“Very well. It is your risk and you see fit to take it. I have nothing more to say.” “Never mind the risk. Have you stopped the calamity talk among the men?” “For the time being, yes. I raised the pay of the shift bosses, and told them what it was for. That is all in the game, and I’m crooked enough by this time not to mind an additional bit of bribery. But there is one thing that I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again: it’s a damned shame to hoodwink a fine young fellow like Vallory the way I’ve been doing ever since he came on the job. He has no idea that we are not playing square with the railroad people; none whatever. And it’s just as I told you last night; if a smash should come, it will hit him harder than it will anybody else.” “We’ll take care of all the smashes,” growled the tyrant, who was no longer tame. “All you have to do is to keep your mouth shut and go on sawing wood. You know very well why I want Vallory kept in the dark; or at least, you know the business reason, anyway. He is valuable on this job only so long as he _is_ kept in the dark. You are the man to do it, Plegg, and you’ve got it to do.” Plegg’s thin lips curled in a dog-like grimace. “If I don’t do it, you’ll revive that old criminal charge against me on the Falling Water dam and get me jugged--the charge that made me the scapegoat for the use of rotten cement when you and your man Homer were the responsible people,” he said bitterly. “I know perfectly well where I stand with you--and with the courts--Mr. Grillage. But there are limits. One of these days I may decide to tell you to go to hell--and take whatever may be coming to me. Vallory trusts me and I am abusing his confidence every day and resorting to all kinds of shifts to keep him from finding out the thousand-and-one crooked things we’re doing to beat the specifications on this job. You say I know the business reason why he was sent out here, but I don’t. Why you wanted to put a clean young fellow like David Vallory in charge of this job is beyond me.” “You’re duller than usual to-night, Plegg, and that’s needless,” was the tyrant’s unfeeling retort. “The chief reason is that David has put some capital into this thing. President Ford knows Adam Vallory, and the Vallory connections generally. We’re capitalizing that knowledge. But that’s a side issue. Coming back to this tunnel business: we’re into it and we’ve got to go through with it. The secret of that ‘rotten spot,’ as you insist upon calling it, must be kept quiet so far as the railroad people are concerned. Jack Dargin must keep it, too, if you have to go and buy him outright. Lushing will be out here in a few days, loaded for bear. He has given it out cold that he is going to do us up, and he wouldn’t ask for any better chance than this tunnel roof tempest in a teapot would give him. You may go now; that will be all for to-night.”