XVIIThe Tar-Barrel
IN any descent to Avernus it is not often given to the wayfarer to recognize the point at which he first begins to go down-hill. In the removal of the careful Altman from the eastern tunnel boring and the substituting of the reckless, devil-may-care Regnier, David Vallory had succeeded in persuading himself that he had merely checked off an item in the day’s work, and was far enough from suspecting that the item figured as another milestone in the downward inclining path.
But certain results followed in due course, and a growth, not in grace. For one of the results, David, being a shrewd-eyed master of his trade, soon began to discover many of the things that Plegg was trying to hide from him—the dishonesties large and small by which unscrupulous Business seeks to increase the margin or profit; to discover them and pass by on the other side with closed eyes. Another result was his changed and changing attitude toward the Powder Can nuisance. From regarding the wide-open mining-campchiefly as a moral menace, he was beginning to look upon it more as an obstacle to progress—his own industrial progress on the job. It was sapping the strength of his working force, and therefore—in spite of the contractor-king’s injunction, which he took to be another of the little kindnesses designed to make things easier for him—it was to be abolished.
In the field of the discovered dishonesties and the closed eye, effect succeeded to cause with due celerity. The conditions on a well-systematized undertaking like the line-shortening project are fairly telepathic. Almost immediately it began to be whispered about among the gang bosses and the men that the new chief was bent upon making a record; the first assistant said so, and the first assistant ought to know. This being the fact, the bridle might be taken off—always with due regard for the railroad watch-dogs, and for a decent concealment from a chief who, for the look of the thing, must be in a position to say that he knew nothing whatever of cast-off bridles and the substitution of loose halters therefor.
When David Vallory began to realize that his lowering of the standards was taken as an ell for an inch by his subordinates and the rank and file, it may be supposed that he was frankly appalled.But momentum counts for something. And back of the push on the downward slide there was always the debt of obligation owed to Eben Grillage. The king of the contractors might be all that men said he was; a hard bargain driver and a cold-blooded buccaneer of business. But at the same time he was Virginia’s father and the savior of the Vallory good name.
If these were the inner wrestlings, David had as yet shared them with no one. Outwardly, at least on the social side, he was measuring up to a rather exacting standard set by Miss Virginia. Days in which he took her on the construction locomotives and put her in touch with the throbbings of the feverish heart of the activities were intermingled with summer evenings on the Alta Vista porches. For some cause as yet unexplained, the coming of his father and sister was delayed; and for some other cause, into which his infatuation forbade him to inquire, no one of Virginia Grillage’s retinue of suitors had thus far intruded upon the scene.
“And still you are not entirely happy,” she laughed, one evening, when he spoke of the comforting dearth of the suitors.
“What makes you think I’m not happy?” he shot back.
“I can tell. You have something on your mind.”
He made an attempt to turn her aside from the topic of the mind-burdens.
“Haven’t I had you to myself for days and days? I don’t know what more a man could ask.”
“Oh, that!” she mocked. “But, just the same, you’re not happy.” Then she added, apparently as an after-thought: “And neither am I.”
“Don’t tell me it is because you are missing the others,” he pleaded, still intent upon warding off the more personal personalities.
“I am missing them dreadfully; especially Lord Cumberleigh and little Freddy Wishart. But mostly it’s your ingratitude.”
“My ingratitude?”
“That is what I said. In the kiddie days you used to tell me everything. But now you are shutting me out. You lead me along just so far, but beyond that I find myself talking to another David, one that I know less and less every day.”
For a time he was silent. Then he said: “You are altogether right—as you always are, Vinnie. Thereisanother David; a man that I am trying mighty hard to get acquainted with, myself. I don’t know him well enough yet to introduce him to you.”
“That sounds almost uncanny. Is it meant to be?”
“It is uncanny. I can’t account for it—or him—or wholly approve him. This other David isn’t always a pleasant person to meet. Part of the time I seem to recognize him in a vague sort of way, and then again he becomes a total stranger; a man of moods and impulses and perfectly barbarous leanings.”
“I know,” she said quietly. “I’ve seen him now and then. I saw him to-day when we were down at the Cross Gulch bridge. The foreman had apparently been doing something that you had told him not to do. You didn’t rave at him, but for a second or two the other David looked out through your eyes.”
“How do you account for it—or him?”
“How should I be able to account for it—or him—if you can’t? Of course, there are always general principles. If a watch has been keeping good time and begins to go wrong, it is a sign that some one has been tinkering with the works, isn’t it?”
“And you would suggest that some one has been tinkering with my works?”
“I know that you are different—and that I am sorry.”
“Have I been different this evening?”
“Yes, part of the time.”
“There is some little cause for the added grouch just now. I’ve been neglecting a plain duty. Did you notice the thinness of the gangs working on the lower section when we were down there to-day?”
“Not particularly.”
“They were thin. Yesterday was pay-day, and a lot of those hand-to-mouth ‘wops’ are blowing themselves in Powder Can. When I first came here I saw that that mining-camp would have to be cleaned up, but I’ve been putting it off. Out of the goodness of his heart, your father tells me to let it alone; he’d rather take his losses than to have me shoulder another load, I suppose. But the thing has reached the limit. I’m going after it with a sharp stick.”
On this particular evening they were sitting on the western porch, a bit withdrawn, as usual, from the groups of idling summer people. At the end of the porch a low-branching fir grew so close to the building that its nearer twigs, swayed by the gentle breeze sliding down from the heights of Qojogo, made little tapping sounds to break the silence of the mountain night. Under the low-hanging branches of the fir the big St. Bernard belongingto the hotel proprietor was curled up; at least David Vallory thought it was the dog—had reason to think so since it was the St. Bernard’s nightly sleeping-place.
“Something ought to be done,” was the young woman’s agreement with the sharp-stick suggestion. “How will you go about it?”
It was at this conjuncture that the sleeping dog stirred uneasily, but David Vallory did not look aside.
“A man named Dargin is the head and front of things over there. If he were run out, the smaller fellows could be handled without much trouble. I’ve been hesitating between two methods of getting at Dargin. I suppose the simplest plan would be to walk over there some day and tell him that he can have twenty-four hours in which to settle up his affairs and vanish.”
Miss Virginia’s exclamation was a little shriek. “The idea!” she said. “Do you suppose he would go away for anything like that?”
“He would if it were properly backed up; if I should tell him, for example, that if I had the job to do over, I’d do it with a gun.”
“Mercy me! This is the ‘other David’ with a vengeance! Do you really mean it?”
“Why shouldn’t I mean it? If the argumentof force is the only one that would appeal to him——”
“But you’d be killed! I’ve heard the most awful stories of this man. He wouldn’t give you the slightest chance. Promise me that you won’t do any such recklessly foolish thing!”
“I shan’t, if you don’t want me to; though it’s much the simpler way to go about it. The other way is to write a personal letter to President Ford of the railroad company. I don’t know him, but my father does, and he is a good man—a clean man. I am practically certain that if he knew the conditions he’d use the railroad company’s power to clean up the camp—the power given it by the land leases. But that is enough about the job and me and my little insanities. I must hike back down the hill to my blankets. I know you’d be yawning if you were not too polite.”
She got up to walk with him to the porch steps, and at the good-night moment he said: “Where are you going to let me take you to-morrow?”
“Before I pick the place I’m going to ask you once more why you have been so persistently refusing to take me to the big tunnel. Don’t you know that I simply adore tunnels?”
Now David had his own good reasons for nothaving taken Eben Grillage’s quick-witted daughter into the big bore where Regnier was driving his hard-rock crews. Day by day the dangerous ‘fault’ was scattering its warnings in chips and spallings of fresh rock thrown down from the disintegrating roof—evidences which Regnier was careful to remove before they should attract the attention of the railroad inspectors.
“A tunnel in process of construction isn’t a good place in which to entertain inquisitive little girls,” David evaded. “And this particular tunnel is wet and mucky.”
“That isn’t the reason why you haven’t taken me there,” she asserted calmly.
“How do you know it isn’t?”
“Because I was in the tunnel this afternoon. You had been making so many foolish excuses that my curiosity was aroused. I took advantage of your absence at the other end of things and made Mr. Plegg take me. He didn’t want to; he was just as gruff and impossible as he dared to be to the big boss’s daughter. But I made him do it.”
It is easily conceivable that David felt cold chills racing up and down his spine at the bare thought of what might have happened during this unauthorized visit—this, be it remarked, though hefancied he had settled it definitely with himself that nothing was going to happen.
“That was altogether wrong!” he said, in his best workmanlike manner. “Don’t you know you shouldn’t break discipline that way?”
“Poof!” she retorted. “That is what Cumberleigh would call ‘putting on side’. It’s a pity if I have to ask permission when I wish to go somewhere—and of you!”
He shook his head in despair.
“You are not a bit less wilful than you used to be in the old Middleboro days. But, really, Vinnie, you mustn’t go into the tunnel again. It’s—it’s no place for visitors, or at least for women visitors.”
“You have a reason for saying that, and it isn’t any of those you’ve been giving me,” she flashed back.
“Do you think so?” He had not yet reached the point at which he could lie to her deliberately.
“I know it. You haven’t any scruples about letting me get mucky and grimy on any other part of the work; you have rather enjoyed telling me that my face needed washing.”
“Never, unless it did,” he laughed, hoping to find some way of diverting the talk from the unwelcometunnel channel. But Miss Virginia, with an end in view, was not of those who may be easily turned aside.
“Then there was Mr. Silas Plegg,” she went on. “I have had a good many escorts, first and last—and some of them unwilling, no doubt—but Mr. Plegg capped the climax. He was as nervous as a cat after we got inside, and if I didn’t know him so well, I should say he acted as if he were afraid of something.”
“He was,” Plegg’s chief confirmed grimly. “I have given positive orders that no one, other than those connected with the working shifts, be admitted to the tunnel headings. Plegg knew he would be in for a bawling-out when I should find out what he’d done.”
The young woman’s smile was a mocking little grimace.
“It wasn’t at all that kind of ‘afraid’; it seemed to me more like just plain scare. While we were watching the drills, Mr. Regnier pulled him aside and spoke to him. They probably thought the drills were making such a clatter that I couldn’t hear what they said; but Ididhear.”
“Cuss-words?” David suggested. He was still trying to maintain the good-naturedly playful attitude.
She nodded vigorously. “Perfectly hair-raising!” she assured him. “Mr. Regnier said, ‘Why in the’—a long string of sizzling things—‘do you bring her here? Have you not of the senses the—blinkety-blank-blank—smallest portion?’
“I couldn’t hear what excuse Mr. Plegg made, but it was evidently not a very good one, for Mr. Regnier broke loose again: ‘Sacre bleu!you are prip-pare to get yourself deeslike.Hein!you shall chase her out of here so queek asle bon Dieuwill let you!’ You spoke of discipline a minute ago. I shouldn’t think you’d allow one of the under-assistants to talk that way to your second in command. It’s disgraceful.”
Answering the disciplinary gibe, David sought once more to stave off the tunnel climax—if so be the breaker of discipline were working toward a climax. But again Miss Virginia proved herself a true inheritor of the Grillage obstinacies and persistences.
“There is something the matter with that tunnel, David, and I want to know what it is,” she urged gravely.
He told a half-truth merely because no plausible or practicable falsehood suggested itself at the moment.
“It is a bit dangerous—in one place.”
“But if it is dangerous for me it is dangerous for the workmen. Why don’t you timber the bad place?”
He laughed. “What do you know about timbering tunnels?”
“You forget that I’ve been eating the bread of the construction camps all my life.”
“That’s so; I had forgotten.” In their excursions together over the job it had given him a glow of superecstasy to find that she was familiar with many of the details of her father’s trade—and his own; details which would have been purest Greek to most women. Silas Plegg’s commendation was amply borne out by the fact; she was, indeed, “a pretty good little engineer, herself.” None the less his lips were sealed in the matter of tunnel-timbering—or the lack of it. He could not tell her that, for the sake of her father’s profit account, the weak roof must not be timbered. Hence, he temporized.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have called it dangerous; it isn’t so bad as you may be imagining. Timbering is an obstruction to the work, and we always get along without it if we can.” Then, resolute to shelve the subject so high that it couldn’t be reached again: “What has become of your father? I haven’t seen him for two or three days.”
“He is down at the car to-night. But he hasn’t been well.”
“Not well? I can’t think of him as not being well. He always looks to me as if he’d never known what it was to be sick.”
“He hasn’t known very often, and for that reason he never takes any care of himself. But something over a year ago he scared me silly; he had a touch of apoplexy. The doctors told me, but they wouldn’t tell him. He got well in almost no time, but since, I’ve been trying to make him take things easy. That was one reason why I insisted on coming out here with him this summer.”
“He needs a complete rest,” said David.
“Yes; and maybe he’ll get one when your father comes. By the way—when are they coming—your father and Lucille?”
“See how association with you makes me forget things!” he jested. “I knew I had something to tell you. They will be here to-morrow. I had a letter this morning.”
“Are you ready for them?” she asked.
“They are to have that cottage over there under the pines, and they can take their meals here in the hotel.”
It was a perfect summer night, with the stars burning like beacon-lights in the inverted bowl ofthe heavens, a crescent moon hanging low over the saw-tooth outline of Qojogo, and the elevated backgrounds sweeping in the blackest of shadow to the high horizons.
“The sublime majesty of it!” said the young woman softly, commenting on the grandeurs. “And to think that Lucille won’t be able to see it when she comes! It’s heart-breaking, David!”
“I think—I hope—the little sister doesn’t miss what she hasn’t had since she was four years old,” he returned, matching her low tone.
“I know; though it seems as if she must. But you are making her miss some of the things she needn’t miss, David.”
“I have been a poor plotter,” he confessed. “I’ll admit that in getting them out here I was confidently counting upon breaking it off for Oswald. But it seems that I have only made matters worse. The letter that I spoke of was from Herbert. He has taken a partner in his law business and is giving himself a vacation. He says Dad’s health is still poor and it is hardly right for him to travel with the care of Lucille; so he, Bert, is coming along. I suppose I shall be obliged to read the riot act to him again.”
Miss Virginia was standing on the lowest porch step and she drew herself up in combative protest.
“You will do nothing of the sort,” she declared, with a touch of her father’s peremptory manner. “If you do, I shall let Lord Cumberleigh and Freddy Wishart know what a perfectly gorgeous place this is in which to spend a summer vacation. Good-night; it’s late and I’m going in.”
When David had descended the hill to his bunk car headquarters he found that Plegg had not yet come in. But Jean Marie François Regnier was there, dark-faced, and with the Gallic temper coruscating.
“Thees devil of hard-rock men!” he sputtered. “They ’ave not so moch as the courage of a mice! They say to me, ‘You s’all timber thees bad place or shoot it down, or bygod we s’all strike.’Sacr-r-re!”
As once before, in a similar crisis, David Vallory sat on the edge of his bunk to take off his lace-boots.
“I’ll think about it, Regnier” he said slowly. “You tell your men that you’ve put it up to me. I’ll see you to-morrow.”
After Regnier had gone, David went on mechanically with his bed-time preparations. Then, as if at the bidding of a sudden impulse, he hurriedly put the boots and his coat on again and went out to the rear platform of the small car.
When he saw that the lights were still on in Mr. Grillage’s Pullman he dropped from the step and went across the tracks to present himself at the porter-guarded door of theAthenia.