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 thundered by, and big rotary ploughs had bitten a way for it
across the drifted prairies. Now it was here, and Charlie Bannon was
keeping it waiting.

He stood there, looking, only a moment; then before the carpenter's
footsteps were well out of hearing, he followed him down the stairway to
the belt gallery. Before he had passed half its length you could have
seen the difference. In the next two hours every man on the elevator saw
him, learned a quicker way to splice a rope or align a shaft, and heard,
before the boss went away, some word of commendation that set his hands
to working the faster, and made the work seem easy. The work had gone on
without interruption for weeks, and never slowly, but there were times
when it went with a lilt and a laugh; when laborers heaved at a hoisting
tackle with a Yo-ho, like privateersmen who have just sighted a sail;
when, with all they could do, results came too slowly, and the hours
flew too fast. And so it was that Christmas night; Charlie Bannon was
back on the job.

About ten o'clock he encountered Pete, bearing off to the shanty a quart
bottle of cold coffee and a dozen big, thick sandwiches. "Come on,
Charlie," he called. "Max is coming, too; but