“All right. That was the way it ran along at first. But now it’s beginning to be whispered around in our headquarters that the Grillage company is out for blood on this contract; that no amount of inspection can keep you from skinning us alive—which the same you are doing. That isn’t a healthy state of affairs, and it ought to be cured before the whisper spreads, let us say, to the Executive Board in New York. Are you on?”
“No,” David challenged stubbornly. Then he fell back upon the seller’s time-worn argument: “You are getting all you pay for, and more.”
“Enough said,” laughed Strayer, getting up to go. “No offense meant, and none taken, I hope. But you say Mr. Grillage is your friend, and—well, it’s just a word to the wise, that’s all. So long, till I see you again.”
Somewhat later in the day, returning from a trip to Brady’s Cut, David paused on the sheltered side of the office bunk car to light his pipe. A window was open, and he heard voices within; the voices, namely, of young Jimmy Crawford and Silas Plegg. Crawford had come to camp for a missing detail drawing of some part of Bridge Number Two, and Plegg was getting it for him out of the blueprint locker.
“A close squeak,” Crawford was saying. “If Bittner hadn’t been thoughtful enough to ’phone, I’d have been caught red-handed. I lost my head for a minute and ran down the track to flag Strayer, meaning to choke the big stiff if I couldn’t think of any other way of keeping him off. Just then the material train came along and the boss dropped off right at my feet. He was a Godsend, and I used him, got him to stay and flag Strayer while I ran back and got busy.”
Then Plegg’s voice: “Did you tell Mr. Vallory what you were going to do?”
“Not hardly!” was Crawford’s laughing denial; “not after the song and dance you gave us fellows a while back, just after the boss came on the job. I just told him that Strayer was coming, and that I’d like to have him hindered until I could make sure everything was ship-shape for an inspection. He seemed to be thinking pretty hard about something else, but he was good-natured enough to sit down on a tie-end and wait for Strayer.”
David’s pipe was alight and he moved away. What he had overheard merely confirmed his former assumption that Crawford had been tamping dry concrete to make it appear wet, and he thought no more of it. But if his match had gone out and he had been obliged to light another on the windless side of the bunk car....
Plegg seemed to be having trouble in the search for the missing drawing, and Crawford rattled on.
“When I got back to the bridge I turned the whole gang loose on the stage-setting. It was some swift job, believe me, and I didn’t know what minute Strayer’s car’d come chugging around the curve. I’ve got so I keep a bunch of short steels handy, and we stuck ’em up in the concrete to look as if they grew there. Strayer counted ’em when he came, as he always does, and they checked out right, of course. But say, Plegg, if he’d touched one of the dummies it would have tumbled over! The concrete had been running a bit thin, and it was all we could do to make the short pieces stand up long enough to be counted. As it was, two or three of ’em fell down just as Strayer and the boss were climbing to their places in the inspection car. That’s why I say it was a close squeak.”