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-one crooked 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.