marine leg, gravely, deliberately
descended. There is a magnificent audacity about that sort of
performance. The leg was ninety feet long, steel-booted, framed of great
timbers, heavy enough to have wrecked the barge like a birch bark canoe
if it had got away. It went down bodily into the hold and the steel boot
was buried in wheat. Then Pete threw another lever, and in a moment
another endless series of cups was carrying the wheat aloft. It went
over the cross-head and down a spout, then stretched out in a golden
ribbon along the glistening white belt that ran the length of the
gallery. Then, like the wheat from the cars, it was caught up again in
the cups, and shot down through spouts, and carried along on belts to
the remotest bins in the annex.

For the first few hours of it the men's nerves were hair springs, but as
time went on and the stream kept pouring in without pause, the tension
relaxed though the watch never slackened. Men patted the bearings
affectionately, and still the same report came to Bannon, "All cool."

Late that night, as the superintendent was figuring his weighing
reports, he said to Bannon; "At this rate, we'll have several hours to
spare."

"We haven't had our accident yet," said Bannon, shortly.

It happened within an hour, at the marine leg, but it was not serious.
They heard a splintering sound, down in the dark, somewhere, and Pete,
shouting to them to throw out the clutch, climbed out and down on the
sleet-clad girders that framed the leg. An agile monkey might have been
glad to return alive from such a climb, but Pete came back presently
with a curious specimen of marine hardware that had in some way got into
the wheat, and thence into the boot and one of the cups. Part way up it
had got jammed and had ripped up the sheathing of the leg. They started
the leg again, but soon learned that it was leaking badly.

"You'll have to haul up for repairs, I guess," the captain called up to
them.

"Haven't time," said Pete, under his breath, and with a hammer and
nails, and a big piece of sacking, he went down the leg again, playing
his neck against a half-hour's delay as serenely as most men would walk
downstairs to dinner. "Start her up, boys," he called, when the job was
done, and, with the leg jolting under his hands as he climbed, he came
back into the tower.

That was their only misfortune, and all it cost them was a matter of
minutes, so by noon of the thirtieth, an hour or two afte