XVIIIIn Loco Parentis
ADMITTED to the office compartment of the private car, David Vallory found its occupant preparing to go up to the hotel; but at the swing of the corridor door Eben Grillage sat down again in the capacious swing-chair at his desk and relighted the stub of his cigar.
“Come in, David,” he growled not unkindly; and before Vallory could speak: “Vinnie ’phoned down a few minutes ago to tell me that you’re looking for your father to-morrow. That sounds mighty good to me. We’ll have another chance to renew our youth. You don’t appreciate how much that means; you’re too young. But some day you will.”
David drew up one of the wicker chairs and sat down. The abrupt dip into the purely friendly relations side-tracked his errand, temporarily; but it also gave him time to gather himself for the plunge into the weightier matter.
“Yes,” he assented; “I had a letter this morning. There will be three of them; Dad and my sister and Bert Oswald.”
“You don’t mean John Oswald’s boy?”
“Yes, that is the one. Bert is a lawyer now, in business for himself in Middleboro.”
Eben Grillage wagged his head as one incredulous, and the massive features were relaxed in a reminiscent smile.
“Well, well; the idea of that little red-headed, blue-eyed chap of Oswald’s growing up to be a man and a lawyer! How time does skip along!” Then: “What’s he coming out here for? We don’t need any lawyers on this job—not yet, I hope.”
“Bert says the trip is a vacation excursion for him,” David replied, suppressing Oswald’s true motive. Then he began on his own errand. “I came over here to bother you for a bit of advice on something that I’ve changed my mind about half a dozen times or more. It’s that weak place in the roof of heading Number One that Plegg wrote you about before I came on the job.”
“Well, what about it?”
“At first I was willing to discount all the nervous stories. I spent one entire summer in hard-rock work, and I know how prone the drill crews are to cry ‘wolf’ when they drive through something a little different. But latterly I’ve been a little anxious myself.”
“I shouldn’t worry, if I were you,” said the big man, with the lenient indulgence of a master for a neophyte. “There’s a good old saying, David, that you ought always to remember: Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you. I’ve had a look at that tunnel roof, myself. You needn’t lose any sleep over it.”
“It looks a bit bad to me,” David made bold to say. “And now Regnier tells me that the men have gone from complaining to making threats.”
“Threats?—what kind of threats?”
“They say if we don’t timber, or shoot the bad roof down, they’ll strike on us; which will be giving open notice to the railroad people that there is something wrong.”
David Vallory did not know that, under conditions similar to those he was presenting, the king of the contractors was wont to explode in volcanic wrath, consigning everybody remotely implicated to the scrap-heap of the nerveless and the yellow-streaked. Nor did he know that he was especially favored when his chief consented to argue the matter with him.
“It has always been that way with the hard-rock crews,” the master maintained; “they’re not happy if they don’t have something to kick about. As to the threat; Lushing and his inspectorsknow—or ought to know—all that anybody can tell them about that ‘fault’. It’s their business to find out.”
David felt that he was losing ground, but he tried once more.
“It has always seemed better to me to be safe than sorry,” he ventured; and he was going on to make the same suggestion that Plegg had made, about taking the matter up with the railroad company for a new contract, when the exponent of modern business success broke in.
“‘Safety first’ is a good idea, but it has been run into the ground, like a lot of other good things, David. You were telling me that your college vacations were spent working for the railroads, and there you would naturally get the safety idea rubbed into you good and hard. I’ve seen railroad engineers spend thousands of dollars—of other people’s money—on precautions that will never be tested while the world stands. When you are working for your own pocketbook it’s different.”
“Yet I suppose we ought not to take too many chances,” David constrained himself to say.
“That is where you are wrong,” was the prompt contradiction. “All business is a taking of chances. The merchant who buys a stock of goodsin spring that he hopes to sell in the fall is taking a chance. The lawyer who expects to charge a fat fee if he wins his cause is taking a chance. The farmer who plows and plants is taking a mighty long chance on what the season and the weather will do to him. Don’t you see how it runs through everything a man can do?”
“Yes, but——”
“Take our own job here and look at the hamperings. I’m talking to you now as Adam Vallory’s boy and not as a hired man. We were ground to the limit on the bidding; and at every turn the railroad people are trying to get more than they bargained for—something for nothing. It’s all right; that’s their part of it, you’ll say. But in addition to all this we’ve got Jim Lushing against us; a man who will stoop to any kind of low, disreputable trickery to do us up. You may say it’s dog eat dog, and so it is. But it’s business.”
David took a leaf from his father’s book and proffered it, not too confidently.
“Dad was always so strong on the ethics of a thing,” he began; but Eben Grillage interrupted with a good-natured laugh.
“Your father is a white-haired old angel; and he is just about as completely out of touch withthe modern business world as the other angels are. There are no theoretical ethics in business, David. If you don’t fight for your own hand, you go to the wall, every time. That is one reason why I offered you a job. I didn’t want to see Adam Vallory’s boy settle down in the old Middleboro Security and become a fossilized back-number before he could grow a beard.”
Here it was, deep in the personalities again, and David Vallory would have been either more or less than human if he could have disentangled himself from the purely friendly relation.
“You have been mighty good to me—good to all of us,” he broke out gratefully. “If I’ve said too much about that tunnel roof——”
“Just you forget the tunnel roof and let it go. It has stood up all right since we drove through it, and you know what it would cost to shoot it down and plug the hole. I want to see you succeed, David, and you can’t do it if you are always worrying about the other fellow’s side of things. I only wish I had a boy like you of my own.”
“You have something vastly better,” said the model son, with a smile.
“Vinnie, you mean? Sometimes I think so; and then, again, I’m sort of worried. When itcomes right down to the jumping-off place, I’m afraid she isn’t going to pick out a sure-enough man. Look at the crowd she runs with! Half of ’em are after my money, and the other half haven’t got brains enough to fry, or sand enough in ’em to keep the wheels from slipping.”
David was far enough beyond the tunnel and all other troubles now to be able to laugh happily. It was reasonably evident that any obstacles which might lie in his way in the sentimental race were not such as might be raised by a purse-proud father, and once again his heart warmed toward the benefactor and foster-father who was so generously overlooking the master-and-man hamperings.
“Virginia is your own daughter, Mr. Grillage; you needn’t be alarmed about her,” he put in loyally.
“I know; but she’s got a raft of high-flown notions about ethical culture—whatever that is—and the brotherhood of man, and ‘tainted money’, and all that—you probably know the whole rigmarole. And when Vinnie sets her head on anything you couldn’t switch her with a hundred-and-fifty-ton crane and a five-yard steam-shovel put together. I tell her what she needs is to marry a man who is in the thick of the businessfight for himself—and for her. Then she’d learn a few practical, every-day facts.”
David Vallory felt that it would be almost a breach of confidence—the confidence that had been growing up day by day between Virginia and himself—if he should let the talk dig any deeper into the personalities in Virginia’s direction. So he spoke again of his father’s coming, and of his hope that the change of scene and climate might prove beneficial.
“We’ll make it beneficial,” declared the big man, with a return to the genially masterful mood; and after a few minutes more of the friendly talk, David took his leave, warming himself once again at the fires of henchman loyalty. Who was he to set up the standards of his own narrow convincements against the wisdom and experience of a man whose success was equalled only by his generosity and princely liberality? And beyond this, had not Eben Grillage as good as said that his consent was already gained if his daughter’s choice should fall upon a man who wasnotof the great army of idlers?
Other phases of the talk emphasized themselves for the young chief of construction after he had seen the big boss striding sturdily up the steep path toward the ridge-top hotel. In no uncertainsense his father’s benefactor had shown himself willing to be a second father to the son, supplying, from his wider experience of men and things, the lacks of a too-narrow upbringing. In an upflash of the newer partisanship, David could smile at his own compunctions. In a world of shrewd battlings one might easily theorize too much. But deep down under this generalization the new loyalty, born first of worthy gratitude, was digging a channel for itself; the channel leading now to blind fealty. The problem was no longer a question of right and wrong in the abstract. It was resolving itself into a grim determination to hew doggedly to the line—the line being the success, in a financial sense, of the Grillage Engineering Company.
With this determination in the saddle, David Vallory did not return to his bunk car. A locomotive was about to make the run up to the tunnel with a supply of freshly blacksmithed drill-bits, and he boarded it. The night breeze, slipping down from the peaks of the higher range, was like a draft of invigorating wine. The moon had gone down, but the carbide flares and electric arcs illuminating the scene in the huge cuttings made the men and machines stand out in harsh relief. Above the clatter of the locomotive therapid, intermittent volley-fire of the steam-shovels rose like the snortings of strange monsters; and against the inky background of the western mountain a single electric star marked the mouth of the tunnel.
At the portal David dropped from the step of the engine and made his way, unaccompanied, into the heart of the mountain. The thread of incandescent bulbs starred the blackness, each illuminating its little circle of the underworld. The distant clamor of the drills ceased shortly after David reached the spot where the threatening roof was sprinkling its daily warnings. Posturing solely as the cool-headed engineer and technician, he would have decided at once that the danger signals were growing more portentous—did so decide in the inner depths of him. The overhead rock had an appearance not unlike that of a slaking lime bed, checked and crisscrossed in every direction with fine seams and cracks.
While he was still examining the roof and telling himself that this was only one of the many chances that had to be taken in the battle for success, a man came out of the half-lighted darkness of the farther depths and spoke to him. It was Silas Plegg.
“Getting your goat so that you can’t sleepnights, is it?” said the first assistant, with his teeth-baring smile.
David ignored the reference to his responsibilities and asked a question.
“Any more strike talk among the men?”
“A little; yes.”
“What do you think about this roof by this time? I know what you thought a few days ago.”
Plegg shook his head.
“It’s not up to me to do the thinking. What do you think?”
“Frankly, Plegg, I don’t know what to say. Just before you came up I was thinking that if I were called in here as an outsider and asked to give an opinion I’d say it was a risk—a damned bad risk. But as a Grillage man, I’ve come around to your point of view on the necessities. We’ve got to trust to luck and bully it through.”
“Yes; if the devil doesn’t take too good care of his own.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that it doesn’t lie with us any more to keep this thing quiet.”
“What? Have the inspectors caught on?”
“Since we haven’t had a bunch of them jumpingonto us, I infer not. But there is at least one warm enemy of yours who knows about it.”
“Who is it?”
“Black Jack Dargin.”
David flew into a rage for the second time that day.
“Can’t I get a positive order obeyed any more on this job?” he rasped. “How many times have I got to say that nobody from the outside is to be allowed in this tunnel?”
“Dargin hasn’t been here,” said Plegg evenly. “But he has had one of his steerers working here as a mucker.” A pause, and then, in the same even tone: “I guess you’ll have to give up your idea of running Black Jack off the lot. It isn’t worth while, anyway.”
David Vallory was still angry. “I’ll be shot if I’ll give it up!” he snapped. “I’ve got a string to pull that will clean those Powder Can dives off the map, and I’ll pull it to-night before I sleep!”
“And take the risk of Dargin’s giving this thing away?”
“I’m not considering risks just now! If that tin-horn gambler thinks he can put something over on us, let him try it.”
Plegg turned aside and stooped as if to examinea joint in the pressure pipe which led the air from the compressor-plant at the portal to the drills in the heading. When he straightened up it was to say, “Have you seen Lushing?”
“No.”
“He is here at the front again; so Altman told me this afternoon.”
“Which means that from now on we’re to have him around under foot!” gritted the angry one.
Plegg glanced back into the depths where thechug-chugof the drills had ceased.
“We’d better be moving out; they’re getting ready to fire a round of shots,” he offered; and after they were in the open air and the muffled reverberations of the dynamite had come rolling out to jar upon the midnight silence: “Lushing will do more than get under foot. He is spiteful, and when he gets ready to hit out, we’ll all know about it. I’m only hoping that he and Dargin won’t get together and compare notes.”
They had started to walk down to the approach track where the waiting locomotive was standing before David made his comment on the Lushing vindictiveness.
“Plegg,” he said grittingly, “you know, and I know, the particular reason why Lushing wantsto stick a knife into us. It’s running in my mind that somebody ought to put him out of the game. And if he strikes me just right, I’m the man to do it!”