But certain results followed in due course, and a growth, not in grace. For one of the results, David, being a shrewd-eyed master of his trade, soon began to discover many of the things that Plegg was trying to hide from him--the dishonesties large and small by which unscrupulous Business seeks to increase the margin or profit; to discover them and pass by on the other side with closed eyes. Another result was his changed and changing attitude toward the Powder Can nuisance. From regarding the wide-open mining-camp chiefly as a moral menace, he was beginning to look upon it more as an obstacle to progress--his own industrial progress on the job. It was sapping the strength of his working force, and therefore--in spite of the contractor-king’s injunction, which he took to be another of the little kindnesses designed to make things easier for him--it was to be abolished. In the field of the discovered dishonesties and the closed eye, effect succeeded to cause with due celerity. The conditions on a well-systematized undertaking like the line-shortening project are fairly telepathic. Almost immediately it began to be whispered about among the gang bosses and the men that the new chief was bent upon making a record; the first assistant said so, and the first assistant ought to know. This being the fact, the bridle might be taken off--always with due regard for the railroad watch-dogs, and for a decent concealment from a chief who, for the look of the thing, must be in a position to say that he knew nothing whatever of cast-off bridles and the substitution of loose halters therefor. When David Vallory began to realize that his lowering of the standards was taken as an ell for an inch by his subordinates and the rank and file, it may be supposed that he was frankly appalled. But momentum counts for something. And back of the push on the downward slide there was always the debt of obligation owed to Eben Grillage. The king of the contractors might be all that men said he was; a hard bargain driver and a cold-blooded buccaneer of business. But at the same time he was Virginia’s father and the savior of the Vallory good name. If these were the inner wrestlings, David had as yet shared them with no one. Outwardly, at least on the social side, he was measuring up to a rather exacting standard set by Miss Virginia. Days in which he took her on the construction locomotives and put her in touch with the throbbings of the feverish heart of the activities were intermingled with summer evenings on the Alta Vista porches. For some cause as yet unexplained, the coming of his father and sister was delayed; and for some other cause, into which his infatuation forbade him to inquire, no one of Virginia Grillage’s retinue of suitors had thus far intruded upon the scene. “And still you are not entirely happy,” she laughed, one evening, when he spoke of the comforting dearth of the suitors. “What makes you think I’m not happy?” he shot back.