and garners were
going into place as rapidly as the completing of the supporting
framework permitted. The cupola floors were not all laid. If you had
stood on the distributing floor, over the tops of the bins, you might
have looked not only down through a score of openings between plank
areas and piles of timbers, into black pits, sixteen feet square by
seventy deep, but upward through a grill of girders and joists to the
clear sky. Everywhere men swarmed over the work, and the buzz of the
electric lights and the sounds of hundreds of hammers blended into a
confused hum.

If you had walked to the east end of the building, here and there
balancing along a plank or dodging through gangs of laborers and around
moving timbers, you would have seen stretching from off a point not
halfway through to the ground, the annex bins, rising so steadily that
it was a matter only of a few weeks before they would be ready to
receive grain. Now another walk, this time across the building to the
north side, would show you the river house, out there on the wharf, and
the marine tower rising up through the middle with a single arc lamp on
the topmost girder throwing a mottled, checkered shadow on the wharf and
the water below.

At a little after eight o'clock, Peterson, who had been looking at the
stairway, now nearly completed, came out on the distributing floor. He
was in good spirits, for everything was going well, and Bannon had
frankly credited him, of late, with the improvement in the work of the
night shifts. He stood looking up through the upper floors of the
cupola, and he did not see Max until the timekeeper stood beside him.

"Hello, Max," he said. "We'll have the roof on here in another ten
days."

Max followed Peterson's glance upward.

"I guess that's right. It begins to look as if things was coming 'round
all right. I just come up from the office. Mr. Bannon's there. He'll be
up before long, he says. I was a-wondering if maybe I hadn't ought to go
back and tell him about Grady. He's around, you know."

"Who? Grady?"

"Yes. Him and another fellow was standing down by one of the cribbin'
piles. I was around there on the way up."

"What was they doing?"

"Nothing. Just looking on."

Peterson turned to shout at some laborers, then he pushed back his hat
and scratched his head.

"I don't know but what you'd ought to 'a' told Charlie right off. That
man Grady don't mean us no good."

"I know it, but I wasn't just