“I was. They couldn’t tell me at the hotel, and I was that frightened I thought I’d be choking. Jack Dargin sent me, and the other Jack—Black Jack Runnels, he is—would be killing me if he knew I came. You’ll remember what I was telling you yesterday. David is to be murdered—in the tunnel some way—I don’t know how. They’re to get him in between the shifts; when the day men have come out and before the night men have gone in. Dargin says there’d be a clock of some kind in a box—he said to tell you that, and you’d understand.”
“But David isn’t at the tunnel; he is at one of the lower camps. Mr. Plegg told me so just a few minutes ago.”
“Maybe he was, but he isn’t now; he went up on an engine not ten minutes ago. It was Simmy Backus’s job to get him there—to ’phone him there was a man hurt in the tunnel. He’d fall for that—David would—and he went. I saw the engine when it passed me, going up. What must we do? ’Tis you that would be loving David, Vinnie Grillage, and that I know well, but you’re not the only one: I—I’d die for him this minute!”
For a moment Virginia Grillage, quick-witted and resourceful as any daughter of Eve since the world began, stood shocked and irresolute, fighting desperately for some shreddings of the capability to act which had suddenly deserted her. Then the lost self-control came back with a bound.
“The telephone!” she gasped. “You run back to the hotel, Judith, and find Bert Oswald—tell him what you’ve told me and he’ll know what to do! While you’re doing that, I’ll try to find a ’phone here in the yards. Run!” and she set the example by flying down the path and dodging around the obstructing cars to reach the Athenia.
To her utter dismay, she found the private car untenanted. The lights were still on, and the recently opened mail lay on the desk, but the big swing-chair was empty. Twice, and again, she called her father, and when there was no answer she caught up the telephone set from the desk and tried to make somebody hear. But the set was dead; the wires connecting it with the working system had not been restrung since the Athenia had returned from Red Butte.
Next she made frantic and fruitless search for the porter; but the negro, too, had disappeared. Plegg was the alternative now, and she ran breathlessly up the yard to the office bunk car. But this, also, proved to be a hope defeated, or at least deferred. The car was dark when she reached it, and when she tried the door she found it locked. The remaining expedient, the only one that suggested itself, was to run to the Inn railroad station a half-mile distant down the yard, where she knew there was an accessible telephone. It was a lame expedient and she knew it; a thousand things might delay the sending of the message of warning to the tunnel, and time was priceless. Yet she ran, stumbling over the loosely bedded cross-ties, and praying that she might happen upon Plegg or some other member of the staff who would know what to do and how to do it.
She had scarcely begun this new flight when she saw one of the construction locomotives lumbering toward her on the main track. The quick wit was coming to its own again, and she stopped, stripping off her coat and stepping into the cone of the headlight beam so that she could be seen when she waved her signal. The engine was Callahan’s “mogul,” and she gave a little sob of joy when she recognized the good-natured Irishman who leaned from his cab window to ask what she wanted. Callahan was the driver with whom she had ridden oftenest when David Vallory had been showing her over the job.
“I want you and your engine, Mr. Callahan!” she panted. “Will you take orders from me?”
“Sure I will, Miss Vinnie,” was the quick response; and when the fireman had helped her up to the foot-board: “Where will ye be wanting the ould ’Thirty-six to be taking you?”