XXVCataclysmic
NOTWITHSTANDING his chief’s angry assertion that he did not need safeguarding, Silas Plegg had contrived to keep track of the goings and comings of “the little big boss” on the job, and his vigilance was increased after the near-tragedy in the tunnel. The gossip of the camps made much of the little war which had developed between the Grillage Company’s chief and Lushing, and it was quickly passed from lip to lip that the enmity between the two men had now become actively and vindictively personal; had, in the phrase of the unfettered desert country, reached the stage in which each was “looking” for the other with vengeful intent. In spite of the assertion, often repeated and as often contradicted, that Strayer’s injury was purely the result of an unlucky accident, there were many to speak of it with an eyelid drooped, and to intimate that Lushing would go far to even up the account with David Vallory, an account which carried itslargest debit item in the blow which had disfigured him.
For Plegg there was a small lessening of one of the many stresses when David, on the day after the accident, had modified the order given in the battle night when he had so promptly backslidden into the field of things elemental.
“About keeping that tunnel situation dark, Plegg: I’ve been thinking that some of our men might take me too literally—that possibly you did,” was the way the modifying clause was introduced. “I was pretty savage that night. I told you that Lushing shot at me, but let you infer that he missed. It was a miss, but it wouldn’t have been if my field-note book hadn’t turned the bullet.”
“I saw the hole in your coat afterwards,” said Plegg quietly.
“Yes; the shock stopped the clock for me, and the gambling house people carried me out for dead—thought I was dead. Naturally, when the clock got to running again, I was hot; was still pretty warm when I talked with you at Brady’s. Of course, I didn’t mean to convey the idea that Lushing, or any member of his staff, was to be massacred out of hand.”
“Of course not,” the first assistant agreed,readily enough. “But we are not to let them find out about the ‘fault,’ are we?”
“Not if we can help it without going to extremes. Mr. Grillage will be back before long, and I’m going to put that tunnel-roof question up to him again good and hard. I know what it will mean to us if we have to dig that hollow tooth out and fill it, but just the same, the responsibility is getting too heavy for me, Plegg. It’s got so I wake up in the night to think about it, and that’s bad medicine.”
Plegg offered no comment on this, but he made haste to pass the word to Regnier that guile, and not violence, was henceforth to be used in preserving the secret of the bad roof. Shortly after the word-passing Regnier had a deduction of his own to proffer. It was to be inferred that the secret had finally escaped, through the man Backus, or otherwise, and that Strayer’s accident had been taken as a warning. None of the railroad inspectors were venturing into the tunnel since Strayer had been injured, Regnier reported.
Beyond this, there was a plot of some sort afoot, so Regnier told Plegg. An attempt had been made to bribe one of the portal watchmen posted to keep unauthorized visitors out of the tunnel, and the briber was one of the Powder Candive-keepers—not Dargin, but one of his concessionaries, who was also known as “Black Jack.” The watchman had proved incorruptible, and had reported the attempt to Regnier. His story was that he had been offered a certain sum of money if he would find out when Vallory was to be in the tunnel at any shift-changing time, and would use the working telephone to notify the briber beforehand.
Plegg said nothing of this to his chief, but it made him doubly watchful. Also, it made him fertile in excuses to keep Vallory from making any but strictly unannounced visits to Heading Number One. Time was all the first assistant hoped to gain. It was reported that Mr. Grillage’s private car was on its way back from Red Butte, and there was the slender chance that, with the president on the ground again, something might be done to clear the air and quiet the various gathering menaces.
This was the situation at the close of the day when the private PullmanAtheniacame in and was shunted to its former position on the spur track. At the moment of its arrival David Vallory was making a tour of the lower camps. Plegg was in the construction yard, and he saw Eben Grillage and his fishing companion leavethe car and go up to the Inn together. And after dinner he saw the king of the contractors come back to the car alone. Later still, the first assistant, smoking his pipe on the platform of the office bunk car, saw a woman descending the path from the hotel. Recognizing the big boss’s daughter, Plegg dutifully went across the yard tracks to meet her.
“Thank you, Mr. Plegg,” she said, as he came up. “I imagine I was just about to lose myself. Whereabouts is theAthenia?”
“I’ll show you,” he offered, and he led her around an obstructing material train and over to the spur-track, where he helped her up the steps of the private car. As he was lifting his hat to go away she stopped him to ask a question.
“Do you happen to know where Mr. Vallory is?”
Plegg gave such information as he had, or thought he had: the chief was somewhere down the line at one of the lower camps; or at least he had gone down earlier in the evening and he had not come back to supper. The young woman appeared to be satisfied with the answer, and when the porter had admitted her to her father’s car, Plegg went his way, wondering if anything new had developed. The conclusion was negative.Miss Virginia’s question was natural and casual; one that need have no bearing upon the threatening conditions—doubtless had none. But if he could have been a listener at the door of the office compartment in theAthenia, he would have known better how much was at stake in the matter of keeping in close touch with his chief’s movements.
Miss Virginia found her father planted in his great chair behind the glass-topped table-desk. The fishing absence was responsible for a huge accumulation of mail, and he was slitting the envelopes with a nimble dexterity curiously at variance with his massive bulk and knotty-knuckled, square-fingered hands.
“Hello, little girl; you down here?” he rumbled; and before she could speak: “I got your wire—two days late. What is it?—something that won’t keep until I have read my mail?” Then, with a chuckling laugh: “Which one is it you’re going to spring on me—Wishart, or the ‘belted earl’?”
“Neither,” she replied succinctly. “I have come to talk business.”
“Oho! business, is it? Well, I guess I’m a business man. Go ahead and open up your samples.”
“The reason why I telegraphed you to come back was because you haven’t kept your promise.”
“Which one?” he inquired, with large indulgence.
“The one you made me when you were sending David out here. You promised me that he wasn’t to be spoiled.”
“Oh, that’s it, is it?”—with another of the deep-chested chuckles. “All right; let’s have it: what do you think you’ve found out?”
“You know, well enough,” she returned coldly. “For a time, I think, Mr. Plegg was able to keep the crooked things hidden from David—as you doubtless instructed him to. But of course David soon found out what is being done, and that it is being done by your orders. And now you are about to make a criminal of him. I don’t see how you can ever look his father in the face.”
Eben Grillage wagged his big head sorrowfully.
“You’re all I’ve got in the world, Vinnie, girl, and there’s mighty little I wouldn’t do for you; but it’s terribly hard to live up to your notions, sometimes. You’ve been a business man’s daughter all your life, and yet you haven’t the faintest idea of what business means.”
“I have a very clear idea of what it means tocheat, to lie, to put human life in jeopardy, and to take a clean, straightforward young man like David Vallory and turn him into a potential murderer.”
“Oh, pshaw!” grunted the king of the contractors. “I suppose somebody has been scaring you about that tunnel and the few cracks it has in the roof. Was it David?”
“No, it wasn’t David; I found out about it myself, before you went away. And the ‘few cracks’ have nearly killed one man, already.”
“Strayer, you mean?—I had David’s report of that. Strayer is a pretty good engineer, and he ought to have known better than to pry a rock loose and let it fall on his own head. Vinnie, I’m getting sore about this thing. That tunnel roof will stand up all right if they’ll only quit monkeying with it and let it alone.”
“I’m not here to argue with you about the tunnel as a tunnel,” said the daughter, with a touch of the true Grillage bluntness. “I merely wish to find out if you’re going to try to patch up that broken promise.”
“What in the name of common sense can I do—more than I have done? I wrote Plegg to keep David on the windward side of the little economies we have to make, and I’m sorry if he hasn’tbeen able to do it. I’ll haul Plegg over the coals, if that will make you feel any better.”
“Mr. Plegg doubtless did his best, and it wasn’t good enough. David is a graduate engineer and a grown man. He would be singularly stupid if he could be your chief of construction and not know what was going on right under his eyes. But that is not the point now. Are you, or are you not, going to give David authority to do what he, and Mr. Plegg, and every member of your own engineering staff, know ought to be done to that dangerous place in the tunnel—a thing that is endangering the lives of the men every day? That is what I came to ask.”
It was a rare thing for Eben Grillage to refuse his daughter’s demands, even when they were unreasonable; but the habits of a ruthless life-time were too strong to be set aside, even at the bidding of indulgent fatherly affection.
“You are my daughter, Vinnie, but you are just like other women when you get your head set on anything. If I should let you run my business for me, there wouldn’t be any business left after a little while, and we’d both join the bread line. If you’ve made up your mind that David is the man you want, just say so and I’ll take him off the job and set him up in any kind of business youpick out—if you can pick one that measures up to your Utopian notions of honesty. That’s fair, isn’t it?”
She did not answer the question. There was one more arrow in her quiver and she fitted it to the string and drew the bow.
“The tunnel isn’t the only thing, as you know. James Lushing makes it an open boast that he will break you, and you know best what reasons he may have for thinking such a thing possible. Beyond that, David has met him and they have quarreled—fought. I have been told that Lushing’s first blow will be struck at David, to get him out of the way.”
“Who told you any such thing as that?”
“No matter; I have heard it, and I have no reason to doubt the truth of the report. David is so loyal to you that he is the biggest obstacle in Lushing’s way. Everybody knows that Lushing can command the help of any number of desperate characters in Powder Can. It wouldn’t be beyond him to——”
—“To have David killed off out of the way?” supplied the big man, with another chuckle. “If you go much deeper, you’ll be telling me that David is the man, after all. But don’t you worry. When you marry David Vallory, Vinnie, you’llmarry a man. If he is half the scrapper I take him to be, he’ll be well able to take care of himself in any mix-up with Jim Lushing—or with any of Lushing’s paid blacklegs.”
The special pleader’s eyes grew suddenly weary.
“Then you will do nothing about the tunnel?” she asked patiently.
“Not until I have some better reason than a foolish little girl’s notion—no.”
“Hasn’t David told you what he thinks ought to be done?”
“Oh, yes, of course; the hard-rock men got him rattled, right at the start, and he came to me about it, boy-like.”
“And you told him to let it alone?”
“Sure I did. We are going to lose money enough on this job, as it is.”
The fine persistence was broken at last. The daughter of the luxuries—and the ideals—rose and moved toward the door. As she reached the vestibule exit she turned and gazed at the big man filling the great arm-chair, and there was neither anger nor impatience in her eyes; only a profound depth of shocked disappointment and reproach.
“I never knew youcouldbe so hard and pitiless,” she said slowly. “If this is what moneyand the love of it can do to you——” The swing door of the vestibule yielded under her hand and she went out, leaving the sentence unfinished.
At the car-steps the negro porter had placed his carpeted foot-stool, but Silas Plegg was not there to see the president’s daughter safely across the tracks. It is conceivable that she did not mark the omission. From childhood she had known construction yards and the paraphernalia of the contracting trade, and her father was fond of boasting that she was as self-reliant as any boy.
Picking her way in the gathering dusk around the obstructing cars filled with building material, she came presently to the foot of the path leading up to the Inn. Out of the first clump of scrub pine on the hill trail a woman darted into the path and blocked it. Virginia Grillage stopped short with a little gasp of apprehension. Then she saw who it was.
“You—Judith? were you looking for me?”
“I was. They couldn’t tell me at the hotel, and I was that frightened I thought I’d be choking. Jack Dargin sent me, and the other Jack—Black Jack Runnels, he is—would be killing me if he knew I came. You’ll remember what I was telling you yesterday. David is to be murdered—inthe tunnel some way—I don’t know how. They’re to get him in between the shifts; when the day men have come out and before the night men have gone in. Dargin says there’d be a clock of some kind in a box—he said to tell you that, and you’d understand.”
“But David isn’t at the tunnel; he is at one of the lower camps. Mr. Plegg told me so just a few minutes ago.”
“Maybe he was, but he isn’t now; he went up on an engine not ten minutes ago. It was Simmy Backus’s job to get him there—to ’phone him there was a man hurt in the tunnel. He’d fall for that—David would—and he went. I saw the engine when it passed me, going up. What must we do? ’Tis you that would be loving David, Vinnie Grillage, and that I know well, but you’re not the only one: I—I’d die for him this minute!”
For a moment Virginia Grillage, quick-witted and resourceful as any daughter of Eve since the world began, stood shocked and irresolute, fighting desperately for some shreddings of the capability to act which had suddenly deserted her. Then the lost self-control came back with a bound.
“The telephone!” she gasped. “You run back to the hotel, Judith, and find Bert Oswald—tell him what you’ve told me and he’ll know what todo! While you’re doing that, I’ll try to find a ’phone here in the yards. Run!” and she set the example by flying down the path and dodging around the obstructing cars to reach theAthenia.
To her utter dismay, she found the private car untenanted. The lights were still on, and the recently opened mail lay on the desk, but the big swing-chair was empty. Twice, and again, she called her father, and when there was no answer she caught up the telephone set from the desk and tried to make somebody hear. But the set was dead; the wires connecting it with the working system had not been restrung since theAtheniahad returned from Red Butte.
Next she made frantic and fruitless search for the porter; but the negro, too, had disappeared. Plegg was the alternative now, and she ran breathlessly up the yard to the office bunk car. But this, also, proved to be a hope defeated, or at least deferred. The car was dark when she reached it, and when she tried the door she found it locked. The remaining expedient, the only one that suggested itself, was to run to the Inn railroad station a half-mile distant down the yard, where she knew there was an accessible telephone. It was a lame expedient and she knew it; a thousand things might delay the sending of the messageof warning to the tunnel, and time was priceless. Yet she ran, stumbling over the loosely bedded cross-ties, and praying that she might happen upon Plegg or some other member of the staff who would know what to do and how to do it.
She had scarcely begun this new flight when she saw one of the construction locomotives lumbering toward her on the main track. The quick wit was coming to its own again, and she stopped, stripping off her coat and stepping into the cone of the headlight beam so that she could be seen when she waved her signal. The engine was Callahan’s “mogul,” and she gave a little sob of joy when she recognized the good-natured Irishman who leaned from his cab window to ask what she wanted. Callahan was the driver with whom she had ridden oftenest when David Vallory had been showing her over the job.
“I want you and your engine, Mr. Callahan!” she panted. “Will you take orders from me?”
“Sure I will, Miss Vinnie,” was the quick response; and when the fireman had helped her up to the foot-board: “Where will ye be wanting the ould ’Thirty-six to be taking you?”
“To the tunnel—as fast as ever you can go! It’s—it’s life and death!”
Callahan asked no further questions. Miss Virginia was the big boss’s daughter, and her demands were sufficient law and Gospel for any man on the Grillage Company’s pay-rolls. While the fireman was lifting her to his box, the heavy construction machine went slamming out over the yard switches, shrieking its warning to all and sundry, and the race was begun.
Though the track was new and rough, and the detours around the hill cuttings held curves of hazard, Callahan—“Wild Irish,” they called him on the job—slackened speed for nothing. Onward and upward through the gathering darkness roared the big locomotive, vomiting a trail of sparks to mark its crooked climb. Virginia Grillage tried pitifully hard to plan what she should do when the goal should be reached; but the dominant impulse would have nothing to do with cool-headed plannings. David’s life hung in the balance, and David must be warned. She could get no further than this.
So it came about that when the tunnel portal was reached, and Callahan and his firemen were helping her down from the high cab, common sense and clarity of mind fled away, and she was once more only an incoherent and badly frightened young woman. A gang of workmen waitedat the tunnel mouth; dimly she realized that this was the night shift, preparing to go in when the day men should come out. One glance showed her that there was no member of the engineering staff with them; no one in authority save the burly Cornish drill-boss.
“Mr. Vallory!” she demanded; “where is he?”
The Cornishman knew the president’s daughter by sight. He pointed into the dark depths of the tunnel. “If ye’ll wait just a minute; it’s time for the shift to be coomin’ out, and he’ll be——” but the remainder of the sentence was lost upon the young woman who had darted into the black depths with neither light nor guide, stumbling blindly over the cross-ties of the spoil-track in her flight, and following the lead of the wide-spaced line of electric bulbs into the grim heart of the mountain.
A scant margin of two minutes after his daughter had halted and boarded a construction engine to be whirled away to the tunnel, Eben Grillage, who had been across to the commissary to put in a call for Plegg, returned to his desk in theAtheniaand once more began the reading of his neglected mail. A matter of three-quarters of an hour later, while he was still immersed in his correspondence,the swing-door of the forward corridor flew open as from the impact of a heavy projectile and Silas Plegg staggered into the office compartment. His lips were drawn back and he was shaking like one in an ague fit.
“The roof in Heading Number One!” he jerked out. “It’s down, damn you, do you hear that?—it’s down, and the day shift is behind it!”
Eben Grillage’s heavy face went purple, and for an instant his jaw sagged and he gasped for breath. Then the strong will triumphed for the moment over the failing body and he sprang out of his chair to catch the news-bringer in a grasp that threatened to crush muscle and bone.
“Vallory—where’s David Vallory?” he stormed.
“He’s—he’s in there with the men—and—and that isn’t all: your daughter’s there, too—if she isn’t buried under the slide!”
Slowly the big man’s grasp upon Plegg relaxed and the veins in his forehead swelled to whip-cords. Eben Grillage’s day of reckoning had come. Before the first assistant realized what was happening, the gigantic figure of the contractor-king swayed like a toppling tower and would have fallen with a crash if Plegg had not braced himself and caught it.