent a summer, an autumn, and the better part of a winter on the work, the closing scenes of his brief summer stop-over in Middleboro had withdrawn into a past already taking on the characteristics of remoteness.
In their general aspect the bridge-building weeks and months had been uneventful, or, at least, unexciting; long working days made short by a keen interest in his chosen profession; the good will, early won, of his associates on the engineering staff; clipped words of approval now and then—progress markers, these—from his chief, Grimsby, a saturnine man-driver who cracked the whip oftener than he praised, and who seemed to enjoy to the fullest extent the confidence of the boss of bosses, Eben Grillage.
Only once in the nine months had David taken time off; a scant three days in December, two of them travel-spoiled, and the one in between—Christmas Day, it was—spent with his father and sister in the Middleboro home. Partly he went to keep his conditional promise to the blind one; but underlying the fraternal motive there was another. Twice during the previous summer he had written to Judith Fallon, conceiving it to be no less than a binding duty. There had been no reply, but the second letter had been returned to him with the postal legend, “No such person at the address given,” stamped upon the envelope. His twenty-four-hour Christmas stay in Middleboro gave him little chance to make inquiries; but few inquiries were needed. The Fallons had sold their cottage in Judsontown and moved away, leaving no word by which they could be traced. Also, there was a story, not vouched for by David’s informant, that there had been trouble of some sort in the Foundries offices, with a big Irish foreman smashing his way into Mr. Thomas Judson’s private room and assaulting its occupant.
With this new barb to rankle, David went back to his work at Coulee du Sac saddened and depressed, and grievously weighted with the senseof responsibility. He found no difficulty in believing the story of the explosion in the Judson offices, and was well able to supply the missing details. Fallon’s quarrel was the deadliest a father could have, and the only wonder was that he had not committed a murder.
During his nine months’ isolation at Coulee du Sac, David had met the Vallory benefactor only a few times; and the benefactor’s daughter not at all. For the lack of the social opportunity he was grateful rather than sorry. In the light of the Judith Fallon tragedy he was beginning to question his right to make love to Virginia Grillage, even if the magic circle could be broken into; or if not to question the right, to realize the immense and humiliating barrier which must always exist between a man with a tragedy in his past and a woman to whom that past should be as a pane of glass. And the height of the barrier was not lessened by the thought that, in the last analysis, he was culpable only to the extent of having been bat-blind to the temperamental abysses yawning for the Judith Fallons. A great love might condone the blindness, but no pure-minded woman could ever be made to believe that it was total.
As to Virginia’s whereabouts during the three-quarters of a year, David had learned somethingfrom Eben Grillage, himself. She had spent the summer with a party of friends in the Rockies—the farther Rockies—touring and resting at a small resort hotel known only to the elect; she had spent the shooting season with other friends in the Adirondacks; and she had gone to Florida late in the season to escape the Northern winter.
So much for the slightly wider horizons. In the working-day field, David had been given the most convincing proof that he had not been merely placed and forgotten. There had been offerings of ample opportunity to show what was in him, with pay-roll advances to fit; and on a March day when Grimsby, the saturnine chief of construction, called him into the bridge office for a conference, he was given fresh assurances that he had been accepted as a post-graduate member of the staff.
“You are a rising young man in the profession, Vallory, and if you keep on as you’ve begun, you’ll come out at the top of the heap,” was the complimentary phrase with which the conference began. “You are not like most of the young fellows I’ve had to hammer into shape; you don’t go around firing off the proposition that you know it all.”
“I should hope not,” said David. “That sortof thing is the best possible evidence that a man needs to go to school again.”
“Meaning that we’re all learning all the time?—that’s the idea, exactly,” said the chief brusquely. “Take it in the use—the modern use—of reinforced concrete, for example: we are all children going to school in that field. What we don’t know about it would fill a library.”
“You are right,” David admitted. “I’m learning something new about it every day.”
“And just because we are still in the apprentice stage, I imagine we go pretty wide on the side of safety,” Grimsby went on. “That’s natural; we’re afraid to take our own figures after we’ve made them. Now this ‘mix’ we’re using on this bridge; I’ll venture the cement content could be cut down twenty per cent and still leave an ample margin of safety. What?” Then, with an abrupt break: “Sit down and have a cigar.”
David found a three-legged stool and nodded acquiescence to the general postulate that the use of concrete as a substitute for masonry was as yet but a babe in arms.
“The quality of the cement is another disputed point,” Grimsby argued. “There isn’t the least doubt in my mind that we are altogether too finical about that. We’ve set up a code of theoreticalstandards; such and such a degree of fineness, such and such a chemical analysis, and all that; and yet, after the job’s done, you can’t tell where the tested stuff ends and the untested begins. Isn’t that so?”
“I couldn’t prove that it isn’t,” said David.
“All right; neither can I. But on this very point we’re continually having trouble with the railroad people, as you know. We may admit cheerfully that we don’t know quite all there is to be known about concrete; but neither do the railroad company’s engineers. Their inspectors on this bridge are a bunch of cranks; that is the sort of fault-finders that the ‘party of the first part’ always hires to put on the job to watch the contractors. If we lived up to the specifications as they’d like to make us, the Grillage Engineering Company would come out about a mile deep in the hole.”
Again David Vallory acquiesced. From time to time he had had troubles of his own with the watch-dog inspectors representing the railroad company for which the bridge was being constructed.
“You younger fellows are fresh from the laboratories, and you have the latest word in the testing experiments,” said Grimsby. “That’s whyI’ve called you in for a conference. You’ve been following the cement tests made in our field laboratory, haven’t you?”
“Most of them; yes.”
“Well, you haven’t seen anything wrong with the stuff, so far, have you?”
“Never.”
The bearded chief nodded. “That’s the talk,” he said; then he made his frontal attack without further preface. “You are loyal to your salt, aren’t you, Vallory? If what they tell me about you and Mr. Grillage is true, you ought to be.”
“I hope I am,” returned the loyalist, a little at a loss to prefigure what was coming next. Then he added: “My family owes Mr. Grillage a greater debt than we can ever hope to pay, if that is what you mean.”
“So I’ve understood. Now we can get down to the nub of the thing. You’ve heard that the railroad company has hired a new chief engineer, haven’t you?”
“Mr. Esher? Yes; I met him day before yesterday when he was going over the work.”
“Esher is his name, and he’s the prize crank of the lot. He has just thrown out that last shipment of cement on us; says it doesn’t test up to standard in the railroad lab. It’s all poppy-cock,of course. Some little-boy chemist on the railroad pay-roll has made a blunder—that’s all there is to it. Now then; have you been keeping in touch with your college?”
“Fairly well; yes.”
“Stand in with the professors in the college cement lab.?”
“Yes; I know them all.”
“Good men, are they?—men whose word you’d take in settling a dispute?”
“In proof tests, you mean? Certainly; I’d accept them without question.”
“Good. Here’s what we’re up against. This shipment of cement that I’m talking about is the material Shubrick was to have used in the under-water work on Pier Four. We can’t afford to throw it away, and to save it we’ll have to do a little juggling; but I want you to satisfy yourself fully beforehand. Take samples of the cement, just as it stands, and send them to your college for analysis. We’ll keep Shubrick supplied out of the reserve stock until you get your answer. Better get the samples off to-day.”
Now all this was purely routine, and David, who had thus been honored by the confidence of his chief, went about it as a part of the day’s work. The samples were duly taken and forwardedto the university, with a personal letter explaining the reason for the requested analysis. An unbiased opinion was desired, and the letter-writer ventured to hope that it might be given promptly.
In a few days the answer came, and it was entirely satisfactory. The samples which had been submitted tested fully up to standard, and the college authorities were at a loss to understand why any question should have been raised as to the quality of the material. David Vallory showed the letter to Grimsby, and was rewarded by the hard-featured chief’s nearest approach to a smile.
“Now for the needful bit of juggling,” was Grimsby’s comment. “The railroad people have us by the neck because we have to ship everything in over their line. But we’ll fool ’em, Vallory. Luckily, the cement mill isn’t on their line. We’ll send the condemned shipment out to-night, as if we were returning it to the mill. To-morrow morning you can slip out on the passenger train and overtake the freight, say at Little River, on the F. S. & A., where we are building the power dam for the paper mill.”
David Vallory was staring out of the office window with a small frown wrinkling between his honest gray eyes. He could forecast what wascoming, and while the cause seemed to be righteous enough, the expedient to which he was to resort bore all the earmarks of crookedness.
“And then?” he queried.
“Then you can take a few laborers off the dam—I’ll give you an order to Bullock authorizing it—shift the cement into other cars, and fire it back here. When it comes in, it’ll figure as a new shipment, and you’ll have to doctor the railroad way-bills a bit to make them fit.”
It was the first time in his working experience that David had been asked to carry out a piece of deliberate trickery, though there had been other occasions when he had helped to throw dust into the eyes of the too-critical railroad inspectors. Quite naturally, his point of view in these smaller deceptions had been that of the men who figured with him as Eben Grillage’s paid henchmen; but this cement “juggling,” as Grimsby had baldly named it, had all the characteristics of a crime.
“It’s a rotten shame that we have to get down to such methods!” he protested. “Let me go to Mr. Esher with the result of these university tests and Professor Luthe’s letter. Taking them together they ought to convince him that we’re not trying to put a spoiled batch of cement across on him.”
Grimsby’s smile was too well guarded to betray his real meaning.
“Esher would turn you down cold. It’s his business to stand by his own laboratory, of course, and he’ll do it. I didn’t ask you to get this college analysis with any hope of convincing Esher with it; I merely wanted you to be satisfied in your own mind. You see what we’re up against. If we have to throw away that shipment of Portland, it will mean a good chunk of loss for the Grillage Engineering Company. You said you owed the big boss something; now’s the time to prove that you weren’t talking through your hat.”
Thus appealed to, David stifled his qualms; and the next day he carried out his instructions faithfully and to the letter. The condemned material was overhauled at Little River and was shunted into the Engineering Company’s own construction yard at the dam. Here it was shifted to other cars by Bullock’s laborers, and the juggling process was brought into play. To the F. S. & A. agent at Little River, David merely stated a fact. He was shipping three car-loads of cement from the company’s yard at the dam to the bridge at Coulee du Sac. Would the agent way-bill them accordingly?
“Ship cement in one day and out the next, doyou?” grinned the railroad man. “Didn’t I see the yard crew shoving these three cars over to the dam yesterday?”
“These are not the same cars,” said David, and he produced the yard boss’s memorandum to prove it.
The half-truth, which was wholly an untruth so far as the inner fact was concerned, succeeded. The cars were billed, and in due course they reached Coulee du Sac as a new shipment. Just what was to be gained by the juggling, when the railroad inspectors would be certain to sample the cement and test it, with probably the same results as those they had reached before, was not very clear to David Vallory. But one night, a little farther along, he was given a shock of enlightenment.
The shock was administered by his bunk-shack mate, the engineer in charge of the under-water work in the caissons; Shubrick by name, and by training a man who had grown accustomed to many shifts and tricks in that branch of engineering which is fullest of fatalities. To Shubrick David Vallory was freeing his mind on the general subject of over-critical inspection.
“These railroad watchers are getting on my nerves more and more, all the time!” he complained.“They act as if they think we are a bunch of crooks, needing only half a chance to scamp this job so that it will fall into the river with the first train that passes over it. Do they worry you on the under-water work as much as they do us on the concreting?”
Shubrick grinned ferociously.
“I’d shut off the air and drown a few of them if they did. Just the same, David, they’re onto their job all right. You needn’t make any mistake about that.”
“You say that as if you thought we needed watching. Do you think so?”
This time Shubrick’s grin took a sardonic twist.
“When you are a few years older, you’ll know a heap more, David. Why, good Lord, man! are you nourishing the idea that this contracting company is doing business on a philanthropic basis?”
David Vallory shook his head. “You’ll have to diagram it for me, I guess. We may not be any too honest; I’ve seen some things done that I’ve wished we didn’t have to do. But that isn’t an admission that we’re a gang of thieves, to be watched and harried from one day’s end to another.”
“It’s a fight,” said the older man cynically.“The other fellows tie us up with a lot of specifications that they know perfectly well would ruin us if we should live up to them; and, on our side, we live up to just as few of them as the law will allow. The honor system may work in college, but it doesn’t get by to any marked extent in business. As far as that goes, you, yourself, are not as innocent as you look, David. You worked that little cement juggle the other day to the queen’s taste.”
“You heard about that?” said David, and it was a mark of the short distance he had traveled on the road to equivocation that he flushed when he said it.
“Everybody knows about it—everybody but the railroad people. You played it mighty fine. What’s puzzling me is the railroad way-bill part of it. How on top of earth did you contrive to get those way-bills doctored on the F. S. & A. at Little River? Did you buy the agent?”
The flush deepened under David Vallory’s eyes. The misleading explanation he had made to induce the railroad agent to bill the condemned cement as a mill shipment to be transferred from the work on the dam to that on the Coulee du Sac bridge was the least defensible part of the transaction, or so it seemed to him.
“The less said about that part of it will be the soonest mended,” he returned gruffly.
“Well, it was a neat little trick all the way round,” the under-water boss commented. “If Congdon hadn’t fallen down in the first place, we wouldn’t have had to work it.”
This was new ground to David Vallory and he said as much. “What did Congdon have to do with it?” he asked.
Shubrick relighted his pipe, and after a puff or two: “Do you mean to tell me that you don’t know?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t ask.”
Again the under-water engineer sucked slowly at his pipe. “There is one of two things, David,” he remarked, after the pause: “you are either a good bit deeper than I’ve been giving you credit for being—or else you’re too innocent to be running loose without a guardian. Didn’t Grimsby tell you how it all got balled up in the beginning?”
“He told me that some railroad chemist had blundered in making the tests.”
Shubrick’s laugh was soundless. “It was our man Congdon who did the blundering. After he had made the tests in our own lab., he was ass enough not to see to it that the railroad chemist didn’t get a whack at the stuff.”
“Are you trying to tell me that the cement wasn’t up to standard?” demanded Grimsby’s accessory.
“If you need to be told. It’s a ‘second,’ all right enough; it sets unevenly, and is otherwise off color; but nobody will ever know the difference after it’s in place in the bottom of the river.”
For a moment the air of the small bunk shack became stifling and David Vallory got up and went to stand in the doorway. When he turned back to Shubrick it was to say: “Then the whole thing was a frame-up, was it?—to enable us to work off a cheaper grade of Portland in a place where it couldn’t show up?”
“Of course it was. We have to play even when we can.”
“But I had that shipment analyzed myself. I sent samples of it to the university.”
“Then you took your samples from the wrong sacks, that’s all. I’m using the stuff in the caisson, and I guess I know what I’m talking about. It’s punk.”
“If that is so, why haven’t the railroad people found it out in a second test?”
“That’s easy. This time Congdon was right on the job and saw to it that they got the properkind of samples. You needn’t look so horrified; the bridge isn’t going to tumble down.”
But more important things than bridges were tumbling down in David Vallory’s heart and mind at that moment. When a young man has grown up in an ethical atmosphere the first broad step toward the unethical is apt to be subversive of a good many preconceived ideas and standards. After a time he said:
“Shubrick, the frame-up wasn’t altogether on the railroad people. Part of it was on me.”
“That’s easy, too,” said the older man. “Grimsby was merely trying to provide you with a good, stoutalibi; to leave you a nice, respectable hole to crawl out of in case there should be any future to the thing. But if you’re really stirred up about it, you are foolish. Things like that are done every day. We are fighting for our own hand. The Golden Rule is pretty to look at, but it doesn’t hold water in business.”
“You’re taking the ground that we are dealing with a condition and not with principles of right and wrong?”
“Precisely. A man has got to be loyal to something, Vallory: I’m loyal to my bread and butter; so, too, in the long run, are you, and ninety-nine other men out of a hundred. Possibly it digs alittle deeper with you. Haven’t I heard you say that you’d willingly go a mile or so out of your way where Mr. Grillage’s interests are concerned?—that it was up to you to take long shifts or hard ones, or anything else that came up?”
“You have.”
“There it is, then. No man living has ever been able to draw the line absolute between ethical right and wrong and lay it down as a mathematical axiom. I’ll put it up to you. If you are a fanatical crank your duty is plain. You know the inside of this cement deal, and you can show it up if you feel like it and make it cost the Grillage Engineering Company a pot of money. But you are not going to do any such asinine and ungrateful thing—you know you’re not. What you’ll do will be to tell yourself that the particular grade of Portland used is strictly a matter of opinion between our staff and the railroad’s, and let it go at that.”
It is altogether improbable that Warner Shubrick regarded himself as in any sense anadvocatus diaboli; and it might be even farther afield to suppose that Grimsby had given him a hint to safeguard the cement fraud by trying to justify it for his shack-mate. None the less, the seed was sown and a new point of view was opened forDavid Vallory. Given time to wear itself out, the natural indignation arising upon the discovery that he had been used as a tool in Grimsby’s small plot became gradually transmuted into something quite different. Shubrick, in declaring that a man must be loyal to something, labeled a solvent which has dissolved much fine gold in the human laboratory. The transition from loyalty to an ideal to loyalty to a cause is not so violent as it may seem. Hence, it need not be written down as a miracle that, in proportion as the ideals withdrew, there grew up in David Vallory a blind determination to be loyal, first, to his salt.
It was in a letter to his father, written at the end of this same month of March, that the newer viewpoint got itself set forth in words.
“I didn’t know what a cramped little circle I’d been trotting around in all my life until I came up here,” he wrote. “You have to go up against the real thing in the world fight before you can get your ideas straightened out, and give things their proper relative values. The university did nothing for me in that respect, and the Government job in Florida was a mere anæsthetic. But here I’m doing a man’s work, and carrying a man’s responsibility. I know you won’t take it as a brag if I say to you, Dad, that I’ve grownmore in the nine months that I’ve been at Coulee du Sac than I did in the nine years before that. For the first time in my experience I’m beginning to be able to peep out over the edge of things, and to grab hold while the grabbing is good. Incidentally, I’m learning what it means to be loyal to a man who has been loyal to me and mine, and I know it will please you when I say that I’ve been able, now and then, to work off a little of the big debt of gratitude we owe to Mr. Grillage.
“Ordinarily, I should suppose, Mr. Grillage doesn’t trouble himself to keep tab on the many apprentice engineers that he has scattered around on his numerous contracts, but I’ve had more than a hint that he looks my way, now and then. Only yesterday Grimsby was telling me in his sort of bitter way that he guessed the big boss was grooming me for something better than I have now. While I’m well enough satisfied with my present billet, I’m not married to it so that Mr. Grillage couldn’t divorce me. Anyway, here’s hoping.”
It was only a short fortnight after the writing of this home letter that David was summoned to Chicago by a telegram from the king of the contractors, and he went with a light heart, half forecasting another promotion. Also, he was soberly jubilant over the thought that, by some happyconjunction of the lucky planets, he might again be permitted to divide time, at least for one evening, with Virginia Grillage’s retinue of court-payers.