Project Gutenberg's Calumet 'K', by Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster

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Title: Calumet 'K'

Author: Samuel Merwin
Henry Kitchell Webster

Release Date: November 8, 2009 [EBook #30431]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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CALUMET "K"

BY MERWIN-WEBSTER

AUTHORS OF "THE SHORT LINE WAR," ETC.

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1904

_All rights reserved_

Copyright, 1901,
By THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY.

Copyright, 1901,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up, electrotyped, and published October, 1901. Reprinted
August, 1902; March, 1903.

Special edition May, June, 1904.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

CALUMET "K"

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 the