XVIMaster and Man
ON the day following the arrival of Mr. Grillage’s private car at Powder Gap, word was passed from camp to camp that the big boss was about to make an inspection round with the new chief of construction, and the activities automatically speeded themselves up to grace the occasion.
At the bridge sites the clank and grind of the concrete mixers, the upshoot and dumping tip of the hoist buckets, and the clattering descent of the concrete into the forms played the industrial quick-step. In the hill cuttings the intermittent clamor of steam-shovels and the strident exhausts of locomotives dragging the spoil to the fills made deafening discords. In the short tunnel under Dead Man’s Ridge the hard-rock men timed their forenoon blasts accurately to make a thunderous crash of dynamite salute the upcoming of the light engine and way-car bearing President Grillage and his chief engineer.
So far as any routine-changing result was concerned,the inspection trip was conspicuously barren. It was rather a triumphal progress for the new chief. At each stopping-place the big boss climbed down dutifully from the way-car to look on and listen while David explained some new method of cost-cutting, and there was always the word of gruff approval, coupled with the suggestion that they move along.
“I’m taking all your little economies and short-cuttings for granted, David,” said the tamed tyrant, as the way-car special shot around the curves of approach to the main tunnel. “I got it pretty straight from Coulee du Sac that you were up in all the late kinks in money-saving and systematizing. You are doing good work, and I’m right proud of you.”
Again David’s heart warmed to the big man who had been so grossly misrepresented as a hard boss. Thus far, there had been no single word of criticism; nothing but hearty appreciation and praise. David knew well enough that his work couldn’t be beyond criticism; that to a master workman as experienced as Eben Grillage the shortcomings must surely be apparent. Yet there had been nothing said that would lead him to believe that the contractor-king was making anything but the most perfunctory duty trip over the job.
At the tunnel portal they found Plegg, who was apparently waiting for them. There was a halt of a few minutes while the first assistant, in obedience to a signal which David was not permitted to see, held his chief to ask some routine question about a proposed re-sloping of the approach cutting. Eben Grillage walked on into the tunnel alone. The great black bore was lighted only by a string of inadequate electric bulbs hung at hundred-foot intervals, and the massive figure of the president was soon lost to view in the depths. David Vallory answered Plegg’s queries impatiently, the more so because they seemed to be peculiarly trivial and ill-timed. It was something less than respectful to allow the president to go stumbling into the tunnel unattended.
When they finally overtook him the big boss had penetrated to the working heading, and was looking on quietly while the drillers and their helpers removed the drill-columns and prepared for a blast. Again there were words commendatory of the discipline and the industrial systematizing.
“Fine!” was Eben Grillage’s comment, when David came up with Plegg at his elbow. “I’ll be losing you two fellows to the efficiency squad one of these fine days; that’s a fact.” Then to the black-eyed, black-mustached little French-Canadianwho had taken Altman’s place: “Hello, Regnier! So they’ve got you on the mole job, now, have they?”
Regnier came across to join the onlooking group.
“Eet is moz’ in’ospitable, but in five minute ze men will fire ze blast,” he announced. “Me, I amdésoléto ’ave to h’ask you zhentlemen to go h’out,mais——”
“But we’d better go out if we don’t want to get our necks stretched, eh?” laughed the visiting overlord. “That’s all right, Regnier; we’ve seen all we need to, I guess.” And the retreat was made so hurriedly that David had no chance to inspect the dangerous spot in the roof, or to call the president’s attention to it, as he had fully intended doing.
These were the commonplace incidents of the day of inspections, and there were no other kind. But when the day was ended, and David Vallory was once more finding a reward for duty done in an ecstatic hour with Virginia on the Inn porch, it is conceivable that the joy-nerve might have lost some of its thrills if he could have been endowed with the gift of double personality, enabling him to see and hear what was transpiring coincidently in the Grillage private Pullman at the foot of theridge. In the open central compartment of the car Plegg was once more under fire, and the special target of the bombardment was his estimate of the bad roof in tunnel heading Number One.
“You are losing your sand, Plegg, the same as young Altman did,” Grillage was asserting bluntly. “I took the chance you made for me this morning and had a good look at that ‘fault’ while you were holding Vallory at the portal. In spite of your test-borings, and all that you’ve had to say about it, I say the roof will stay up while we’re driving. If the railroad company wants to concrete it after we’re through, that’s a horse of another color. We’re not hunting for a chance to throw good money away.”
“I know,” said Plegg, almost humbly.
“How did you manage to get Altman out and Regnier in?”
“The change was made to-day and Vallory authorized it. Altman went over my head last night and took his complaint to Vallory, though I had warned him not to. A little later Vallory fell upon me and wanted to know why I hadn’t ordered the weak spot timbered. I smoothed it over as well as I could; gave him a hint of the use Lushing might make of it if we should advertise the weak spot by timbering it. He saw thepoint after a while and told me to shift Altman and put Regnier in. But I had to lie to him to bring it about.”
“Bosh! That roof isn’t coming down. You’ve been letting Altman’s nerves put one across on yours!”
It was just here that the first assistant took his courage in both hands.
“I know what I know; and you know it, as well, Mr. Grillage,” he said. “The test drillings showed up the conditions plainly enough, as I wrote you at the time. That entire crevice is filled with loose material that is certain to come down, sooner or later. Why not go to the railroad people frankly, show them what we’re up against, and try to persuade them to let us concrete that break on force account, with the cost of doing it added to our estimate?”
Eben Grillage’s answer to this was brutally direct.
“I’m running the business end of this company’s affairs, Plegg, and when I want your help I’ll call on you. But since you’ve gone this far, I’ll tell you a thing or two. Lushing hasn’t been idle since he climbed over the fence into the railroad pasture. He’s been building prejudice against us to beat the band. If we’d make the break yousuggest, I wouldn’t put it beyond him to claim that we’d shaken that roof up purposely with dynamite to get an excuse to run a force account job in on them. Such things have been done, on other jobs, and I shouldn’t wonder if Lushing had helped do some of ’em. No; our safe play is to let sleeping dogs lie.”
“But if somebody should take the trouble to wake this particular dog?” Plegg put in quietly.
“Put Lushing on?” queried the big man at the desk.
“Yes.”
“Who would do it?”
“The bad roof is an open secret. The men in the tunnel shifts all know about it.”
“But none of our men will go to Lushing. They hate him too well.”
“There is one other man who knows about it, too.”
“Who is that?”
“Black Jack Dargin.”
“Huh! How did he find out?”
“That door is pretty wide open, isn’t it? A good many of the hard-rock men blow their money in Dargin’s dives.”
“Are you sure he knows?”
“Yes, quite sure.”
“He’d sell the tip to Lushing?”
Plegg shook his head. “No, I don’t believe he’d sell it. But he might give it.”
“Spit it all out—don’t beat around the bush, Plegg! What’s the inside of the deal? You know more than you’re willing to tell, and that isn’t a safe play for you to make at me!”
Plegg ignored the implication and the threat and answered only the direct question.
“I don’t know the inside of the deal. But one man’s guess is as good as another’s. Lushing goes all the gaits in Powder Can; he did it while he was with us, and he does it now, when he’s here. I’ve thought, more than once, that he might have some sort of a stand-in with Dargin. As the matter stands now, Dargin can give us away any time he feels like it.”
As was his habit when he was putting his back to the wall in any fight, Eben Grillage caught up the paper-knife from his desk and began to test the edge of it with a spatulate thumb.
“I’m beginning to get at the inwards of this thing,” he said slowly. “David was saying something last night about wanting to clean out the Powder Can messes. Dargin is going to hold this tunnel business as a club. Vallory mustn’t meddlewith the nuisances; you must see to it that he doesn’t.”
“Vallory doesn’t take ‘seeing to’ very submissively.”
“That’s all right; you keep him from meddling with Dargin’s affairs.”
“You won’t consider my suggestion about making a clean breast of the tunnel situation to Mr. Ford? As I’ve said, I am firmly convinced that the stuff in the crevice will come down, sooner or later. If it slides while we are still driving the heading, no man who happens to be behind it will get out alive.”
“I don’t want your suggestion—or your convictions either, for that matter.”
“Very well. It is your risk and you see fit to take it. I have nothing more to say.”
“Never mind the risk. Have you stopped the calamity talk among the men?”
“For the time being, yes. I raised the pay of the shift bosses, and told them what it was for. That is all in the game, and I’m crooked enough by this time not to mind an additional bit of bribery. But there is one thing that I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again: it’s a damned shame to hoodwink a fine young fellow like Vallory the way I’ve been doing ever since he came on the job. Hehas no idea that we are not playing square with the railroad people; none whatever. And it’s just as I told you last night; if a smash should come, it will hit him harder than it will anybody else.”
“We’ll take care of all the smashes,” growled the tyrant, who was no longer tame. “All you have to do is to keep your mouth shut and go on sawing wood. You know very well why I want Vallory kept in the dark; or at least, you know the business reason, anyway. He is valuable on this job only so long as heiskept in the dark. You are the man to do it, Plegg, and you’ve got it to do.”
Plegg’s thin lips curled in a dog-like grimace.
“If I don’t do it, you’ll revive that old criminal charge against me on the Falling Water dam and get me jugged—the charge that made me the scapegoat for the use of rotten cement when you and your man Homer were the responsible people,” he said bitterly. “I know perfectly well where I stand with you—and with the courts—Mr. Grillage. But there are limits. One of these days I may decide to tell you to go to hell—and take whatever may be coming to me. Vallory trusts me and I am abusing his confidence every day and resorting to all kinds of shifts to keep him from finding out the thousand-and-onecrooked things we’re doing to beat the specifications on this job. You say I know the business reason why he was sent out here, but I don’t. Why you wanted to put a clean young fellow like David Vallory in charge of this job is beyond me.”
“You’re duller than usual to-night, Plegg, and that’s needless,” was the tyrant’s unfeeling retort. “The chief reason is that David has put some capital into this thing. President Ford knows Adam Vallory, and the Vallory connections generally. We’re capitalizing that knowledge. But that’s a side issue. Coming back to this tunnel business: we’re into it and we’ve got to go through with it. The secret of that ‘rotten spot,’ as you insist upon calling it, must be kept quiet so far as the railroad people are concerned. Jack Dargin must keep it, too, if you have to go and buy him outright. Lushing will be out here in a few days, loaded for bear. He has given it out cold that he is going to do us up, and he wouldn’t ask for any better chance than this tunnel roof tempest in a teapot would give him. You may go now; that will be all for to-night.”
It was at this precise moment, when Plegg was leaving the private Pullman in the construction yard, that David Vallory was asking the daughter of profitable contracts a pointed question.
“Is there ever such a thing as a middle course between absolute right and absolute wrong, Vinnie?”
“What a question!” she laughed. “Is that what you’ve been thinking about all this time that you’ve been letting me do the talking?”
“But I’d like to know,” he persisted.
“I imagine you have as much common sense, and rather more conscience, than most men, David. Why do you ask me?”
“Because I know you are honest, and altogether fearless.”
“So are you,” she returned quickly.
“No. I was once, I think; but, somehow, things are changing for me. The old anchorages are slipping away, and I can’t seem to find any new ones. For example: I did a thing last night which seems perfectly justifiable on one side, and almost criminal on the other. I’ve been trying all day to make up my mind as to whether I ought to pat myself on the back, or go to jail.”
“If you should tell me what you did, perhaps I might be able to help your common sense, or your conscience, or whatever it is that is involved,” she suggested.
David glanced at his watch. The hour waslate, and there were but few of the Inn guests remaining on the porches.
“I’m keeping you up,” he said shortly. “Some day, perhaps, I’ll take the lid off and let you see the tangle inside of me; but it’s too late to begin on as big a job as that to-night. Are you going to let me show you over the plant to-morrow?”
“What else is there for me to do in this wilderness of a place?” she asked in mock despair. “I shall most probably tag you around like a meddlesome little boy until you’ll be glad to put me on the train and send me home.”
David was still holding the hand of leave-taking. “If you don’t go home until I send you, you’ll stay here a long time,” he said happily. And then he went his way, forgetting, in this newest prospect of joy, the troublesome underthought which had been growing, like an ominous threat, around the incident of the talk with Altman, and its outcome.