“And you’ve been setting the pace, eh? How about the railroad inspectors?—are they giving you much trouble?”
“All we need, though as a general thing they don’t say much to me personally; they go to Plegg. One of them—Strayer—took me into his confidence a bit to-day. He professes to believe that we are deliberately burking the railroad company and threw out a hint to the effect that the railroad Executive Board might take some action.”
“Did you get back at him?”
“I did; there hasn’t been a single instance where we’ve failed to make good when they have called us down, and I told him so. Strayer is acting chief of the inspection staff in Lushing’s absence. I haven’t seen Lushing yet. They tell me he has gone East.”
“I can add something to that,” said Lushing’s former employer, with a sour smile. “He went to New York to appear before the Executive Board of his railroad—at his own request. We’ll hear from him a little later.”
“I suppose he’s trying to make more trouble for us,” said David.
“He is. He is trying to force legal proceedings to get our contract canceled. He threatened to do that when we dropped him. He’s a vindictive cuss, if ever there was one.”
David Vallory shook his head in sympathetic deprecation. He was too loyal himself to be able to understand how a man, even if he were enraged, could turn upon the hand that had fed him.
“He can’t do anything like that,” he asserted confidently. “I’ve specialized a good bit in the law of contracts—took it as a part of my college course. As I see it, the railroad company has absolutely no grounds whatever for cancellation. As I’ve said, when Lushing’s inspectors bring up a specific charge, we make good, and that’s the end of it.”
Since being in love with a man’s daughter is the poorest possible preliminary to any accurate reading of face signs when the subject chances to be the father of the daughter, the slow drooping of an eyelid on the part of the big man in the desk chair opposite was quite thrown away upon David Vallory.