In naming the place to which he was going, David gave the first assistant only the outward husk of the kernel of truth. As he tramped his stumbling course over the unevenly spaced cross-ties of the construction track in the general direction of Brady’s, he was thinking little enough of the work at the cutting or of anything connected with the affairs of the Grillage Engineering Company. Taking their revenge for a long period of banishment into a limbo of things conveniently pushed aside, the thoughts that had once harassed him into something like a congestive chill of moral remorse assailed him afresh.
The woman he had unconsciously led up to the brink of the chasm had not only gone over; she had sunk to a depth perilously near the bottom. There could be no doubt of what the end would be. For some inscrutable reason of his own, Dargin, “the killer,” was according her such a measure of respect as his cave-man attributes were capable of entertaining for anything in the shape of a woman. But that was the most that could be said. Poor Gloriana! What a bitter price she was paying! And with what portion of that price must he, David Vallory, in justice charge himself?
Reaching the approach to Brady’s Cut, a huge gash torn through the side of one of the rounded basin hills, David turned to his left and climbed steadily until he attained the sparse growth of trees crowning the hill at the edge of the great cutting. Below him the ordered pandemonium of industry was in full stride. Under the light of masthead arcs, two mammoth steam-shovels rattled and clanked, the sharp staccato of their exhaust pipes echoing from the surrounding heights like the cachinnations of some invisible and mocking giant of the immensities. Between the shovels rooting like prehistoric monsters into the banks on either hand, a grunting locomotive pushed its train of dump-cars for the spoil, moving them so accurately that the circling shovel buckets to right and left never failed of an empty hopper into which to drop the three-ton torrent of mingled clay and broken stone.
David Vallory cast himself down at the edge of the cutting with his back to one of the little trees. The chattering clamor of the industries floated up to him on a thin nimbus of coal smoke; but when the senses are turned inward the near and the actual lose their appeal. Once more the fair structure of David’s imaginings was preparing to topple—a structure that he had thought Judith’s disappearance from Middleboro, leaving no trace, gave him leave to rear. But now their paths had crossed again; she was here, almost within rifle-shot of the tree against which he was leaning. And in a day or two Virginia Grillage would come. Was it mere chance, or an avenging fate, that was about to place him at the converging point of a great happiness and an equally great reckoning with a past that could never be recalled?
It was far past midnight when he got up and shook himself as one awaking from a troubled dream. Down on the construction track he saw a train of flat-cars bringing the two-o’clock shifts to relieve the gangs which had gone on in the early evening. Above the mechanical clamor in the cutting at his feet he could hear the upcoming men singing raucously.
“Bellow it out—it’s little enough you have to trouble you!” he grated, apostrophizing the singing workmen. Then he turned his steps toward the distant material yard, avoiding the approaching train, and closing sullen ears to the noisy human atoms who had no troubles.
XI
Bridge Number Two
SINCE he was now able to argue from a personal knowledge of the Powder Can facts, David Vallory was ready to go to the railroad officials with a plea for intervention and relief. But with his own president’s visit impending he was unwilling to absent himself for the needful trip to the railroad headquarters in Brewster. In this small dilemma a bit of gossip trickling in over the construction line wire from Agorda, the point at which the new grade diverged from the old, offered an alternative. There was a right-of-way claim to be adjusted at Agorda, and the gossiping wire said that the Short Line’s legal representative had come up from Brewster on the morning train to settle with the claimants.
Seizing the opportunity, David Vallory boarded an empty material train backing out of the Powder Gap yards and in due time was set down at the desolate little junction station at the foot of Mount Latigo. There was a private car standing on one of the side-tracks, and inquiry at the telegraph office developed the fact that the right-of-way claimants had already had their day in court, and Mr. Jolly was in his car, waiting for the afternoon train to come along and tow him back to Brewster.
Walking down the tracks to the occupied siding, David presented himself at the door of the private car and was welcomed effusively by a round-bodied little gentleman with a face like a full moon.