David Vallory

IF David Vallory were reluctant to leave the hotel and make his way down the wooded ridge to the gridironing of tracks in the railroad yard, it was only because his duty was shortening the evening with Virginia. Without being unduly puffed up with a sense of his own efficiency, he felt sure that his work would show for itself and that there was no reason why he should hesitate to spread the results before the president.

Not knowing where Mr. Grillage’s car had been placed, it took him some few minutes to find it in the crowded material yard, which was not too well lighted by the widely spaced masthead electrics. When he did find it, on the single unobstructed spur-track, the nearest electric showed him the figure of a man dropping from the car step to become quickly lost in the shadows of the surrounding material trains. In the brief glimpse David recognized the alert poise and swinging stride of his first assistant; but since neither jealousy nor suspicion had any part in the Vallory make-up, the recognition evoked no wondering query as to why Plegg had anticipated him in calling upon Eben Grillage.

A moment later the porter had admitted him and was standing aside to let him pass through the vestibule to the open compartment in the rear of the luxurious car. At the heavy, glass-topped desk he found the contractor magnate sitting alone, with the inevitable black and shapeless cigar clamped between his teeth.

“Hello, David—come in!” was the brusque greeting; and then with a grim chuckle: “By George! I was beginning to think you were lost out completely.”

“I was up at the tunnel when your train got in,” David explained, judiciously slurring over the interval which had elapsed since the early-evening hour of the arrival.

“And when you crawled out of the tunnel you found your way to the hotel and promptly forgot all about the old duffer who has to dig down into his jeans for the pay-roll money,” laughed the man-driver in jovial humor. “It’s all right, my boy; I was young once, myself. How goes the job?”

“I think you will find it moving along all right,” David ventured. Then he said a good word for the first assistant. “Plegg had things in fine shape when I took hold; good organization, good distribution, and no friction. All that was needed was a little pace-setting.”

“And you’ve been setting the pace, eh? How about the railroad inspectors?—are they giving you much trouble?”

“All we need, though as a general thing they don’t say much to me personally; they go to Plegg. One of them—Strayer—took me into his confidence a bit to-day. He professes to believe that we are deliberately burking the railroad company and threw out a hint to the effect that the railroad Executive Board might take some action.”

“Did you get back at him?”

“I did; there hasn’t been a single instance where we’ve failed to make good when they have called us down, and I told him so. Strayer is acting chief of the inspection staff in Lushing’s absence. I haven’t seen Lushing yet. They tell me he has gone East.”

“I can add something to that,” said Lushing’s former employer, with a sour smile. “He went to New York to appear before the Executive Board of his railroad—at his own request. We’ll hear from him a little later.”

“I suppose he’s trying to make more trouble for us,” said David.

“He is. He is trying to force legal proceedings to get our contract canceled. He threatened to do that when we dropped him. He’s a vindictive cuss, if ever there was one.”

David Vallory shook his head in sympathetic deprecation. He was too loyal himself to be able to understand how a man, even if he were enraged, could turn upon the hand that had fed him.

“He can’t do anything like that,” he asserted confidently. “I’ve specialized a good bit in the law of contracts—took it as a part of my college course. As I see it, the railroad company has absolutely no grounds whatever for cancellation. As I’ve said, when Lushing’s inspectors bring up a specific charge, we make good, and that’s the end of it.”

Since being in love with a man’s daughter is the poorest possible preliminary to any accurate reading of face signs when the subject chances to be the father of the daughter, the slow drooping of an eyelid on the part of the big man in the desk chair opposite was quite thrown away upon David Vallory.

“Of course,” agreed the contractor-king, with a suppressed chuckle which he turned into a forced clearing of his throat; “we’re up to all the little methods of pacifying the enemy, eh, David?” And then: “I’ve just had Plegg here, making him tell tales out of school. Naturally, he didn’t want to say much about his chief, but you’ve got his vote, all right. He tells me you’ve made good with the force, and that you’re a home-grown miracle in the pace-setting. That is what I wanted to hear; but it is also what I expected to hear.”

“More kindness,” said the beneficiary of the kindness, with a comforting glow warming him. “Before I went to Coulee du Sac I used to hear that you were a hard man to work for. I shall feel like scrapping with the next man who says anything like that to me.”

“You go right on believing that I’m a hard man,” said Eben Grillage, with a ferocious twinkle of the shrewd eyes; “it’s safer. Now there’s another little thing, while I think of it: Plegg was telling me something about these dives and speak-easys over in Powder Can; said you’d got stirred up about ’em and wanted to give ’em the high kick. You take a word of advice from me, David, and let ’em alone. After you’ve handled grade laborers and hard-rock men as long as I have, you’ll realize that they’re bound to have their fling after pay-day. If you were an angel from heaven you couldn’t stop it. And you’ll only get your hands muddy if you try.”

“But it’s such a tremendous drawback to the work!” David protested, feeling, in his inmost recesses, that this argument, rather than the moral, would be more likely to appeal to Eben Grillage.

“That’s one of the things you have to figure on,” was the man-driver’s reply. “Pad your gangs with a few extras to make up for the pay-day absentees. Labor’s fairly plentiful just now, and in the contracting business you’ll find that man-muscle is about the cheapest material you handle. But that’s enough about business. What do you hear from your father?”

“Mighty good news, just now. He hasn’t been very well this spring, so I have persuaded him to come out here for a while. I shall be looking for him and my sister next week.”

“That’s the talk!” exclaimed the Vallory benefactor. “I’ll make him go trout-fishing with me. And that drags us back to the business matter again. I’m not out here to stand over you and tell you what to do on the job, David; I’ve told Vinnie it’s my vacation—something that I haven’t had for so long that I’ve forgotten what it looks like. I’ll make a little round of the work with you to-morrow, just to let the outfit see that you’ve got the boss on your side, and after that you can count me out. Vinnie probably won’t let you off so easily, but you can settle that with her.”

With this program for a sort of stirrup-cup, David Vallory left the president’s car with the warm glow at his heart bursting into a generous flame. In an age in which filial piety has come to be more or less regarded as a hold-over from an emotional elder generation, he found himself inclining toward the savior of the good name of the Vallorys with an affection akin to that which he felt for the father who had begotten him. That the industrial world held Eben Grillage as a hard master, and the world of business looked a trifle askance at his huge fortune and the manner of its acquiring, were matters subsidiary to the main question. Under the gruff exterior, the grasping exterior, if his detractors would have it so, David told himself there dwelt a giant of generosity and loving-kindness; a man whose very crudities and bluntnesses were lovable; a man for whom his grateful beneficiaries could never go too far, so long as the saving spark of gratitude remained alive in the human breast.

It was with these exalted emotions stirring him that he swung up to the step of his bunk car. Since the car was lighted, he expected to find Silas Plegg at work on his customary evening task of checking the books of field-notes. But the only occupant of the car proved to be young Altman, who was driving the rock-blasting in the eastern heading of the great tunnel; a sober-minded young mining engineer only a year out of college, but yet with the lines of responsibility already graving themselves visibly in his boyish face.

“I’m disobeying orders, Mr. Vallory,” he began. “Plegg tells us we mustn’t bother you with our complaints, but in justice to my men I’ve got to break over this one time. You know that weak spot in the tunnel roof?—the one I showed you the first time you were in?”

David nodded. The “weak spot” was a section of the big bore which had been driven through a prehistoric gash in the granite; a huge vertical crack which had been filled with softer rock in some later earth upheaval. “What about it?” he asked.

“It’s getting my goat. It is growing worse every day, and I’m afraid it will come down on us. Since we’re working three shifts, with a gang in the heading all the time, you know what a cave-in would mean; the shift that happened to be caught behind it would die to the last man before it could be dug out. There’s enough of that slippery marl hanging up in the ‘fault’ to bury an army, and, sooner or later, it’s going to come down. But I can’t make Plegg see it that way at all. He says I’ve got too many nerves.”

“You think the weak spot ought to be timbered?”

“I know it ought; and the men think so, too. There has been a good bit of grumbling and some little strike talk among them, and I can’t blame them. They say the company has no right to ask them to take their lives in their hands for the sake of saving a few dollars’ worth of timbers. It was my shift off this afternoon, but if I had known you were going to be up there, I should have stayed and asked you to take another look at the roof for yourself.”

“I’ll go up to-morrow,” was David’s prompt offer. “We mustn’t take chances on the lives of your men. At the same time, it doesn’t pay to let a thing of that kind get on your nerves, Fred. The responsibility is up to Plegg and me, and we’ll take care of it. Now you’d better hike back to the bunk shack and catch up on your sleep.”

It was less than a quarter of an hour after Altman had gone when Silas Plegg came in and found David Vallory preparing to go to bed.

“About that weak place in the tunnel roof in heading Number One,” said David, pausing with one lace-boot off. “Have you examined it lately?”

“I’ve been keeping an eye on it ever since we drove through it,” was the first assistant’s answer. Then: “Has Altman been worrying you about it?”

“He was here a few minutes ago. He seems to think it’s dangerous, and says his men are protesting.”

“Altman is a fine young fellow, and an expert in the rock-blasting, but he is a little inclined to be nervous,” Plegg threw in. “That sort of thing is always contagious, and Altman’s personal scare has been spreading itself. That roof stood up while we were driving through the fault, and I guess it will continue to stand.”

“If there is any doubt about it, it ought to be timbered,” was David’s decision. “I’m looking to you, Plegg, for the carrying out of these routine details.”

“We can’t afford to timber it,” said Plegg, shortly.

“Why not? The cost would be nothing compared with what we’d lose in a strike of the hard-rock men.”

“I’ll guarantee the men won’t strike. And as for the cost of the timbering; have you considered what it would mean to us if we should call the attention of the railroad inspectors to that bad spot by propping it up?”

“Do you mean to say that the railroad engineers, and Lushing among them, don’t know about that ‘fault’?”

“We’re hoping they don’t,” said Plegg, with the sardonic smile wrinkling slowly at the corners of his eyes. “It would give Mr. James B. Lushing the one big chance he is looking for. The day in which we haul the first car-load of props into the tunnel will be the day when he’ll fall on us like a thousand of brick. We’ll get a peremptory order from the railroad headquarters to shoot that bad roof down and plug the hole with concrete. That will mean a delay, maybe of weeks, a forfeiture of our time-limit bond for the completion of the job, and a bill of costs for the additional work that will turn the Grillage company’s profit into a loss heavy enough to make the big boss sweat blood.”

David said nothing while he was slowly removing the remaining lace-boot. When he spoke it was to ask a curt question.

“Does Mr. Grillage know about this bad spot in the tunnel.”

“Sure he does. I sent him photographs when we were driving through it. He’s an old hand at the rock-blasting, and he isn’t losing any sleep over the cracked roof—which is cracked chiefly in Altman’s imagination.”

In some vague sense David Vallory felt that he was confronting a crisis and another test of the ideals. Before he realized it the battle was joined between a just regard for human life on one hand, and strict loyalty to Eben Grillage on the other. Should he heed Altman’s warning and order the timbering, regardless of the possible consequences to the Grillage Engineering Company? Or should he take Plegg’s assurances at their face value and discount the fears of an overanxious subordinate?

The daughter of the luxuries had possibly spoken better than she knew in saying that the first downward step in the ethical ladder makes all the others easy. As David Vallory rolled himself into the bunk blankets and turned his face away from the light of the hanging lamp under which Plegg was squaring himself for the nightly task of field-note checking, the decision came.

“Perhaps you are right about Altman’s nerves, Plegg. Suppose you shift him to the quarry work in Dixon’s Cut and put Regnier in the tunnel heading. If I’m any judge of men, Regnier won’t let the spalling roof trouble him. He’ll be too busy trying to break Altman’s record of so many feet advance a day, and that will be some job.”

“That’s better,” said Plegg, bending lower over the checking. But when David’s regular breathing began, as it did almost at the instant of eye-closing, the first assistant straightened up, shaking his head regretfully.

“It’s a damned shame!” he muttered under his breath. And then: “If I were half as loyal to him as he is to Grillage, I’d blow the whole gaff—tell him exactly what he is up against on this crooked job, and at least give him a chance to fight with his eyes open. Maybe I shall, some day—after it’s everlastingly too late.”