"Well, that's a nice way to celebrate, I must say," Pete commented.
"Celebrate what?"
"Why, last night; throwing Grady down. You ought to take a day off on the strength of that."
"What's Grady got to do with it? He ain't in the specifications."
"No," said Pete, slowly; "but where would we have been if he'd got the men off?"
"Where would we have been if the house had burned up?" Bannon retorted, turning away from the table. "That's got nothing to do with it. I haven't felt less like taking a day off since I came on the job. We may get through on time and we may not. If we get tangled up in the plans like this, very often, I don't know how we'll come out. But the surest way to get left is to begin now telling ourselves that this is easy and it's a cinch. That kind of talk makes me tired."
Pete flushed, started an explanatory sentence, and another, and then, very uncomfortable, went out.
Bannon did not look up; he went on studying the blue print, measuring here and there with his three-sided ruler and jotting down incomprehensible operations in arithmetic on a scrap of paper. Max was figuring tables in his time-book, Hilda poring over the cash account. For half an hour no one spoke. Max crammed his cap down over his ears and went out, and there were ten minutes more of silence. Then Bannon began talking. He still busied his fingers with the blue print, and Hilda, after discovering that he was talking to himself rather than to her, went on with her work. But nevertheless she heard, in a fragmentary way, what he was saying.
"Take a day off—schoolboy trick—enough to make a man tired. Might as well do it, though. We ain't going to get through. The office ought to do a little work once in a while just to see what it's like. They think a man can do anything. I'd like to know why I ain't entitled to a night's sleep as well as MacBride. But he don't think so. After he'd worked me twenty-four hours a day up to Duluth, and I lost thirty-two pounds up there, he sends me down to a mess like this. With a lot of drawings that look as though they were made by a college boy. Where does he expect 'em to pile their car doors, I'd like to know."
That was the vein of it, though the monologue ran on much longer. But at last he swung impatiently around and addressed Hilda. "I'm ready to throw up my hands. I think I'll go back to Minneapolis and tell MacBride I've had enough. He can come down here and finish the house himself."
"Do you think he would get it done in time?" Hilda's eyes were laughing at him, but she kept them on her work.
"Oh, yes," he said wearily. "He'd get the grain into her somehow. You couldn't stump MacBride with anything. That's why he makes it so warm for us."
"Do you think," she asked very demurely, indeed, "that if Mr. MacBride had been here he could have built it any faster than—than we have, so far?"
"I don't believe it," said Bannon, unwarily. Her smile told him that he had been trapped. "I see," he added. "You mean that there ain't any reason why we can't do it."
He arose and tramped uneasily about the little shanty. "Oh, of course, we'll get it done—just because we have to. There ain't anything else we can do. But just the same I'm sick of the business. I want to quit."
She said nothing, and after a moment he wheeled and, facing her, demanded abruptly: "What's the matter with me, anyway?" She looked at him frankly, a smile, almost mischievous, in her face. The hard, harassed look between his eyes and about his drawn mouth melted away, and he repeated the question: "What's the matter with me? You're the doctor. I'll take whatever medicine you say."
"You didn't take Mr. Peterson's suggestion very well—about taking a holiday, I mean. I don't know whether I dare prescribe for you or not. I don't think you need a day off. I think that, next to a good, long vacation, the best thing for you is excitement." He laughed. "No, I mean it. You're tired out, of course, but if you have enough to occupy your mind, you don't know it. The trouble today is that everything is going too smoothly. You weren't a bit afraid yesterday that the elevator wouldn't be done on time. That was because you thought there was going to be a strike. And if just now the elevator should catch on fire or anything, you'd feel all right about it again."
He still half suspected that she was making game of him, and he looked at her steadily while he turned her words over in his mind. "Well," he said, with a short laugh, "if the only medicine I need is excitement, I'll be the healthiest man you ever saw in a little while. I guess I'll find Pete. I must have made him feel pretty sore."
"Pete," he said, coming upon him in the marine tower a little later, "I've got over my stomach-ache. Is it all right?"
"Sure," said Pete; "I didn't know you was feeling bad. I was thinking about that belt gallery, Charlie. Ain't it time we was putting it up? I'm getting sort of nervous about it."
"There ain't three days' work in it, the way we're going," said Bannon, thoughtfully, his eyes on the C. & S. C. right-of-way that lay between him and the main house, "but I guess you're right. We'll get at it now. There's no telling what sort of a surprise party those railroad fellows may have for us. The plans call for three trestles between the tracks. We'll get those up today."
To Pete, building the gallery was a more serious business. He had not Bannon's years of experience at bridge repairing; it had happened that he had never been called upon to put up a belt gallery before, and this idea of building a wooden box one hundred and fifty feet long and holding it up, thirty feet in air, on three trestles, was formidable. Bannon's nonchalant air of setting about it seemed almost an affectation.
Each trestle was to consist of a rank of four posts, planted in a line at right angles to the direction of the gallery; they were to be held together at the top by a corbel. No one gave rush orders any more on Calumet K, for the reason that no one ever thought of doing anything else. If Bannon sent for a man, he came on the run. So in an incredibly short time the fences were down and a swarm of men with spades, post augers, picks, and shovels had invaded the C. & S. C. right-of-way. Up and down the track a hundred yards each way from the line of the gallery Bannon had stationed men to give warning of the approach of trains. "Now," said Bannon, "we'll get this part of the job done before any one has time to kick. And they won't be very likely to try to pull 'em up by the roots once we get 'em planted."
But the section boss had received instructions that caused him to be wide-awake, day or night, to what was going on in the neighborhood of Calumet K. Half an hour after the work was begun, the picket line up the track signalled that something was coming. There was no sound of bell or whistle, but presently Bannon saw a hand car spinning down the track as fast as six big, sweating men could pump the levers. The section boss had little to say; simply that they were to get out of there and put up that fence again, and the quicker the better. Bannon tried to tell him that the railroad had consented to their putting in the gallery, that they were well within their rights, that he, the section boss, had better be careful not to exceed his instructions. But the section boss had spoken his whole mind already. He was not of the sort that talk just for the pleasure of hearing their own voices, and he had categorical instructions that made parley unnecessary. He would not even tell from whom he had the orders. So the posts were lugged out of the way and the fence was put up and the men scattered out to their former work again, grinning a little over Bannon's discomfiture.
Bannon's next move was to write to Minneapolis for information and instructions, but MacBride, who seemed to have all the information there was, happened to be in Duluth, and Brown's instructions were consequently foggy. So, after waiting a few days for something more definite, Bannon disappeared one afternoon and was gone more than an hour. When he strode into the office again, keen and springy as though his work had just begun, Hilda looked up and smiled a little. Pete was tilted back in the chair staring glumly out of the window. He did not turn until Bannon slapped him jovially on the shoulders and told him to cheer up.