The Project Gutenberg eBook, Calumet "K", by Samuel Merwin and Henry
Kitchell Webster

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Title: Calumet "K"

Author: Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster

Release Date: April 11, 2006 [eBook #18154]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CALUMET "K"***

E-text prepared by Robert Petty

CALUMET "K"

by

MERWIN-WEBSTER

1904

CHAPTER I

The contract for the two million bushel grain elevator, Calumet K,
had been let to MacBride & Company, of Minneapolis, in January, but
the superstructure was not begun until late in May, and at the end of
October it was still far from completion. Ill luck had attended
Peterson, the constructor, especially since August. MacBride, the
head of the firm, disliked unlucky men, and at the end of three
months his patience gave out, and he telegraphed Charlie Bannon to
leave the job he was completing at Duluth and report at once at the
home office.

Rumors of the way things were going at Calumet under the hands of his
younger co-laborer had reached Bannon, and he was not greatly
surprised when MacBride told him to go to Chicago Sunday night and
supersede Peterson.

At ten o'clock Monday morning, Bannon, looking out through the dusty
window of the trolley car, caught sight of the elevator, the naked
cribbing of its huge bins looming high above the huddled shanties and
lumber piles about it. A few minutes later he was walking along a
rickety plank sidewalk which seemed to lead in a general direction
toward the elevator. The sidewalks at Calumet are at the theoretical
grade of the district, that is, about five feet above the actual
level of the ground. In winter and spring they are necessary
causeways above seas of mud, but in dry weather every one abandons
them, to walk straight to his destination over the uninterrupted
flats. Bannon set down his hand bag to button his ulster, for the
wind was driving clouds of smoke and stinging dust and an occasional
grimy snowflake out of the northwest. Then he sprang down from the
sidewalk and made his way through the intervening bogs and, heedless
of the shouts of the brakemen, over a fr