“To the tunnel—as fast as ever you can go! It’s—it’s life and death!”
Callahan asked no further questions. Miss Virginia was the big boss’s daughter, and her demands were sufficient law and Gospel for any man on the Grillage Company’s pay-rolls. While the fireman was lifting her to his box, the heavy construction machine went slamming out over the yard switches, shrieking its warning to all and sundry, and the race was begun.
Though the track was new and rough, and the detours around the hill cuttings held curves of hazard, Callahan—“Wild Irish,” they called him on the job—slackened speed for nothing. Onward and upward through the gathering darkness roared the big locomotive, vomiting a trail of sparks to mark its crooked climb. Virginia Grillage tried pitifully hard to plan what she should do when the goal should be reached; but the dominant impulse would have nothing to do with cool-headed plannings. David’s life hung in the balance, and David must be warned. She could get no further than this.
So it came about that when the tunnel portal was reached, and Callahan and his firemen were helping her down from the high cab, common sense and clarity of mind fled away, and she was once more only an incoherent and badly frightened young woman. A gang of workmen waited at the tunnel mouth; dimly she realized that this was the night shift, preparing to go in when the day men should come out. One glance showed her that there was no member of the engineering staff with them; no one in authority save the burly Cornish drill-boss.
“Mr. Vallory!” she demanded; “where is he?”
The Cornishman knew the president’s daughter by sight. He pointed into the dark depths of the tunnel. “If ye’ll wait just a minute; it’s time for the shift to be coomin’ out, and he’ll be——” but the remainder of the sentence was lost upon the young woman who had darted into the black depths with neither light nor guide, stumbling blindly over the cross-ties of the spoil-track in her flight, and following the lead of the wide-spaced line of electric bulbs into the grim heart of the mountain.
A scant margin of two minutes after his daughter had halted and boarded a construction engine to be whirled away to the tunnel, Eben Grillage, who had been across to the commissary to put in a call for Plegg, returned to his desk in the Athenia and once more began the reading of his neglected mail. A matter of three-quarters of an hour later, while he was still immersed in his correspondence, the swing-door of the forward corridor flew open as from the impact of a heavy projectile and Silas Plegg staggered into the office compartment. His lips were drawn back and he was shaking like one in an ague fit.
“The roof in Heading Number One!” he jerked out. “It’s down, damn you, do you hear that?—it’s down, and the day shift is behind it!”
Eben Grillage’s heavy face went purple, and for an instant his jaw sagged and he gasped for breath. Then the strong will triumphed for the moment over the failing body and he sprang out of his chair to catch the news-bringer in a grasp that threatened to crush muscle and bone.