David Vallory

“ Through all this, David Vallory lived as one in [375] hideous dream. But when the flare of another of the precious matches, a tiny flame that was scarcely visible in its brief and futile struggle with the heavy air, showed him that a second night was far advanced, he drew Virginia away to the heading and made her lie down on the coat-covered pallet, which he had remade, propping it as high as he could on the broken stone to escape the lower stratum of air. ”

“ You won’t take it amiss if the old daddy has his notions, too, will you? Just the same, we’re chums, little girl, and we won’t fight about a little thing like that. I’ll see to it that David doesn’t have to stick his fingers into [126] the tar-barrel, if that’s what you want. Now run along to bed.”
The upshot of this heart-to-heart talk between the father and daughter had been a letter to Silas Plegg, which followed David Vallory so promptly in his westward flight as to be in the first assistant’s hands when he made his introductory round over the big job with the new chief. ”

“ With Adam Vallory’s boy in charge for us at Powder Gap, Ford may rest easier, and maybe he’ll make it a little easier for us. And, by giving David his boost, I’m fixing it so you won’t have to marry a poor man.”
“I’m not talking about marrying; I’m talking about the soul of a man,” was the quick retort. “It is in your hands to keep David Vallory true to his ideals, or to make him like other men who have one conscience for their personal relations and another for business. David is more loyal to you than your own son would be, if you had one ”

“ To the astonishment of the reticent, self-contained first assistant, David Vallory lifted his clenched hands to the stars and swore savagely. But as Plegg had respected his chief’s former silence, so now he respected the wrathful outburst. Farther along, when they were crossing the tracks in the material yard, David offered niggard explanation.
“I knew the woman, back home, Plegg; I grew [139] up with her. If ever a man needed killing, Tom Judson is that man.” ”

“ For a moment the air of the small bunk shack became stifling and David Vallory got up and went to stand in the doorway. When he turned back to Shubrick it was to say: “Then the whole thing was a frame-up, was it?—to enable us to work off a cheaper grade of Portland in a place where it couldn’t show up?”
“Of course it was. We have to play even when we can.” ”

“ 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’ll [349] marry a man. ”

“ David Vallory showed the letter to Grimsby, and was rewarded by the hard-featured chief’s nearest approach to a smile.
“Now for the needful bit of juggling,” was Grimsby’s comment. “The railroad people have us by the neck because we have to ship everything in over their line. But we’ll fool ’em, Vallory. Luckily, the cement mill isn’t on their line. We’ll send the condemned shipment out to-night, as if we were returning it to the mill. ”

“ David Vallory placed a chair for himself at the desk end and felt mechanically for his pipe and tobacco. Disaster was plainly in the air and he prepared himself to meet it.
“When you’re ready, Dad,” he said.
Adam Vallory sank into his chair. There was a bit of string on the desk and he picked it up and began aimlessly to untie the knots in it.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come; I didn’t know whether you could come. It isn’t fair to take you away from your work ”

“ David was beginning; but Lushing cut him off with a short laugh.
“I know; some of them have told you that I [260] have a personal quarrel with Grillage, and perhaps some others have hinted that I wanted to marry into the company and got kicked out for my impudence. We’ll let that go. What was, is ancient history, and we’re dealing with the here and now. Your company is as crooked as a dog’s hind leg, and if you don’t know it, you ought to. Its days on this job are numbered.”
“Threats are the cheapest things in the world,” said David. ”

“ During his nine months’ isolation at Coulee du Sac, David had met the Vallory benefactor only a few times; and the benefactor’s daughter not at all. For the lack of the social opportunity he was grateful rather than sorry. In the light of the Judith Fallon tragedy he was beginning to question his right to make love to Virginia Grillage, even if the magic circle could be broken into; or if not to question the right, to realize the immense and humiliating barrier which must always exist between a man with a tragedy in his past and a woman to whom that past should be as a pane of glass. ”

“ Notwithstanding these indications, it was Lucille Vallory who first put the impending threat into words, confiding in Oswald one evening when Virginia Grillage had gone for a stroll along the ridge accompanied by her two shadows.
“What is it, Herbert?” the blind girl asked; “what is happening to us all?”
“What should be happening?” he evaded. “Aren’t you enjoying yourself?”
“You know what I mean,” she insisted. “Nothing is the same any more; I can feel it. You are troubled about something, and so is Virginia. No, it isn’t anything that either of you say; it’s just how you feel inside. ”

“ Again David said, “I don’t care,” and Plegg went on calmly. “If that is the play, we’ll have to take measures accordingly. You mustn’t run around on the job unless I’m with you. If you will pardon me for saying it, you are not quite quick enough on the draw, as yet; and you haven’t learned to hold the other fellow’s eye while you’re doing it. That is about all the difference there is between living and dying when it comes to a show-down, you know.”
They had boarded the bunk car and were preparing to turn in. David looked up from the boot-unlacing and his eyes were bloodshot. ”

“ 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 [185] the spalling roof trouble him. ”

“ What under heaven were you doing in here?”
“I came to tell you,” she said simply. “Where are the men?”
“They are all down at the slide, and Regnier is with them. They are trying to find out how effectually we are buried. You are sure you’re not hurt?”
“A little bruised and shaken up, of course, but that is nothing. Will the men be able to dig us out?”
With any other woman he knew as the questioner, David Vallory might have temporized. But he knew Virginia Grillage’s quality and the steel-true fineness of it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 business [244] fight 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. ”

“ Then he dragged out the biscuit-like watch. “We’ve got barely fifteen minutes, young man. You go and get Judson, the scrapers-and-dump-car man, on the ’phone, while I do a bit of figuring. Jump for it!”
David Vallory obeyed blindly, with his brain in a whirl. It took several of the hastening minutes to locate Judson at his home in the northern suburb, and when the telephone connection was finally made, the hotel porter was calling the Chicago train and Eben Grillage was at the desk, paying [38] his bill and growling out orders about his hand-baggage. ”

“ On the Grillage pay-roll he appeared as Simeon Backus, serving on the day shift as a muck shoveler in the eastern heading of the great tunnel. He sat in one of the upholstered chairs with a deep seat, and his deformities—the lopped shoulder and arms much too long for his body—were accentuated. His face, with its lines half obliterated by a ragged beard, lacked none of the villainous characteristics of the ingrained criminal; beady eyes that would look at nothing steadily, a retreating chin, a thin-lipped, acrid mouth. ”

“ 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. [180] 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. ”

“ When a man of your size comes at me, I shoot first and shoot quick. I’m out to get your crooked company and the man who owns it. You say you’ll fight for him, and that puts you on the black list. I’m fair enough to give you a tip, and I’ve given it to you. If you don’t get off this job quick and fade away, you’ll wake up some fine morning to find yourself dead.”
What little calm judgment David Vallory still retained was telling him to go away; that there was nothing to be gained by staying and listening to Lushing’s threats. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I was to tell you to report to him at the car down in the railroad yard if I saw you first. I’m afraid I haven’t been a very obedient call-boy.”
David got out of his chair reluctantly.
“I’m trying to realize that you are sending me away—and that just as we were beginning to get down to the real heart of things. May I come back after your father is through with me? It is so soul-satisfying not to have to divide time with half a dozen other men.”
“The ‘other men,’ as you call them, will probably be here after a while; or some of them, at least,” she laughed. ”

“ Dargin is the head and front of the lawlessness himself!”
“’Tis so; but that makes no difference. You can’t tell what’s in the heart of a man, Davie—and I know Jack Dargin; that side of him that not you, nor any one else knows. He’d fight you; maybe he’d kill you. But he’d respect you the more.”
There was a grim humor in the paradox, but David Vallory was not in the mood to appreciate it.
“He’ll be gunning for me; and so will Lushing. But I don’t care; I’ll fight the whole outfit, if I [274] have to. ”

“ Her eyes fell. “I grew up with him—in Middleboro.”
Plegg smiled. It was easier now.
“I’m not going to ask you why you refused to talk with him the other night; we’ll let that go. I’m going to leave this thing with you, Judith. David Vallory stands to get a knife in the back. Jim Lushing will do the stabbing, but it will be [202] Dargin who will hand him the knife. Your woman’s heart will tell you what to do, and how to do it.” ”

“ 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 with [242] the 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. ”

“ Eben Grillage next, you ask him plainly what he wants you to do about this Powder Can business. If he tells you to clean it up, maybe our people can be induced to help.” Then, as if some secret spring had been touched, the full-moon face lightened up and the gusty joviality slipped into place again: “But, hah! that’s enough of these disagreeable topics. You’re my guest, Mr. Vallory: you’ll stop and take a noon bite with me, won’t you? I’ve, hah! got a fairly good cook on the car.” ”

“ Also, I realize that you have never, by any chance, written a line or happened to come to Chicago at any time when I’ve been at home. Or perhaps you’ve been here and didn’t think it worth while to let me know.”
“Nothing like it,” said David, matching her mood. “I haven’t been in the city since your father sent me to Coulee du Sac, unless you count the car-changing times when I went home at Christmas. You don’t realize that I have become a workingman since I left the Government service. I have, and I’ve had a laudable ambition to stick to the job and earn my wages honestly.” ”