XThe Miry Clay
HAVING himself so recently made the journey from Chicago to the Timanyoni, David Vallory knew that he could count upon at least two clear days in which to gather up the loose ends and otherwise to prepare his huge working machine for a critical inspection by the president of the company. To that end he called a conference of the members of his staff and applied the spur. The big boss was coming, and it was up to them to show him the machine in perfect working order. If there were any loose ends, now was the time to tie them in.
“There’s only one thing that I’d like to see changed,” said Crawford, the grading expert who had charge of the line building on the lower end of the cut-off; “that is this crazy practice of paying off every two weeks instead of once a month. I count on at least a ten per cent reduction in my gangs for two or three days after every second Saturday—which is about the length of time ittakes the high-rollers to get rid of their money in the Powder Can dives.”
“Leaks of that kind are precisely what we are trying to find and stop,” the new chief broke in. “Any suggestions?”
There were several made by different members of the staff, but they were all variations upon the same theme, namely, some method by which the too-frequent pay-days might be abolished.
“I’m afraid the twice-a-month basis will have to stand,” was David Vallory’s decision. “I talked that matter out with Mr. Grillage before I left Chicago. He is opposed to the fortnightly pay-day, but he has been forced to establish it on all of his contracts because other companies have adopted it, and if we don’t keep step we lose our men.”
“Zat Powder Can—she is one blot on zee face of zee eart’!” spat out Regnier, the fiery little French-Canadian engineer who was handling the gangs in the rock cuttings.
David Vallory nodded. “I’m new to this country,” he admitted. “Are there no laws by which these man-trappers can be put out of business?”
It was Plegg who made answer to this.
“The sheriff’s writs don’t run this far from the nearest court-house. What is everybody’s businessis nobody’s business. Besides, the man-traps and the construction camps have gone hand-in-hand ever since the beginning of time.”
“There is no reason why they should continue to do so to the end of time,” David cut in. “If the Powder Can lawlessness is holding us back, we must clean it up.”
Plegg shook his head. “That’s easier said than done. The town is on its own, and it gets its revenue chiefly from our pay-rolls. The mines, with the single exception of the Murtrie, don’t amount to anything.”
“Maybe the railroad people would help us out,” suggested Altman, the smooth-faced, young-looking mining engineer who was directing the granite boring in the east-end tunnel heading. “Somebody told me once that nearly all of the town is built on land leased from the railroad company.”
“I’ll look into this Powder Can business, myself,” said David, as the conference broke up. “The thing that’s biting us just now is the need to show Mr. Grillage a clean slate when he comes. He knows good work when he sees it, and I don’t want to have to begin making excuses the minute he lights down in Powder Gap. Go to it and key things up to concert pitch.”
With the great machine grinding merrily underthis new impetus, David Vallory did look cursorily into the Powder Can situation, stealing time from the strenuous activities to make inquiries as to what might be done. Up to this time, when the doing of something began to urge itself baldly as an industrial necessity, he had been postponing action in this particular field, excusing himself upon what seemed to be the perfectly justifiable plea that the mining-camp man-traps and their curbing or abolition were matters outside of the line of his duties; a view which he knew to be in strict accordance with that of the president of his company. It was not that he meant to adopt the policy of the blind eye in principle. His promise to Virginia Grillage forbade that. But the excuses had opened the door to postponement.
Such were the surface indications of the vein of reluctance; but deeper down there was another reason for the postponement. Not at any time since his arrival had David forgotten that Judith Fallon was most probably still living in Powder Can. If he should chance to meet her—which was not at all unlikely—the entire question of his responsibilities—a question which the lapse of time, and the growing hope that he might one day win the love of Virginia Grillage, had pushed into the background—would be reopened.
As a result of his inquiries he soon found that there would be little use in making an appeal to the law. As Plegg had pointed out, the Powder Gap region was far enough distant from civilization to be a law unto itself. But there was the hope that he might be able to make such representations to the railroad people, who were the lessors of the land upon which the town was built, as might induce them to intervene on the side of law and order. Being thus brought face to face with the thorny duty, he enlisted Plegg; and after the mess-tent supper they crossed the basin together to make such a survey of the conditions as would enable them to present the demoralizing facts in their reality to the railroad company.
With one of the fortnightly pay-days less than thirty-six hours in the past there was ample evidence of the malignance of the social and industrial ulcer. The wide-open resorts were packed with throngs of the Grillage workmen, and the harvesting of the hard-earned dollars was in full swing.
“We’ll see it all while we’re about it,” said David; and with Plegg at his elbow he pushed his way through one of the crowded bar-rooms to a den at the rear where a faro-game was running, with the circle of sitters backed by eager gamblerswho reached over the shoulders of the chair circle to place their bets. Outside in the bar there was noise enough, but here the strained silence was broken only by the clicking of the counters, the heavy breathing of the men, and the silken whisper of the cards as the dealer ran them from his box. David let his gaze sweep the table circle and come to rest upon the forbidding features of the man who was running the cards; a swarthy, heavy-faced giant with Indian-like hair, drooping mustaches that only half veiled a mouth of utter ruthlessness, and eyes that were at the moment as dead as the pallor showing beneath the Mexican-darkness of his skin.
“‘Black Jack’ Dargin,” Plegg whispered in Vallory’s ear. “He owns and runs this place, and does his own dealing, but he has another sort of dive a little farther up the street.”
David Vallory’s jaw was set when they had worked their way out to the open air.
“It isn’t even a square game!” he gritted. “What I don’t know about faro would fill a book, but any sober man with eyes in his head could see that that scoundrel was running a stacked deck! Who is this Dargin?”
“You’ve seen,” said Plegg shortly. “In a way, he’s the boss of this camp; has a reputation as a‘killer’ and he has traded on it until he has everybody ‘buffaloed.’ He is the only faro dealer I’ve ever seen who would consent to run a game without a ‘lookout.’ He makes a brag of it; says all he needs is a boy to sell the chips. The woman is the only human being in this camp who has ever made him take a stand-off.”
“The woman?” said David.
“Yes; I keep forgetting that you’re new. She is another example of Dargin’s cave-man methods. When the work began here in the Gap last September, Dargin was about the first man on the ground for the shekel harvest. He opened this place and a dance-hall, killed a man or two to get himself properly dreaded, and began to rake in the easy money. About that time the woman dropped in.”
“God pity her, whoever she is,” was David’s comment.
“It was a curious case,” Plegg went on, as they walked together up a street blatant with the roistering crowds. “Shortly after the dissipations had caught their stride a young plunger from somewhere back east turned up here and took rooms in the Hophra House. As nearly as I could learn at the time, the young ass was rich—or at least a rich man’s son—and he had been stung ona Powder Can mining scheme. He came here to see what he’d been let in for, and he didn’t have any better sense than to bring his wife along—to such a wolf-den as this!”
“Go on,” said David, with some dim premonition warning him that, instead, he should have told Plegg to stop.
“I don’t know all the ins and outs of it; or just how much or how little the woman was to blame. But the upshot of the matter was that one day, right in the face and eyes of the whole camp, as you might say, Black Jack backed this young fool up against a wall, stuck a gun into his face, and gave him a quick choice between passing out there and then, or buying his life and a chance to vanish by giving up all claims to his wife.”
“Good heavens!” the listener ejaculated. “Cave-man is right!”
“One of the laws of the jungle that Kipling didn’t mention,” was the first assistant’s terse summing-up. “Dargin saw something that he wanted, and that was his way of reaching out and taking it. But now comes the queer part of it. The young plunger disappeared between two days, and everybody looked to see the woman take up with Dargin. But that isn’t what happened. She stayed on at the Hophra House for a few days and thensent for her father, a poor devil of a machinist who seemed to be trying to drink himself to death. Either she or Dargin got him a job at the Murtrie mine, and the two of them set up housekeeping in one of the mine shacks.”
“Dargin and the woman, you mean?”
“No! the woman and her father. And that’s the way it has been ever since. Making all due allowances for the time and place, Dargin’s relations with the woman are the only half-way decent ones he has. The old man was drunk half the time, so Dargin gave the girl a job playing the piano in his dance-hall—by way of giving her a chance to earn an honest living, you’d say. That seems to be as far as it has gone, except that one day last fall a tipsy ‘hard-rock’ man tried to take liberties with the girl at the piano, and when she fought him, struck her. He skipped out, across the range, but Black Jack caught up with him and shot him.”
David Vallory’s premonition of coming tragedy had been fulfilled long before Plegg reached this point in his story, but if there had been any doubt as to the woman’s identity the incident of the “hard-rock” man would have dispelled it. Oddly enough, the filling-out of Judith Fallon’s story did not seem to lessen his own feeling of moral obligation;on the contrary, it increased it. More than ever, as it appeared, it was needful that Judith should be taken quickly out of the false position into which her relations, innocent or otherwise, with the man-killer had placed her.
By this time their progress up the single street of the town had brought them to another of the resorts; a dance-hall, this, also with its bar-room annex. There was little room on the dancing-floor for spectators, and they did not try to enter. But enough could be seen from the bar to determine the character of the place.
“This is Dargin’s other place,” said Plegg. “It’s the least tough of any of the Powder Can joints, and the money is made over the bar. If a man gets too well ‘lit up’ he is thrown out. Most of the women you see in there are the miners’ wives and daughters. It hurts us chiefly because it attracts men who would neither gamble nor drink if they didn’t start in here on a sort of social plane.”
David nodded and was turning away when a hand was laid on his arm and he wheeled quickly.
“Judith!” he gasped. Then, as Plegg stood aside and pretended not to see or hear; “My God!”
“Yes,” she said, “’tis ‘Judith’ now, and never‘Glory’ any more. What brings you here, Davie?”
“You—partly,” he blurted out. “Put something on and come outside. I want to talk to you.”
“No,” she refused bluntly; and then, to temper the bluntness: “’Tis no good it can do now, Davie, and ’twould do you harm. There be tongues to wag, even in Powder Can, and you’re the chief on the big job.”
“But I must see you and talk with you!” he insisted.
“’Twill do no good,” she repeated. “I’ve made my bed, Davie, and I’ve got to lie on it.”
The bar-room throng was jostling them as they stood, and David saw the bartender marking them through half-closed eyes. He fancied there was crafty suspicion in the look, but at the moment he was thinking chiefly of the obligation that he must not shirk.
“I shall come again, in daytime,” he said. “You are living on the Murtrie claim?”
“You must not!” she forbade quickly. “’Twould be—it might be as much as your life’s worth! Nor must you stay here talking to me. Go now, or the Plegg man will be asking questions that you can’t answer!” And with that sheslipped aside and lost herself in the throng on the dancing-floor.
David Vallory was gravely silent on the remainder of the round of investigation; and Plegg, knowing that something sobering had happened at Dargin’s dance-hall, respected his chief’s mood. But on the way back to the construction camp the silence was broken by David himself.
“You saw the woman I was talking to in that place across from the Murtrie ore yard?”
“Yes, I saw her.”
“Do you know who she is?”
Plegg nodded. “She is the one I was talking about.”
“I know it. And the hound who brought her here? I believe you didn’t mention his name.”
“It was Hudson—no, that isn’t quite it—Judson; Thomas Judson.”
To the astonishment of the reticent, self-contained first assistant, David Vallory lifted his clenched hands to the stars and swore savagely. But as Plegg had respected his chief’s former silence, so now he respected the wrathful outburst. Farther along, when they were crossing the tracks in the material yard, David offered niggard explanation.
“I knew the woman, back home, Plegg; I grewup with her. If ever a man needed killing, Tom Judson is that man.”
“They were not married?” said Plegg.
“I have no reason to believe that they were. But that doesn’t excuse Judson.”
“Of course not; it makes it worse—if he was the original sinner.”
“He was,” said David; “but he was not the only one.” And with that he shut his mouth like a trap and did not open it again until they reached the steps of their bunk car. Then he said shortly: “I am going up to Brady’s Cut. You needn’t leave the lamp burning for me when you turn in; I don’t know when I’ll get back.”
In naming the place to which he was going, David gave the first assistant only the outward husk of the kernel of truth. As he tramped his stumbling course over the unevenly spaced cross-ties of the construction track in the general direction of Brady’s, he was thinking little enough of the work at the cutting or of anything connected with the affairs of the Grillage Engineering Company. Taking their revenge for a long period of banishment into a limbo of things conveniently pushed aside, the thoughts that had once harassed him into something like a congestive chill of moral remorse assailed him afresh.
The woman he had unconsciously led up to the brink of the chasm had not only gone over; she had sunk to a depth perilously near the bottom. There could be no doubt of what the end would be. For some inscrutable reason of his own, Dargin, “the killer,” was according her such a measure of respect as his cave-man attributes were capable of entertaining for anything in the shape of a woman. But that was the most that could be said. Poor Gloriana! What a bitter price she was paying! And with what portion of that price must he, David Vallory, in justice charge himself?
Reaching the approach to Brady’s Cut, a huge gash torn through the side of one of the rounded basin hills, David turned to his left and climbed steadily until he attained the sparse growth of trees crowning the hill at the edge of the great cutting. Below him the ordered pandemonium of industry was in full stride. Under the light of masthead arcs, two mammoth steam-shovels rattled and clanked, the sharp staccato of their exhaust pipes echoing from the surrounding heights like the cachinnations of some invisible and mocking giant of the immensities. Between the shovels rooting like prehistoric monsters into the banks on either hand, a grunting locomotive pushed its train of dump-cars for the spoil, moving them soaccurately that the circling shovel buckets to right and left never failed of an empty hopper into which to drop the three-ton torrent of mingled clay and broken stone.
David Vallory cast himself down at the edge of the cutting with his back to one of the little trees. The chattering clamor of the industries floated up to him on a thin nimbus of coal smoke; but when the senses are turned inward the near and the actual lose their appeal. Once more the fair structure of David’s imaginings was preparing to topple—a structure that he had thought Judith’s disappearance from Middleboro, leaving no trace, gave him leave to rear. But now their paths had crossed again; she was here, almost within rifle-shot of the tree against which he was leaning. And in a day or two Virginia Grillage would come. Was it mere chance, or an avenging fate, that was about to place him at the converging point of a great happiness and an equally great reckoning with a past that could never be recalled?
It was far past midnight when he got up and shook himself as one awaking from a troubled dream. Down on the construction track he saw a train of flat-cars bringing the two-o’clock shifts to relieve the gangs which had gone on in the early evening. Above the mechanical clamor in thecutting at his feet he could hear the upcoming men singing raucously.
“Bellow it out—it’s little enough you have to trouble you!” he grated, apostrophizing the singing workmen. Then he turned his steps toward the distant material yard, avoiding the approaching train, and closing sullen ears to the noisy human atoms who had no troubles.