“I shouldn’t worry, if I were you,” said the big man, with the lenient indulgence of a master for a neophyte. “There’s a good old saying, David, that you ought always to remember: Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you. I’ve had a look at that tunnel roof, myself. You needn’t lose any sleep over it.”
“It looks a bit bad to me,” David made bold to say. “And now Regnier tells me that the men have gone from complaining to making threats.”
“Threats?—what kind of threats?”
“They say if we don’t timber, or shoot the bad roof down, they’ll strike on us; which will be giving open notice to the railroad people that there is something wrong.”
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. As to the threat; Lushing and his inspectors know—or ought to know—all that anybody can tell them about that ‘fault’. It’s their business to find out.”
David felt that he was losing ground, but he tried once more.
“It has always seemed better to me to be safe than sorry,” he ventured; and he was going on to make the same suggestion that Plegg had made, about taking the matter up with the railroad company for a new contract, when the exponent of modern business success broke in.
“‘Safety first’ is a good idea, but it has been run into the ground, like a lot of other good things, David. You were telling me that your college vacations were spent working for the railroads, and there you would naturally get the safety idea rubbed into you good and hard. I’ve seen railroad engineers spend thousands of dollars—of other people’s money—on precautions that will never be tested while the world stands. When you are working for your own pocketbook it’s different.”
“Yet I suppose we ought not to take too many chances,” David constrained himself to say.