David Vallory

David Vallory’s train, to make which he had precipitately thrown down pencil and mapping-pen in the drafting room of the Government harbor-deepening project on the Florida coast two days earlier, was an hour late arriving at Middleboro; and in this first home-coming from the distant assignment, the aspect of things once so familiar seemed jarred a trifle out of focus. It was not that the June fields were less green, or the factory suburb through which the long train was slowing more littered and unsightly. But there was a change, and it was in a manner depressive.

“Your home town?” inquired the traveler in the opposite half of the Pullman section, as Vallory began to assemble his various belongings.

“Yes,” said David, adding, as if in some sort of justification: “I was born here in Middleboro.”

The man who had occupied the upper berth looked aside reflectively, taking in and appraising the country-town tritenesses as the open car windows passed them in review.

“A man may be born anywhere,” he remarked; then, with the appraisive glance directed at the fair-haired, frank-faced young man kneeling to strap an over-filled suit case; “It’s a safe bet that you’ll not die in Middleboro--unless you should chance to be killed in an accident.”

Vallory, soberly preoccupied, looked up from the strapping.

“Why do you say that?”

The older man smiled with a rather grim widening of the thin lips half hidden by a cropped beard and mustaches.

“You are young, and youth is always impatient of the little horizons. Let me make another guess. You have been away for some time, and this is your first return. You are finding it a bit disappointing. Am I right?”

“Not exactly disappointing,” Vallory denied.

“Well, then, different, let us say. You may not realize it yet, but you have outgrown the home town. I know, because, years ago, I had precisely the same experience myself. Do your people live here?”

The train had been halted in the yard by a dropped semaphore arm, and for the moment Vallory was at the mercy of his chance traveling companion. Yet he told himself that there was no good reason why he should be churlish.

“Yes,” he conceded; “my father and sister live here. And I have lived here all my life except for the four years in college, and the past two years in Florida.”

“College--to be sure,” the inquisitor agreed half absently. “What course, if I may ask?”

“Engineering.”

At this the bearded man exhibited a tiny fob charm made in the shape of a simple trestle bent and extended a hand individualized by the spatulate thumb and square-ended fingers of the artist-artisan.

“Shake!” he exclaimed, with something more than Middle-Western informality. “I happen to be one of the same breed. Now I am quite certain you won’t die here in--Middletown?--is that the name?--always making an exception in favor of the untoward accident, of course.”

“Middleboro,” David corrected. Then to the repetition of the prophecy: “You are probably right. I found that I had to leave home to get my first job. I have been on Government work in Florida--rivers and harbors.”

“Government work? A deep grave and a safe one. Would you mind telling me just why you chose to bury yourself in it?”

Vallory’s smile was still good-natured. For so young a man he was singularly free from the false dignity which so often is made to pass for the real.

“I don’t mind in the least. I did what most college men do; took the first reasonably decent thing that offered. It wasn’t at all what I wanted, but my own particular line was rather dull two years ago. I majored in railroad building.”