foundation. When Max and his sister had gone
the foreman looked around, and said, with a show of surprise:--

"Oh, hello, Charlie. Going up to the house?"

"Yes."

Peterson's manner was not wholly natural. As they walked across the
flats his conversation was a little forced, and he laughed occasionally
at certain occurrences in the morning's work that were not particularly
amusing.

Bannon did not get back to the office until a half hour after work had
commenced for the afternoon. He carried a large bundle under one arm and
in his hand a wooden box with a slot cut in the cover. He found the
scrub-woman hard at work on the office floor. The chair and the unused
stool were on the table. He looked about with satisfaction.

"It begins to look better already," he said to Miss Vogel. "You know
we're not going to be able to keep it all clean; there'll be too many
coming in. But there's going to be a law passed about tracking mud
inside the railing." He opened his bundle and unrolled a door mat, which
he laid in front of the gate.

Miss Vogel was smiling, but Bannon's face was serious. He cut a square
piece from the wrapping paper, and sitting on the table, printed the
placard: "Wipe your feet! Or put five cents in the box." Then he nailed
both box and placard to the railing, and stood back to look at his work.

"That will do it," he said.

She nodded. "There's no danger that they won't see it."

"We had a box down on the New Orleans job," said Bannon, "only that was
for swearing. Every time anybody swore he put in a nickel, and then when
Saturday came around we'd have ten or fifteen dollars to spend."

"It didn't stop the swearing, then?"

"Oh, yes. Everybody was broke a day or so after pay day, and for a few
days every week it was the best crowd you ever saw. But we won't spend
this money that way. I guess we'll let you decide what to do with it."

Hour by hour the piles of cribbing dwindled, and on the elevator the
distance from bin walls to post-tops grew shorter. Before five o'clock
the last planks were spiked home on the walls and bins in the northwest
corner. A few hours' work in the morning would bring the rest of the
house to the same level, and then work could commence on the
distributing floor and on the frame of the cupola. Before the middle of
the afternoon he had started two teams of horses dragging the cupola
timbers, which had been cut ready for framing, to the foot of the hoist.
By ten o'clock in