XIBridge Number Two
SINCE he was now able to argue from a personal knowledge of the Powder Can facts, David Vallory was ready to go to the railroad officials with a plea for intervention and relief. But with his own president’s visit impending he was unwilling to absent himself for the needful trip to the railroad headquarters in Brewster. In this small dilemma a bit of gossip trickling in over the construction line wire from Agorda, the point at which the new grade diverged from the old, offered an alternative. There was a right-of-way claim to be adjusted at Agorda, and the gossiping wire said that the Short Line’s legal representative had come up from Brewster on the morning train to settle with the claimants.
Seizing the opportunity, David Vallory boarded an empty material train backing out of the Powder Gap yards and in due time was set down at the desolate little junction station at the foot of Mount Latigo. There was a private car standing on one of the side-tracks, and inquiry at thetelegraph office developed the fact that the right-of-way claimants had already had their day in court, and Mr. Jolly was in his car, waiting for the afternoon train to come along and tow him back to Brewster.
Walking down the tracks to the occupied siding, David presented himself at the door of the private car and was welcomed effusively by a round-bodied little gentleman with a face like a full moon.
“Vallory, hah!—do I get the name right?—always want to get a man’s name right—demned awkward to find that you’ve been calling Smith Jones, when his name is Smith,” bubbled the welcomer. “Sit down—sit down, Mr. Vallory, and be at home. Of the Grillage Engineering Company, you say? Big job you’ve got on your hands here—tre-mendous job! How’s it coming along?”
David Vallory braced himself as one stepping out of shelter into a blustering March wind. Gusty talkers had always been his pet aversion, and he seemed to have encountered the original of the type. By taking persevering advantage of the lulls between the gusts he contrived to explain his errand. The Powder Can situation was thus and so. The Grillage company had no jurisdiction,and he understood that the Short Line company, in its capacity as owner of the town site, might possibly be able to intervene on the side of law and order. How about it?
“Why, hah! my dear Mr. Vallory! what do you take us for?” cackled the gusty one. “We’re not an eleemosynary institution, any more than you are! Why, hah! bless your heart, if we should go into the moral-issue business in these mountains we’d last as a railroad corporation just about as long as it would take an indignant State legislature to repeal our charter!”
“I must have stated the case clumsily, Mr. Jolly; I’m not asking you to do more than any respectable landlord ought to be willing to do,” David persisted firmly. “Your property in Powder Can is being put to uses which were never contemplated when the leases were signed. A public nuisance harmful to your neighbors has developed, and you ought to be willing to help abate it.”
“Nothing to be done, I assure you, my dear young man. Those Powder Can leases are mere matters of form, to enable us to hold what land we may need for railroad purposes after the new line is opened. I’m not sure, but I think the consideration was the usual one dollar, or somethingof that sort. We can’t police Powder Can for you.”
“All right; we’ll drop the moral argument and take up another,” said David, stubbornly. “The railroad company has set a time limit on the completion of this new line. The Powder Can nuisance is delaying the work.”
“That, hah! is up to your people, Mr. Vallory. The contract provides for forfeitures if you don’t come within the time limit, and a bonus if you better it. You can’t stand it on that leg.”
It was just here that David lost his temper.
“I’m not making any charges, Mr. Jolly, but an unprejudiced outsider might take the view that the railroad company, or some of its officials, are profiting by the continued existence of a wide-open town where our men are robbed.”
Instantly the moon-like face of the railroad attorney became a blank.
“No; I shouldn’t make any such charge as that, if I were you,” he barked. And then, abruptly: “Have you taken this matter up with your own president? Or are you going it alone?”
“There is no reason why I should take it up with Mr. Grillage. He holds me responsible for the work, and for the conditions under which we are working.”
“That’s all very well,” snapped the lawyer. “But if you are ever tempted to make that charge you speak of, Mr. Vallory, you’d better think twice. The natural counter-charge would be that your own officials have a much better chance for a Powder Can rake-off than ours have. Like yourself, I’m making no accusations; but I’ll say this: when you see Mr. Eben Grillage next, you ask him plainly what he wants you to do about this Powder Can business. If he tells you to clean it up, maybe our people can be induced to help.” Then, as if some secret spring had been touched, the full-moon face lightened up and the gusty joviality slipped into place again: “But, hah! that’s enough of these disagreeable topics. You’re my guest, Mr. Vallory: you’ll stop and take a noon bite with me, won’t you? I’ve, hah! got a fairly good cook on the car.”
Wishing nothing less than to be entertained by a verbal March wind, David Vallory pleaded a press of work, escaped, and was fortunate enough to catch the loaded material train as it was starting up the new line. He was soberly depressed, not so much by the lawyer’s attitude, which he had partially discounted before the interview, as by the seed which had been planted by Jolly’s retort to his own small outburst of temper.The thought that his employer and the Vallory benefactor could be profiting, however indirectly, by sharing with the Powder Can pirates was grossly incredible—a thought to be cast down and indignantly trodden upon. Yet it is the fashion of planted seeds to germinate quite irrespective of the wishes of the soil into which they have been thrust. David Vallory could not help recalling the brief reference made to Powder Can as the contractor-king was threshing out the details with him on the eve of his outsetting: “A tough mining-camp, running wide-open; but that’s no affair of yours,” was the curt phrase in which Eben Grillage had dismissed it.
It was on Crawford’s section of the new work that David roused himself out of the depressive reverie. The material train was rounding a long curve on the approach to Bridge Number Two, and the engineer checked its speed to slow for the crossing of the little river on the temporary trestle just beyond the bridge-building activities. Dropping from the moving train a few hundred yards from the bridge location, David was immediately pounced upon by the square-shouldered young athlete who was driving the work on Bridge Number Two.
“By George! Mr. Vallory—you’re like anangel sent from heaven!” was the athlete’s enthusiastic welcome. “Bittner has just ’phoned from down the line that Strayer, of the railroad inspecting force, is on his way up here in a gas-car. Will you flag him when he comes along and hold him for a few minutes until I can get back to the bridge?”
David, thinking pointedly of his late encounter with the railroad attorney, nodded abstractedly. “Yes, I’ll stop Strayer, if you want me to. But what’s the object—what are you trying to cover up?”
“N-nothing,” Crawford explained hurriedly. “I just want to make sure that those concrete fellows are carrying out instructions. Strayer’s got an eye like a hawk, and if so much as a single piece of reinforcing steel happens to be an inch out of line, he’ll see it and report that we’re not living up to the specifications.”
“I see,” said David; “go to it,” and he sat down on a projecting cross-tie end to wait for the railroad inspector’s gas-velocipede to come in sight.
From the cross-tie waiting-place on the inner side of the long curve the bridge under construction was in plain view. It was a single short arch spanning the stream; the false-work and woodenforming were in place, and from the aërial spout of the distributing tower a continuous trickle of concrete was pouring into the box-like forms. David Vallory’s half-absent gaze followed Crawford’s retreating figure. When it reached the bridge the distance-softened grind of the concrete mixer and hoist stopped abruptly, and the absent-minded onlooker a few hundred yards down the line saw Crawford climb to the bridge-head and wave his arms.
The precise object of what followed was not clearly apparent to a man thinking soberly of something else. Other figures, silhouetted against the sky-line, appeared, crawling out upon the forms. When they erected themselves they seemed to be tamping the concrete into place. The young chiefs conclusion was the most obvious one that offered. “Humph!” he muttered, “he’s been letting his ‘mix’ go too dry, and he’s ramming it so the water will come up. Strayer would jump him for that, of course.”
It was a measure of the distance that one Matthew Grimsby had led David along the road to “salt” loyalty that he made no mental note to “jump” Crawford himself for the forbidden practice of ramming dry concrete into bridge forms; and when the motor-driven inspection car appearedat the farther end of the curve he got up to flag it. As it chanced, the big, bearded engineer who was driving the car was no less ready to stop than David was to have him stop. With the brakes locked he sprang out and fired his battery.
“I was hoping I’d find you somewhere this side of the Gap,” he rasped. “There’s no use talking, Vallory, you fellows have got to hew closer to the line or you’ll hear something drop. If you think, because Lushing happens to be away, you can put something across on us every day or two, you’ve got another guess coming.”
“I’ve met you before, Strayer,” said David, with his slow smile. “I worked with a round half-dozen of you all last summer and fall in Wisconsin. What’s gone wrong now?”
“That fill at Havercamp’s. The specifications call for solid work on the fills. Your man is burying unbroken chunks of clay in that embankment as big as he can pick up with his steam-hog. The first heavy snow that melts back of that fill will make it look like a toboggan slide!”
“We’ll look into the Havercamp fill,” said David mildly. “Anything else?”
“Yes; the cutting just below Havercamp’s, where they’re getting the spoil for the fill. I askedthe foreman just now if he considered that the lower side of the cutting was worked back to the required angle. He said that he did, and it was; but when I put my instrument on it, I found that there is still a good six-foot slice to come off. It won’t do, Vallory; you’ve got to quit this business of cost-shaving at every twist and turn that offers.”
“We are not in the contracting business for our health,” was David Vallory’s good-natured retort; “I admit it. When you find anything wrong, we correct it, don’t we? And you’re here to find the wrong things, aren’t you? If we should toe the mark all the time, you’d be out of a job. I’ll look after the cutting. What next?”
“Next I’ll have a squint at this bridge of Crawford’s. When you fellows take to pouring concrete, you need to have a man standing over you day and night. If you’re headed my way, get on the car and I’ll give you a ride.”
David Vallory accepted the invitation, climbing into the second seat of the three-wheeled car. At the approach to the temporary wooden trestle over which the construction track ran, the car was halted and they crossed to the new structure.
The machinery was grinding again by this time and David Vallory stood aside while the railroad engineer went carefully over the job. The big,bearded inspector took nothing for granted. The “mix” was examined, samples of the cement were taken, a handful of the sand was put into a bottle with water, shaken, and allowed to settle to determine its purity. On the work itself nothing escaped him; he even counted the steel reinforcing bars whose ends stuck up out of the rising tide of soft concrete, checking the number against the figures in his field-notes.
“Something radically wrong here,” he grinned, when the final item had been checked. “It’s the first time I haven’t found Jimmy Crawford trying to put something over on me. What’s the matter, Jimmy—got religion?”
“Sure!” said Crawford, with a sly wink for his chief. “Didn’t you know Mr. Vallory holds revival meetings in his bunk car every little while? You ought to come up some night and we’ll convert you.”
“I’m going up, right now,” Strayer announced; and it was thus that David got a motor-car ride all the way to the Gap, the railroad watch-dog enlivening the journey with additional criticisms as they went along.
It was after they had reached the headquarters camp, and David had invited the railroad man into his office bunk car for an intermission smoke,that the bluff inspector dipped abruptly into the personalities.
“I like you, Vallory,” he said, “and I’ve been wondering for a solid month how you ever came to tie up with this Grillage outfit. Would you mind telling me?”
“Not in the least. Mr. Grillage and my father are old friends; they were schoolmates.”
“That stops me dead,” was Strayer’s rejoinder. “I shan’t say any of the things I was going to say.”
“It needn’t stop you,” was David’s surrejoinder.
“But it does. Under such conditions you have personal relations with Father Eben; you can’t help having them. And that reminds me, he is in Brewster now, on his way up here. Did you know he was coming?”
“Yes; I heard of it through the hotel people.”
“He’s got his daughter with him. Did you know that?”
“Not positively, no.”
“Leaving her father entirely out of it, she’s a mighty fine young woman,” said Strayer. “I met her when she was here last September. She didn’t seem to think that a railroad inspecting engineer was merely a new kind of dog to be kicked off the door-step.”
“Neither do I,” David asserted. “You think we are a bunch of crooks on our side, and we know you want to get something for nothing on yours. There needn’t be anything personal about it.”
The big man’s grin bared a marvelously fine set of teeth.
“Youarecrooks, Vallory; so crooked that it would break a snake’s back to try to keep up with you. If Eben Grillage wasn’t your father’s friend, I’d say that he ought to have a middle name beginning with the letter ‘S’ for——”
“But he is my father’s friend—and mine,” interrupted David, with a little of the emphasis belligerent on the verb.
“Sure! I’ll quit. And to make up for the implied slam, I’ll give you a little pointer, Vallory. This business of systematically dodging specifications has about run its course, and it’s going to get you in bad. Our people have been taking it rather easy and contenting themselves with checking you up in spots and making you make good. Do you get me?”
“I’m listening.”
“All right. That was the way it ran along at first. But now it’s beginning to be whispered around in our headquarters that the Grillage companyis out for blood on this contract; that no amount of inspection can keep you from skinning us alive—which the same you are doing. That isn’t a healthy state of affairs, and it ought to be cured before the whisper spreads, let us say, to the Executive Board in New York. Are you on?”
“No,” David challenged stubbornly. Then he fell back upon the seller’s time-worn argument: “You are getting all you pay for, and more.”
“Enough said,” laughed Strayer, getting up to go. “No offense meant, and none taken, I hope. But you say Mr. Grillage is your friend, and—well, it’s just a word to the wise, that’s all. So long, till I see you again.”
Somewhat later in the day, returning from a trip to Brady’s Cut, David paused on the sheltered side of the office bunk car to light his pipe. A window was open, and he heard voices within; the voices, namely, of young Jimmy Crawford and Silas Plegg. Crawford had come to camp for a missing detail drawing of some part of Bridge Number Two, and Plegg was getting it for him out of the blueprint locker.
“A close squeak,” Crawford was saying. “If Bittner hadn’t been thoughtful enough to ’phone, I’d have been caught red-handed. I lost my head for a minute and ran down the track to flagStrayer, meaning to choke the big stiff if I couldn’t think of any other way of keeping him off. Just then the material train came along and the boss dropped off right at my feet. He was a Godsend, and I used him, got him to stay and flag Strayer while I ran back and got busy.”
Then Plegg’s voice: “Did you tell Mr. Vallory what you were going to do?”
“Not hardly!” was Crawford’s laughing denial; “not after the song and dance you gave us fellows a while back, just after the boss came on the job. I just told him that Strayer was coming, and that I’d like to have him hindered until I could make sure everything was ship-shape for an inspection. He seemed to be thinking pretty hard about something else, but he was good-natured enough to sit down on a tie-end and wait for Strayer.”
David’s pipe was alight and he moved away. What he had overheard merely confirmed his former assumption that Crawford had been tamping dry concrete to make it appear wet, and he thought no more of it. But if his match had gone out and he had been obliged to light another on the windless side of the bunk car....
Plegg seemed to be having trouble in the search for the missing drawing, and Crawford rattled on.
“When I got back to the bridge I turned the whole gang loose on the stage-setting. It was some swift job, believe me, and I didn’t know what minute Strayer’s car’d come chugging around the curve. I’ve got so I keep a bunch of short steels handy, and we stuck ’em up in the concrete to look as if they grew there. Strayer counted ’em when he came, as he always does, and they checked out right, of course. But say, Plegg, if he’d touched one of the dummies it would have tumbled over! The concrete had been running a bit thin, and it was all we could do to make the short pieces stand up long enough to be counted. As it was, two or three of ’em fell down just as Strayer and the boss were climbing to their places in the inspection car. That’s why I say it was a close squeak.”
This, then, was what David missed by not having to light a second match. Instead of a practically harmless ramming of dry concrete, Crawford had been covering up another item of the cost-cutting. One of the commonest economies in concrete construction is the scanting of the steel which binds the mass together and adds its strength to that of the cement. The contract specifications called for a stated number of these bars in Bridge Number Two. Following the Grillagepractice, certain of these bars had been left out—to save their cost. Crawford had made his dummy bars figure as permanences for Strayer, and the trick was turned.
But of all this David Vallory knew nothing; and since his pipe was now drawing freely, he mounted to the cab of one of the construction locomotives to have himself conveyed to the tunnel mouth on the eastern slope of the great mountain.