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 like to know."

That was the vein of it, though the monologue ran on much longer. But at
last he swung impatiently around and addressed Hilda. "I'm ready to
throw up my hands. I think I'll go back to Minneapolis and tell MacBride
I've had enough. He can come down here and finish the house himself."

"Do you think he would get it done in time?" Hilda's eyes were laughing
at him, but she kept them on her work.

"Oh, yes," he said wearily. "He'd get the grain into her somehow. You
couldn't stump MacBride with anything. That's why he makes it so warm
for us."

"Do you think," she asked very demurely, indeed, "that if Mr. MacBride
had been here he could have built it any faster than--than we have, so
far?"

"I don't believe it," said Bannon, unwarily. Her smile told him that he
had been trapped. "I see," he added. "You mean that there ain't any
reason why we can't do it."

He arose and tramped uneasily about the little shanty. "Oh, of course,
we'll get it done--just because we have to. There ain't anything else we
can do. But just the same I'm sick of the business. I want to quit."

She said nothing, and after a moment he wheeled and, facing her,
demanded abruptly: "What's the matter with me, anyway?" She looked at
hi