He told a half-truth merely because no plausible or practicable falsehood suggested itself at the moment.
“It is a bit dangerous—in one place.”
“But if it is dangerous for me it is dangerous for the workmen. Why don’t you timber the bad place?”
He laughed. “What do you know about timbering tunnels?”
“You forget that I’ve been eating the bread of the construction camps all my life.”
“That’s so; I had forgotten.” In their excursions together over the job it had given him a glow of superecstasy to find that she was familiar with many of the details of her father’s trade—and his own; details which would have been purest Greek to most women. Silas Plegg’s commendation was amply borne out by the fact; she was, indeed, “a pretty good little engineer, herself.” None the less his lips were sealed in the matter of tunnel-timbering—or the lack of it. He could not tell her that, for the sake of her father’s profit account, the weak roof must not be timbered. Hence, he temporized.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have called it dangerous; it isn’t so bad as you may be imagining. Timbering is an obstruction to the work, and we always get along without it if we can.” Then, resolute to shelve the subject so high that it couldn’t be reached again: “What has become of your father? I haven’t seen him for two or three days.”
“He is down at the car to-night. But he hasn’t been well.”
“Not well? I can’t think of him as not being well. He always looks to me as if he’d never known what it was to be sick.”
“He hasn’t known very often, and for that reason he never takes any care of himself. But something over a year ago he scared me silly; he had a touch of apoplexy. The doctors told me, but they wouldn’t tell him. He got well in almost no time, but since, I’ve been trying to make him take things easy. That was one reason why I insisted on coming out here with him this summer.”