The woman he had unconsciously led up to the brink of the chasm had not only gone over; she had sunk to a depth perilously near the bottom. There could be no doubt of what the end would be. For some inscrutable reason of his own, Dargin, “the killer,” was according her such a measure of respect as his cave-man attributes were capable of entertaining for anything in the shape of a woman. But that was the most that could be said. Poor Gloriana! What a bitter price she was paying! And with what portion of that price must he, David Vallory, in justice charge himself? Reaching the approach to Brady’s Cut, a huge gash torn through the side of one of the rounded basin hills, David turned to his left and climbed steadily until he attained the sparse growth of trees crowning the hill at the edge of the great cutting. Below him the ordered pandemonium of industry was in full stride. Under the light of masthead arcs, two mammoth steam-shovels rattled and clanked, the sharp staccato of their exhaust pipes echoing from the surrounding heights like the cachinnations of some invisible and mocking giant of the immensities. Between the shovels rooting like prehistoric monsters into the banks on either hand, a grunting locomotive pushed its train of dump-cars for the spoil, moving them so accurately that the circling shovel buckets to right and left never failed of an empty hopper into which to drop the three-ton torrent of mingled clay and broken stone. David Vallory cast himself down at the edge of the cutting with his back to one of the little trees. The chattering clamor of the industries floated up to him on a thin nimbus of coal smoke; but when the senses are turned inward the near and the actual lose their appeal. Once more the fair structure of David’s imaginings was preparing to topple--a structure that he had thought Judith’s disappearance from Middleboro, leaving no trace, gave him leave to rear. But now their paths had crossed again; she was here, almost within rifle-shot of the tree against which he was leaning. And in a day or two Virginia Grillage would come. Was it mere chance, or an avenging fate, that was about to place him at the converging point of a great happiness and an equally great reckoning with a past that could never be recalled? It was far past midnight when he got up and shook himself as one awaking from a troubled dream. Down on the construction track he saw a train of flat-cars bringing the two-o’clock shifts to relieve the gangs which had gone on in the early evening. Above the mechanical clamor in the cutting at his feet he could hear the upcoming men singing raucously. “Bellow it out--it’s little enough you have to trouble you!” he grated, apostrophizing the singing workmen. Then he turned his steps toward the distant material yard, avoiding the approaching train, and closing sullen ears to the noisy human atoms who had no troubles. XI Bridge Number Two