The narrow windows in the belt gallery had no glass, and the rain came driving through them into the shadows, each drop catching the white shine of the electric lights outside. The floor was trampled with mud and littered with scraps of lumber, tool boxes, empty nail kegs, and shavings. The long, gloomy gallery was empty when Bannon and Hilda stepped into it, excepting a group of men at the farther end, installing the rollers for the belt conveyor—they could be seen indistinctly against a light in the river house.
The wind came roaring around the building, and the gallery trembled and shook. Hilda caught her breath and stopped short.
"It's all right," said Bannon. "She's bound to move some."
"I know—" she laughed—"I wasn't expecting it—it startled me a little."
"Watch where you step." He took her arm and guided her slowly between the heaps of rubbish.
At one of the windows she paused, and stood full in the rain, looking out at the C. & S. C. tracks, with their twinkling red and green lights, all blurred and seeming far off in the storm.
"Isn't this pretty wet?" he said, standing beside her.
"I don't care." She shook the folds of the rubber coat, and glanced down at it. "I like it."
They looked out for a long time. Two millwrights came through the gallery, and glanced at them, but they did not turn. She stepped forward and let the rain beat on her face—he stood behind, looking at her. A light showed far down the track, and they heard a faint whistle. "A train," he said; and she nodded. The headlight grew, and the car lights appeared behind it, and then the black outline of the engine. There was a rush and a roar, and it passed under them.
"Doesn't it make you want to jump down?" she said softly, when the roar had dwindled away.
He nodded with a half-smile. "Say," he said, a little later, "I don't know about your writing—I don't believe we'd better—" he got the words out more rapidly—"I'll tell you what you do—you come along with me and we won't have to write."
"Come—where?"
"Up to the St. Lawrence. We can start on the third just the same."
She did not answer, and he stopped. Then, after a moment, she slowly turned, and looked at him.
"Why—" she said—"I don't think I—"
"I've just been thinking about it. I guess I can't do anything else—I mean I don't want to go anywhere alone. I guess that's pretty plain, isn't it—what I mean?"
She leaned back against the wall and looked at him; it was as if she could not take her eyes from his face.
"Perhaps I oughtn't to expect you to say anything now," he went on. "I just thought if you felt anything like I did, you'd know pretty well, by this time, whether it was yes or no."
She was still looking at him. He had said it all, and now he waited, his fists knotted tightly, and a peculiar expression on his face, almost as if he were smiling, but it came from a part of his nature that had never before got to the surface. Finally she said:—
"I think we'd better go back."
He did not seem to understand, and she turned away and started off alone. In a moment he was at her side. He guided her back as they had come, and neither spoke until they had reached the stairway. Then he said, in a low tone that the carpenters could not hear:—
"You don't mean that—that you can't do it?"
She shook her head and hurried to the office.
CHAPTER XVI
Bannon stood looking after her until she disappeared in the shadow of an arc lamp, and after that he continued a long time staring into the blot of darkness where the office was. At last the window became faintly luminous, as some one lighted the wall lamp; then, as if it were a signal he had been waiting for, Bannon turned away.
An hour before, when he had seen the last bolt of the belt gallery drawn taut, he had become aware that he was quite exhausted. The fact was so obvious that he had not tried to evade it, but had admitted to himself, in so many words, that he was at the end of his rope. But when he turned from gazing at the dimly lighted window, it was not toward his boarding-house, where he knew he ought to be, but back into the elevator, that his feet led him.
For once, his presence accomplished nothing. He went about without thinking where; he passed men without seeing who they were or what they were doing. When he walked through the belt gallery, he saw the foreman of the big gang of men at work there was handling them clumsily, so that they interfered with each other, but it did not occur to him to give the orders that would set things right. Then, as if his wire-drawn muscles had not done work enough, he climbed laboriously to the very top of the marine tower.
He was leaning against a window-casing; not looking out, for he saw nothing, but with his face turned to the fleet of barges lying in the river; when some one spoke to him.
"I guess you're thinking about that Christmas dinner, ain't you, Mr. Bannon?"
"What's that?" he demanded, wheeling about. Then rallying his scattered faculties, he recognized one of the carpenters. "Oh, yes," he said, laughing tardily. "Yes, the postponed Christmas dinner. You think I'm in for it, do you? You know it's no go unless this house is full of wheat clear to the roof."
"I know it," said the man. "But I guess we're going to stick you for it. Don't you think we are?"
"I guess that's right."
"I come up here," said the carpenter, well pleased at the chance for a talk with the boss, "to have a look at this—marine leg, do you call it? I haven't been to work on it, and I never saw one before. I wanted to find out how it works."
"Just like any other leg over in the main house. Head pulley up here; another one down in the boot; endless belt running over 'em with steel cups rivetted on it to scoop up the grain. Only difference is that instead of being stationary and set up in a tank, this one's hung up. We let the whole business right down into the boat. Pull it up and down with that steam winch."
The man shook his head. "What if it got away from you?"
"That's happened," said Bannon. "I've seen a leg most as big as this smash through two decks. Thought it was going right on through the bottom of the boat. But that wasn't a leg that MacBride had hung up. This one won't fall."
Bannon answered one or two more questions rather at random, then suddenly came back to earth. "What are you doing here, anyway?" he demanded. "Seems to me this is a pretty easy way to earn thirty cents an hour."
"I—I was just going to see if there wasn't something I could do," the man answered, a good deal embarrassed. Then before Bannon could do more than echo, "Something to do?" added: "I don't get my time check till midnight. I ain't on this shift. I just come around to see how things was going. We're going to see you through, Mr. Bannon."
Bannon never had a finer tribute than that, not even what young Page said when the race was over; and it could not have come at a moment when he needed it more. He did not think much in set terms about what it meant, but when the man had gone and he had turned back to the window, he took a long breath of the night air and he saw what lay beneath his eyes. He saw the line of ships in the river; down nearer the lake another of Page's elevators was drinking up the red wheat out of the hold of a snub-nosed barge; across the river, in the dark, they were backing another string of wheat-laden cars over the Belt Line switches. As he looked out and listened, his imagination took fire again, as it had taken fire that day in the waiting-room at Blake City, when he had learned that the little, one-track G.&M. was trying to hinder the torrent of the Northern wheat.