's the
matter--all they want of you is to do the work on time."

"Now, look here, Charlie----"

"Hold on, Pete. Don't get mad. It's facts, that's all. Here's these two
weeks gone. You see that, all right enough. Now, the way this work's
laid out, a man's got to make every day count right from the start if he
wants to land on his feet when the house is done. Maybe you think
somebody up in the sky is going to hand you down a present of two extra
weeks so the lost time won't count. That would be all right, only it
ain't very likely to happen."

"Well," said Peterson, "what are you getting at? What do you want me to
do? Perhaps you think it's easy."

"No, I don't. But I'll tell you what to do. In the first place you want
to quit this getting out on the job and doing a laborer's work. The
office is paying out good money to the men that should do that. You know
how to lay a corbel, but just now you couldn't tell me how much cribbing
was coming. You're paid to direct this whole job and to know all about
it, not to lay corbels. If you put in half a day swinging a sledge out
there on the spouting house, how're you going to know that the lumber
bills tally, and the carpenters ain't making mistakes, and that the
timber's piled right. Here to-day you had a dozen men throwing away
their time moving a lot of timber that ought to have been put in the
right place when it first came in."

Peterson was silent.

"Now to-morrow, Pete, as soon as you've got the work moving along, you'd
better go over to the electric light company and see about having the
whole ground wired for arc lamps, so we can be ready to put on a night
shift the minute the cribbing comes in. You want to crowd 'em, too. They
ought to have it ready in two days."

Bannon sat for a moment, then he arose and looked at his watch.

"I'm going to leave you, Pete," he said, as he put on his collar.

"Where're you going?"

"I've got to get up to the city to make the ten o'clock train. I'm going
up to Ledyard to get the cribbing. Be back in a couple of days."

He threw his shaving kit into his grip, put on his overcoat, said
good-night, and went out.

CHAPTER III

Next morning at eight o'clock Charlie Bannon walked into the office of
C. H. Dennis, the manager of the Ledyard Salt and Lumber Company.

"I'm Bannon," he said, "of MacBride & Company. Come up to see why you
don't get out our bill of cribbing."

"Told you by letter," retorted Dennis. "We can't