at Duluth."

Another big timber came swinging up to them at the end of the hoisting
rope. Peterson sprang out upon it. "I'm going down before I get brushed
off," said Bannon.

"I'll be back at the office as soon as I get this corbel laid."

"No hurry. I want to look over the drawings. Go easy there," he called
to the engineer at the hoist; "I'm coming down on the elevator."
Peterson had already cast off the rope, but Bannon jumped for it and
thrust his foot into the hook, and the engineer, not knowing who he was,
let him down none too gently.

On his way to the office he spoke to two carpenters at work on a stick
of timber. "You'd better leave that, I guess, and get some four-inch
cribbing and some inch stuff and make some ladders; I guess there's
enough lying 'round for that. About four'll do."

It was no wonder that the Calumet K job had proved too much for
Peterson. It was difficult from the beginning. There was not enough
ground space to work in comfortably, and the proper bestowal of the
millions of feet of lumber until time for it to be used in the
construction was no mean problem. The elevator was to be a typical
"Chicago" house, built to receive grain from cars and to deliver it
either to cars or to ships. As has been said, it stood back from the
river, and grain for ships was to be carried on belt conveyors running
in an inclosed bridge above the railroad tracks to the small spouting
house on the wharf. It had originally been designed to have a capacity
for twelve hundred thousand bushels, but the grain men who were building
it, Page & Company, had decided after it was fairly started that it must
be larger; so, in the midst of his work, Peterson had received
instructions and drawings for a million bushel annex. He had done
excellent work--work satisfactory even to MacBride & Company--on a
smaller scale, and so he had been given the opportunity, the
responsibility, the hundreds of employees, the liberal authority, to
make what he could of it all.

There could be no doubt that he had made a tangle; that the big job as a
whole was not under his hand, but was just running itself as best it
could. Bannon, who, since the days when he was chief of the wrecking
gang on a division of the Grand Trunk, had made a business of rising to
emergencies, was obviously the man for the situation. He was worn thin
as an old knife-blade, he was just at the end of a piece of work that
would have entitled any other man to a vac