“If there is any doubt about it, it ought to be timbered,” was David’s decision. “I’m looking to you, Plegg, for the carrying out of these routine details.”
“We can’t afford to timber it,” said Plegg, shortly.
“Why not? The cost would be nothing compared with what we’d lose in a strike of the hard-rock men.”
“I’ll guarantee the men won’t strike. And as for the cost of the timbering; have you considered what it would mean to us if we should call the attention of the railroad inspectors to that bad spot by propping it up?”
“Do you mean to say that the railroad engineers, and Lushing among them, don’t know about that ‘fault’?”
“We’re hoping they don’t,” said Plegg, with the sardonic smile wrinkling slowly at the corners of his eyes. “It would give Mr. James B. Lushing the one big chance he is looking for. The day in which we haul the first car-load of props into the tunnel will be the day when he’ll fall on us like a thousand of brick. We’ll get a peremptory order from the railroad headquarters to shoot that bad roof down and plug the hole with concrete. That will mean a delay, maybe of weeks, a forfeiture of our time-limit bond for the completion of the job, and a bill of costs for the additional work that will turn the Grillage company’s profit into a loss heavy enough to make the big boss sweat blood.”
David said nothing while he was slowly removing the remaining lace-boot. When he spoke it was to ask a curt question.
“Does Mr. Grillage know about this bad spot in the tunnel.”
“Sure he does. I sent him photographs when we were driving through it. He’s an old hand at the rock-blasting, and he isn’t losing any sleep over the cracked roof—which is cracked chiefly in Altman’s imagination.”
In some vague sense David Vallory felt that he was confronting a crisis and another test of the ideals. Before he realized it the battle was joined between a just regard for human life on one hand, and strict loyalty to Eben Grillage on the other. Should he heed Altman’s warning and order the timbering, regardless of the possible consequences to the Grillage Engineering Company? Or should he take Plegg’s assurances at their face value and discount the fears of an overanxious subordinate?