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.

Well, the wheat had come down. It had beaten a blizzard, it had churned
and wedged and crushed its way through floating ice and in the trough of
mauling seas; belated passenger trains had waited on lonely sidings while
it thundere