“There it is, then. No man living has ever been able to draw the line absolute between ethical right and wrong and lay it down as a mathematical axiom. I’ll put it up to you. If you are a fanatical crank your duty is plain. You know the inside of this cement deal, and you can show it up if you feel like it and make it cost the Grillage Engineering Company a pot of money. But you are not going to do any such asinine and ungrateful thing--you know you’re not. What you’ll do will be to tell yourself that the particular grade of Portland used is strictly a matter of opinion between our staff and the railroad’s, and let it go at that.” It is altogether improbable that Warner Shubrick regarded himself as in any sense an _advocatus diaboli_; and it might be even farther afield to suppose that Grimsby had given him a hint to safeguard the cement fraud by trying to justify it for his shack-mate. None the less, the seed was sown and a new point of view was opened for David Vallory. Given time to wear itself out, the natural indignation arising upon the discovery that he had been used as a tool in Grimsby’s small plot became gradually transmuted into something quite different. Shubrick, in declaring that a man must be loyal to something, labeled a solvent which has dissolved much fine gold in the human laboratory. The transition from loyalty to an ideal to loyalty to a cause is not so violent as it may seem. Hence, it need not be written down as a miracle that, in proportion as the ideals withdrew, there grew up in David Vallory a blind determination to be loyal, first, to his salt. It was in a letter to his father, written at the end of this same month of March, that the newer viewpoint got itself set forth in words. “I didn’t know what a cramped little circle I’d been trotting around in all my life until I came up here,” he wrote. “You have to go up against the real thing in the world fight before you can get your ideas straightened out, and give things their proper relative values. The university did nothing for me in that respect, and the Government job in Florida was a mere anæsthetic. But here I’m doing a man’s work, and carrying a man’s responsibility. I know you won’t take it as a brag if I say to you, Dad, that I’ve grown more in the nine months that I’ve been at Coulee du Sac than I did in the nine years before that. For the first time in my experience I’m beginning to be able to peep out over the edge of things, and to grab hold while the grabbing is good. Incidentally, I’m learning what it means to be loyal to a man who has been loyal to me and mine, and I know it will please you when I say that I’ve been able, now and then, to work off a little of the big debt of gratitude we owe to Mr. Grillage.