“He would if it were properly backed up; if I should tell him, for example, that if I had the job to do over, I’d do it with a gun.”
“Mercy me! This is the ‘other David’ with a vengeance! Do you really mean it?”
“Why shouldn’t I mean it? If the argument of force is the only one that would appeal to him——”
“But you’d be killed! I’ve heard the most awful stories of this man. He wouldn’t give you the slightest chance. Promise me that you won’t do any such recklessly foolish thing!”
“I shan’t, if you don’t want me to; though it’s much the simpler way to go about it. The other way is to write a personal letter to President Ford of the railroad company. I don’t know him, but my father does, and he is a good man—a clean man. I am practically certain that if he knew the conditions he’d use the railroad company’s power to clean up the camp—the power given it by the land leases. But that is enough about the job and me and my little insanities. I must hike back down the hill to my blankets. I know you’d be yawning if you were not too polite.”
She got up to walk with him to the porch steps, and at the good-night moment he said: “Where are you going to let me take you to-morrow?”
“Before I pick the place I’m going to ask you once more why you have been so persistently refusing to take me to the big tunnel. Don’t you know that I simply adore tunnels?”
Now David had his own good reasons for not having taken Eben Grillage’s quick-witted daughter into the big bore where Regnier was driving his hard-rock crews. Day by day the dangerous ‘fault’ was scattering its warnings in chips and spallings of fresh rock thrown down from the disintegrating roof—evidences which Regnier was careful to remove before they should attract the attention of the railroad inspectors.
“A tunnel in process of construction isn’t a good place in which to entertain inquisitive little girls,” David evaded. “And this particular tunnel is wet and mucky.”
“That isn’t the reason why you haven’t taken me there,” she asserted calmly.