“Damn your grannying!” he flared out savagely. “When I need a wet nurse I’ll advertise for one!”
A few seconds later he looked up again, to find Plegg chuckling softly.
“What the devil are you laughing at?” he snapped.
The chuckle expanded into the first assistant’s slow, half-cynical smile. “And once, not so many months ago, I was idiotic enough to cherish the notion that you might be too good!” he exclaimed, in mock self-derision. And with that, he rolled himself in his blankets and turned his face from the light.
XXIII
The Killer
ON the morning following the raid which had failed to connect, Eben Grillage carried out his promise to side-track business and go a-fishing. David made the necessary arrangements, stocking the Athenia’s larder with provisions from the camp commissary, borrowing a tent and camping outfit from one of the grade subcontractors, and otherwise bestirring himself to expedite the departure of the anglers.
With the Athenia out of its berth and safely on its way to some unannounced destination in the upper Timanyoni, a handicap of a sort was removed; a handicap and a restriction. As David phrased it for Plegg, he had gotten two non-combatants out of the range of the guns and the field was now clear for whatever battle of reprisals might be threatening.
Of the restriction removed he said nothing to Plegg or to any one. There be certain secret curtains of the heart which are not to be drawn aside for alien eyes to view what may lie behind them; and as yet, not even to himself would David admit that he was no longer able to see eye to eye with his father. None the less, it was with a distinct sense of relief that he waved good-by to the pair standing on the rear platform of the private Pullman as Callahan’s “mogul” snaked it out through the yard to make a flying-switch coupling with the outgoing stub train.
It was on this same morning that Plegg reported for the third time his inability to find the man Backus, and the report was made while he and Vallory were climbing the mountain on their way to make an inspecting tour of the western slope activities, including the tunnel drift which was slowly gnawing its way to meet Regnier’s bore from the eastward.
“I’ve had a dozen ‘trusties’ looking for him and they have combed Powder Can and every other mining-camp in a ten-mile radius,” was Plegg’s summing-up of the search. “He has disappeared as completely as if the earth had swallowed him.”