“Vinnie, you mean? Sometimes I think so; and then, again, I’m sort of worried. When it comes right down to the jumping-off place, I’m afraid she isn’t going to pick out a sure-enough man. Look at the crowd she runs with! Half of ’em are after my money, and the other half haven’t got brains enough to fry, or sand enough in ’em to keep the wheels from slipping.”
David was far enough beyond the tunnel and all other troubles now to be able to laugh happily. It was reasonably evident that any obstacles which might lie in his way in the sentimental race were not such as might be raised by a purse-proud father, and once again his heart warmed toward the benefactor and foster-father who was so generously overlooking the master-and-man hamperings.
“Virginia is your own daughter, Mr. Grillage; you needn’t be alarmed about her,” he put in loyally.
“I know; but she’s got a raft of high-flown notions about ethical culture—whatever that is—and the brotherhood of man, and ‘tainted money’, and all that—you probably know the whole rigmarole. 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 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. So he spoke again of his father’s coming, and of his hope that the change of scene and climate might prove beneficial.
“We’ll make it beneficial,” declared the big man, with a return to the genially masterful mood; and after a few minutes more of the friendly talk, David took his leave, warming himself once again at the fires of henchman loyalty. Who was he to set up the standards of his own narrow convincements against the wisdom and experience of a man whose success was equalled only by his generosity and princely liberality? And beyond this, had not Eben Grillage as good as said that his consent was already gained if his daughter’s choice should fall upon a man who was not of the great army of idlers?
Other phases of the talk emphasized themselves for the young chief of construction after he had seen the big boss striding sturdily up the steep path toward the ridge-top hotel. In no uncertain sense his father’s benefactor had shown himself willing to be a second father to the son, supplying, from his wider experience of men and things, the lacks of a too-narrow upbringing. In an upflash of the newer partisanship, David could smile at his own compunctions. In a world of shrewd battlings one might easily theorize too much. But deep down under this generalization the new loyalty, born first of worthy gratitude, was digging a channel for itself; the channel leading now to blind fealty. The problem was no longer a question of right and wrong in the abstract. It was resolving itself into a grim determination to hew doggedly to the line—the line being the success, in a financial sense, of the Grillage Engineering Company.
With this determination in the saddle, David Vallory did not return to his bunk car. A locomotive was about to make the run up to the tunnel with a supply of freshly blacksmithed drill-bits, and he boarded it. The night breeze, slipping down from the peaks of the higher range, was like a draft of invigorating wine. The moon had gone down, but the carbide flares and electric arcs illuminating the scene in the huge cuttings made the men and machines stand out in harsh relief. Above the clatter of the locomotive the rapid, intermittent volley-fire of the steam-shovels rose like the snortings of strange monsters; and against the inky background of the western mountain a single electric star marked the mouth of the tunnel.
At the portal David dropped from the step of the engine and made his way, unaccompanied, into the heart of the mountain. The thread of incandescent bulbs starred the blackness, each illuminating its little circle of the underworld. The distant clamor of the drills ceased shortly after David reached the spot where the threatening roof was sprinkling its daily warnings. Posturing solely as the cool-headed engineer and technician, he would have decided at once that the danger signals were growing more portentous—did so decide in the inner depths of him. The overhead rock had an appearance not unlike that of a slaking lime bed, checked and crisscrossed in every direction with fine seams and cracks.
While he was still examining the roof and telling himself that this was only one of the many chances that had to be taken in the battle for success, a man came out of the half-lighted darkness of the farther depths and spoke to him. It was Silas Plegg.