The daughter of the luxuries had possibly spoken better than she knew in saying that the first downward step in the ethical ladder makes all the others easy. As David Vallory rolled himself into the bunk blankets and turned his face away from the light of the hanging lamp under which Plegg was squaring himself for the nightly task of field-note checking, the decision came.
“Perhaps you are right about Altman’s nerves, Plegg. Suppose you shift him to the quarry work in Dixon’s Cut and put Regnier in the tunnel heading. If I’m any judge of men, Regnier won’t let the spalling roof trouble him. He’ll be too busy trying to break Altman’s record of so many feet advance a day, and that will be some job.”
“That’s better,” said Plegg, bending lower over the checking. But when David’s regular breathing began, as it did almost at the instant of eye-closing, the first assistant straightened up, shaking his head regretfully.
“It’s a damned shame!” he muttered under his breath. And then: “If I were half as loyal to him as he is to Grillage, I’d blow the whole gaff—tell him exactly what he is up against on this crooked job, and at least give him a chance to fight with his eyes open. Maybe I shall, some day—after it’s everlastingly too late.”
XIV
The Mucker
FOR some little time after his chief had gone to sleep, Silas Plegg bent thoughtfully over his task at the trestle-table. It was said of him that he could live and work with less sleep than any other man on the staff, and his nightly vigils proved it. Now and again the midnight workers on some remote section of the job would look up to find the first assistant staring down at them from some coign of vantage, and the shirkers never knew at what moment the cool, crisp voice of the under-boss would come crackling out of the shadows with a snap like that of a whip lash.
With the slipping of the rubber band over the last of the field-books, Plegg rose noiselessly and left the car as if to begin another of his nocturnal rounds. In the shadow of the cement sheds he overtook the yard watchman.
“Anything stirring, Mac?” he asked.
“Nothin’ but that tunnel mucker they call ‘Simmy’. Early in the evenin’ I caught him prowlin’ ’round the big boss’s private car. I asked him what he was doin’ and he said he couldn’t sleep. I wouldn’t ’a’ thought nothin’ of it if you hadn’t told me to keep an eye out for him.”
“Anything else?”