de into the office and
over to the draughting table. He tossed Pete's hat to one side and began
studying a detail of the machinery plans.

"Max." He spoke without looking up. "I wish you'd find a water boy and
send him up to the hotel to get a couple of sandwiches and a bottle of
coffee."

"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 lik