XIIUnder the High Stars
IT was in the evening of the day in which David Vallory had been twice told that his president was on the way to Powder Gap that the stub train forming the connecting link between the main line and the construction headquarters came in with a private Pullman for a trailer. David was four miles away, in the eastern heading of the big tunnel, at the moment, but the service telephone line quickly transmitted the news of the big boss’s arrival. An hour farther along, after a hurried supper in the mess-tent at Brady’s cut, David took a short path across the basin and climbed the forested ridge to the Alta Vista Inn.
He had his reward for the haste, the primitive meal, and the rapid climb when he came in sight of the Inn and its rustic porches. The radiant daughter of profit-gaining contracts was there in visible presence; David singled her out instantly among the people lounging on the westward-facingporch. She stood at the railing, leaning against one of the rough tree-trunk porch pillars and gazing out upon the sunset which was painting itself in colorings known only to the high altitudes. David drew near, treading softly. It was a lover’s fancy that the glories of the sunset were reflected in the starry eyes, in the ripe lips parted a little as if in the rapture of the vision, and in the warm tintings of neck and cheek.
When he finally stood beside her she gave him her hand without loosing her eye-hold upon the crimson-shot glories.
“Isn’t it perfectly exquisite!” she breathed, accepting the fact of his presence quite as if their parting in the lakeside mansion had been but the day before.
“The sunset? Naturally; they are built that way out here. But you mustn’t expect me to rhapsodize over the scenery when I can look at you.”
“Please don’t be frivolous,” she chided. “There are plenty of others to say the silly things; and besides, it isn’t your—it isn’t in character. Stand here and enjoy this with me while it lasts, and then we’ll go somewhere and talk.”
David acquiesced willingly enough, and after the sunset had faded, and they had found chairs in the corner farthest removed from the chatteringgroups of summer people, he told her of his few weeks of strenuous work, enlarging in boyish enthusiasm upon the magnitude of the job and the possibilities of man-sized growth it offered to those who were driving it.
“And you haven’t had any trouble?” she interrogated, after the story was told.
“Not what you would call trouble; no. Of course, the railroad inspectors make life miserable for us when they can, but that is all in the day’s work. It amuses them and keeps them out of mischief, and it doesn’t hurt us.”
“Why should they make life miserable for you?”
“You ask me that?—and you the only daughter of the king of the contractors?” he laughed. “That is what they are hired for; to find fault, and to get us to give them something for nothing if they can.”
At this point it pleased Miss Virginia to play the part of the innocent and the uninformed.
“How should I know anything about it?” she queried. “Could you explain it so that a woman could understand?”
“I can explain it so that this one woman I’m talking to can understand. Have you ever happened to read a contract and specifications?”
“What a question!”
“I didn’t suppose you had. They are like the Congressional Record—nobody reads them unless it’s a necessity. But they are fearfully and wonderfully constructed. One of the clauses in the regulation form reads something like this: ‘The engineer of the party of the first part’—that’s the railroad company in the present instance—‘reserves the right to pass upon all work and material, and to reject either if found, in his judgment, to be unsatisfactory.’ Mark the wording and you’ll notice that it leaves an open door wide enough to drive a locomotive through. And up here we have a man against us who would like to hitch a whole train of cars to the locomotive.”
“Mr. Lushing, you mean?”
“The same.”
“Have you met him yet?”
“Not yet; he hasn’t been on the job in person since I came. I understand he has gone East. But he has left some pretty able fault-finders to represent him, I can assure you. If there is anything in the category of crime that they don’t accuse us of committing, it is something they have temporarily forgotten. But you mustn’t make me talk shop all the time. I’m sure it bores you, only you are too good-natured to say so.”
“A man’s work, if it is at all worth while, ought not to bore anybody. It is your life, isn’t it?”
“It was, up to just a little while ago.”
“What happened a little while ago?”
“You came.”
“That is another of the sayings that doesn’t fit,” she warned him.
“All right; we’ll talk about something else. How long can you stay?”
“I don’t know. Father is calling it his vacation, and threatens to go trout-fishing in the mountains.”
“That will be fine. If I didn’t have to watch Lushing’s outfit so closely, I’d like to go with him.”
She looked up quickly. “Have you ever had a real vacation, David?”
“I suppose not; not in your sense of the word. I was out on field work during the four college summers. I’m saving up for my honeymoon.”
“I thought you said that was only a dream; a ‘pipe-dream,’ you called it, didn’t you?”
“I did; and it is. I was only joking. The only thing I can talk seriously about is the big job. And you are not interested especially in that—or are you? Plegg said one day when we werespeaking of you that you were a pretty good little engineer. I’m quoting him literally. He meant it as a compliment.”
“Mr. Plegg,” she said, with a touch of abstraction which the mention of the first assistant’s name seemed to evoke. “Do you like him?”
“Immensely; though he always gives me the feeling that there are nooks and corners in him that he never allows anybody to explore. I met him first a year ago. It was in the Pullman, when I was going home from Florida. He had the upper berth in my section, and we scraped an acquaintance of a sort just as the train was pulling into Middleboro, though neither of us learned the other’s name. I remembered him chiefly on account of his sardonic smile, and a queer thing he said to me.”
“Will the queer thing bear repeating?”
“To you, yes. He made a running commentary on my face—like one of those street-corner physiognomists, you know; eyes, nose, jaw, and so on, and said I’d probably go far in my profession if I wasn’t too good.”
“What an exceedingly odd thing for a stranger to say to you!”
“Wasn’t it? But he was so genial about it that I couldn’t take offense.”
“What did he mean by not being ‘too good’?” she questioned gravely.
“I didn’t know at the time, but I’ve found out since. I grew up with a good many old-fashioned notions, I guess, and I’m not sure that I haven’t got some of them yet. One of them that I’ve been trying to modify was the belief that a man might set up his own standards and live by them.”
“I have that same belief now,” asserted the daughter of the luxuries. “Why are you trying to modify it? Isn’t it reasonable?”
“It is reasonable enough, and it is right and proper that you should have it. It is your woman’s privilege to believe the best of everything. But the man has to take the world as he finds it.” Thus far he was merely skirting judiciously upon the safer edges of the generalizations. But the next moment he found himself yielding to the temptation which so easily besets the average man—to confide in a woman. “I’ll tell you, Virginia; I’ve done things in the past year that I would never have dreamed of doing in my callow days; things that would make my father gasp if he knew about them.”
“Wicked things?” she suggested.
“There was a time when I should have called them wicked, without a shadow of doubt. Butthat was before I had come to realize that business—all kinds of business—is a sort of war; a fight in which, if you don’t ‘get’ the other fellow, he’ll get you.”
“You are all wrong—hideously wrong!” she broke out in a sudden passion of vehemence. “I don’t mean in the statement of fact—that is only too true. But in your own attitude. It is the first of the downward steps: if you take that step deliberately, there is no reason why you should stop at anything!”
There was only soft starlight on the sheltered porch, and David could smile in safety. The little outburst of generous indignation carried him swiftly back to the childhood days, reviving his memory picture of a hot-hearted little girl whose anger had always flamed fiercely at any spectacle of wrong or oppression, and whose defending of stray kittens and homeless dogs had more than once made him fight in blind boyish rage—not for the dogs and kittens, but for her.
“You haven’t changed much, inside, since we were babies together, and I’m glad of it,” he said, after the momentary pause ushered in by the indignant protest. “It is good of you not to make me always think of you as the grown-up Miss Virginia—the little sister of the luxuries.”
“There are times, David, when I hate the luxuries—knowing so well the source of so many of them,” she declared; and then: “Are you trying to tell me that you have thrown all of the ideals overboard?”
The appeal in her tone sobered him suddenly.
“No, I hope not, Virginia. What I’ve been saying applies only to business; the business conscience, if you want to call it that. I have plenty of the other kind left. And it’s giving me a lot of trouble.”
“Is the trouble like the professional things you were talking about a few minutes ago?—explainable to this woman?”
“No; at least, not yet. It is a question of duty, and how much duty. It is as if you had incurred a debt and didn’t know the amount of it. You’d be willing to pay, perhaps, if you only knew how much to pay.”
“That sounds entrancingly interesting,” she said. And then: “To whom do you owe the debt, David?”
“I’m not sure that I owe it to any one; or if there really is a debt. I shall have to think it out, and when I know, I’ll tell you.”
From this their talk slipped back to the big job and its askings and drawbacks, and so led up tothe moral cancer whose lights they could see twinkling in the distance at the foot of Gold Hill. David spoke of the demoralizing effects of the cancer upon his working force, and told of his futile effort to enlist the railroad people on the side of reform.
“Mr. Ford would do something, if he knew,” the young woman suggested, naming the president of the P. S-W. system.
“I believe he would; but it is like climbing a ladder a mile high to get to him. From what Jolly said, I gathered that the Brewster officials are absolutely indifferent, and to get at Mr. Ford I’d have to go over their heads.”
“You have been in the mining-camp?” she asked.
“Once, only, after dark. Some day you are going to tell me the name of the man who took your slumming party there last fall and I’ll go and beat him up.”
“Never mind the man. Did you see Judith Fallon?”
“Yes; but only for a moment. I tried to get a chance to talk to her, but she wouldn’t have it.”
“She is still living with her father?”
“Yes.”
“You needn’t be afraid to tell me all of it, David.”
At that he repeated Plegg’s short account of the manner in which Judith Fallon had come to Powder Can, and its near-tragic outcome.
“How terrible!” she said. “I remember Tom Judson, just vaguely, as a handsome little kiddie with light curly hair and the bluest of blue eyes. And he’s grown up intothat!”
“Yes; and he didn’t take long about it, either,” said David. “Long before he was expelled from college he was Middleboro’s most shining example of depravity.”
“But this other man; Dargin, did you call him? Isn’t Judith worse off than if she had no protector at all?”
“God knows,” said David, solemnly. “Except for the single fact that he seems to have some respect for her, he is the crudest of crude brutes, according to Plegg’s story. It’s going to be mighty hard to run him out of Powder Can.”
“Are you going to try to run him out?”
“It’s up to me, I guess. The railroad people won’t do anything, and the place has got to be cleaned up. This job of ours demands it. But see here; can’t we keep this talk from stumbling into the sink-holes? Tell me how long you aregoing to be content to stay away from the luxuries?”
“I told you there were times when I hated the luxuries. You must be awfully good to me if you don’t want me to run away to the lavishnesses that I use and despise in the same breath. I shall put on a khaki skirt and leggings, and you’ll have to show me everything that is going on. Have you seen father?”
“No, not yet.”
“Mercy me! I was to tell you to report to him at the car down in the railroad yard if I saw you first. I’m afraid I haven’t been a very obedient call-boy.”
David got out of his chair reluctantly.
“I’m trying to realize that you are sending me away—and that just as we were beginning to get down to the real heart of things. May I come back after your father is through with me? It is so soul-satisfying not to have to divide time with half a dozen other men.”
“The ‘other men,’ as you call them, will probably be here after a while; or some of them, at least,” she laughed. “And that reminds me; what have you done about sending for your father and sister? Nothing, I hope.”
“Oh, but I have; I have done precisely whatyou said I ought not to do. They are coming, and they will be here next week. I have taken one of the hotel cottages for them.”
“That was downright cruel, and you need to be punished,” she retorted brightly. “And you will be, too; you see if I’m not a true prophet.” Then: “I think you needn’t come back this evening. I shall probably be in bed and asleep long before father lets you escape. Now don’t you wish you hadn’t sent for your father and Lucille?”