This, then, was what David missed by not having to light a second match. Instead of a practically harmless ramming of dry concrete, Crawford had been covering up another item of the cost-cutting. One of the commonest economies in concrete construction is the scanting of the steel which binds the mass together and adds its strength to that of the cement. The contract specifications called for a stated number of these bars in Bridge Number Two. Following the Grillage practice, certain of these bars had been left out—to save their cost. Crawford had made his dummy bars figure as permanences for Strayer, and the trick was turned.
But of all this David Vallory knew nothing; and since his pipe was now drawing freely, he mounted to the cab of one of the construction locomotives to have himself conveyed to the tunnel mouth on the eastern slope of the great mountain.
XII
Under the High Stars
IT was in the evening of the day in which David Vallory had been twice told that his president was on the way to Powder Gap that the stub train forming the connecting link between the main line and the construction headquarters came in with a private Pullman for a trailer. David was four miles away, in the eastern heading of the big tunnel, at the moment, but the service telephone line quickly transmitted the news of the big boss’s arrival. An hour farther along, after a hurried supper in the mess-tent at Brady’s cut, David took a short path across the basin and climbed the forested ridge to the Alta Vista Inn.
He had his reward for the haste, the primitive meal, and the rapid climb when he came in sight of the Inn and its rustic porches. The radiant daughter of profit-gaining contracts was there in visible presence; David singled her out instantly among the people lounging on the westward-facing porch. She stood at the railing, leaning against one of the rough tree-trunk porch pillars and gazing out upon the sunset which was painting itself in colorings known only to the high altitudes. David drew near, treading softly. It was a lover’s fancy that the glories of the sunset were reflected in the starry eyes, in the ripe lips parted a little as if in the rapture of the vision, and in the warm tintings of neck and cheek.
When he finally stood beside her she gave him her hand without loosing her eye-hold upon the crimson-shot glories.
“Isn’t it perfectly exquisite!” she breathed, accepting the fact of his presence quite as if their parting in the lakeside mansion had been but the day before.
“The sunset? Naturally; they are built that way out here. But you mustn’t expect me to rhapsodize over the scenery when I can look at you.”
“Please don’t be frivolous,” she chided. “There are plenty of others to say the silly things; and besides, it isn’t your—it isn’t in character. Stand here and enjoy this with me while it lasts, and then we’ll go somewhere and talk.”
David acquiesced willingly enough, and after the sunset had faded, and they had found chairs in the corner farthest removed from the chattering groups of summer people, he told her of his few weeks of strenuous work, enlarging in boyish enthusiasm upon the magnitude of the job and the possibilities of man-sized growth it offered to those who were driving it.