“It’s a fight,” said the older man cynically. “The other fellows tie us up with a lot of specifications that they know perfectly well would ruin us if we should live up to them; and, on our side, we live up to just as few of them as the law will allow. The honor system may work in college, but it doesn’t get by to any marked extent in business. As far as that goes, you, yourself, are not as innocent as you look, David. You worked that little cement juggle the other day to the queen’s taste.”
“You heard about that?” said David, and it was a mark of the short distance he had traveled on the road to equivocation that he flushed when he said it.
“Everybody knows about it—everybody but the railroad people. You played it mighty fine. What’s puzzling me is the railroad way-bill part of it. How on top of earth did you contrive to get those way-bills doctored on the F. S. & A. at Little River? Did you buy the agent?”
The flush deepened under David Vallory’s eyes. The misleading explanation he had made to induce the railroad agent to bill the condemned cement as a mill shipment to be transferred from the work on the dam to that on the Coulee du Sac bridge was the least defensible part of the transaction, or so it seemed to him.
“The less said about that part of it will be the soonest mended,” he returned gruffly.
“Well, it was a neat little trick all the way round,” the under-water boss commented. “If Congdon hadn’t fallen down in the first place, we wouldn’t have had to work it.”
This was new ground to David Vallory and he said as much. “What did Congdon have to do with it?” he asked.
Shubrick relighted his pipe, and after a puff or two: “Do you mean to tell me that you don’t know?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t ask.”
Again the under-water engineer sucked slowly at his pipe. “There is one of two things, David,” he remarked, after the pause: “you are either a good bit deeper than I’ve been giving you credit for being—or else you’re too innocent to be running loose without a guardian. Didn’t Grimsby tell you how it all got balled up in the beginning?”