“Of course,” agreed the contractor-king, with a suppressed chuckle which he turned into a forced clearing of his throat; “we’re up to all the little methods of pacifying the enemy, eh, David?” And then: “I’ve just had Plegg here, making him tell tales out of school. Naturally, he didn’t want to say much about his chief, but you’ve got his vote, all right. He tells me you’ve made good with the force, and that you’re a home-grown miracle in the pace-setting. That is what I wanted to hear; but it is also what I expected to hear.”
“More kindness,” said the beneficiary of the kindness, with a comforting glow warming him. “Before I went to Coulee du Sac I used to hear that you were a hard man to work for. I shall feel like scrapping with the next man who says anything like that to me.”
“You go right on believing that I’m a hard man,” said Eben Grillage, with a ferocious twinkle of the shrewd eyes; “it’s safer. Now there’s another little thing, while I think of it: Plegg was telling me something about these dives and speak-easys over in Powder Can; said you’d got stirred up about ’em and wanted to give ’em the high kick. You take a word of advice from me, David, and let ’em alone. After you’ve handled grade laborers and hard-rock men as long as I have, you’ll realize that they’re bound to have their fling after pay-day. If you were an angel from heaven you couldn’t stop it. And you’ll only get your hands muddy if you try.”
“But it’s such a tremendous drawback to the work!” David protested, feeling, in his inmost recesses, that this argument, rather than the moral, would be more likely to appeal to Eben Grillage.
“That’s one of the things you have to figure on,” was the man-driver’s reply. “Pad your gangs with a few extras to make up for the pay-day absentees. Labor’s fairly plentiful just now, and in the contracting business you’ll find that man-muscle is about the cheapest material you handle. But that’s enough about business. What do you hear from your father?”
“Mighty good news, just now. He hasn’t been very well this spring, so I have persuaded him to come out here for a while. I shall be looking for him and my sister next week.”
“That’s the talk!” exclaimed the Vallory benefactor. “I’ll make him go trout-fishing with me. And that drags us back to the business matter again. I’m not out here to stand over you and tell you what to do on the job, David; I’ve told Vinnie it’s my vacation—something that I haven’t had for so long that I’ve forgotten what it looks like. I’ll make a little round of the work with you to-morrow, just to let the outfit see that you’ve got the boss on your side, and after that you can count me out. Vinnie probably won’t let you off so easily, but you can settle that with her.”
With this program for a sort of stirrup-cup, David Vallory left the president’s car with the warm glow at his heart bursting into a generous flame. In an age in which filial piety has come to be more or less regarded as a hold-over from an emotional elder generation, he found himself inclining toward the savior of the good name of the Vallorys with an affection akin to that which he felt for the father who had begotten him. That the industrial world held Eben Grillage as a hard master, and the world of business looked a trifle askance at his huge fortune and the manner of its acquiring, were matters subsidiary to the main question. Under the gruff exterior, the grasping exterior, if his detractors would have it so, David told himself there dwelt a giant of generosity and loving-kindness; a man whose very crudities and bluntnesses were lovable; a man for whom his grateful beneficiaries could never go too far, so long as the saving spark of gratitude remained alive in the human breast.
It was with these exalted emotions stirring him that he swung up to the step of his bunk car. Since the car was lighted, he expected to find Silas Plegg at work on his customary evening task of checking the books of field-notes. But the only occupant of the car proved to be young Altman, who was driving the rock-blasting in the eastern heading of the great tunnel; a sober-minded young mining engineer only a year out of college, but yet with the lines of responsibility already graving themselves visibly in his boyish face.
“I’m disobeying orders, Mr. Vallory,” he began. “Plegg tells us we mustn’t bother you with our complaints, but in justice to my men I’ve got to break over this one time. You know that weak spot in the tunnel roof?—the one I showed you the first time you were in?”