is bundle and unrolled a door mat, which he laid in front of
the gate.

Miss Vogel was smiling, but Bannon's face was serious. He cut a square
piece from the wrapping paper, and sitting on the table, printed the
placard: "Wipe your feet! Or put five cents in the box." Then he nailed
both box and placard to the railing, and stood back to look at his work.

"That will do it," he said.

She nodded. "There's no danger that they won't see it."

"We had a box down on the New Orleans job," said Bannon, "only that was
for swearing. Every time anybody swore he put in a nickel, and then when
Saturday came around we'd have ten or fifteen dollars to spend."

"It didn't stop the swearing, then?"

"Oh, yes. Everybody was broke a day or so after pay day, and for a few
days every week it was the best crowd you ever saw. But we won't spend
this money that way. I guess we'll let you decide what to do with it."

Hour by hour the piles of cribbing dwindled, and on the elevator the
distance from bin walls to post-tops grew shorter. Before five o'clock the
last planks were spiked home on the walls and bins in the northwest
corner. A few hours' work in the morning would bring the rest of the house
to the same level, and then work could commence on the distributing floor
and on the frame of the cupola. Before the middle of the afternoon he had
started two teams of horses dragging the cupola timbers, which had been
cut ready for framing, to the foot of the hoist. By ten o'clock in the
morning, Bannon figured, the engine would be lifting timbers instead of
bundles of cribbing.

There was a chill wind, up there on the top of the elevator, coming across
the flats out of the glowing sunset. But Bannon let his coat flap open, as
he gave a hand now and then to help the men. He liked to feel the wind
tugging at sleeves and cap, and he leaned against it, bare-throated and
bare-handed--bareheaded, too, he would have been had not a carpenter, rods
away on the cribbing, put out a hand to catch his cap as it tried to whirl
past on a gust. The river wound away toward the lake, touched with the
color of the sky, to lose itself half a mile away among the straggling
rows of factories and rolling mills. From the splendid crimson of the
western sky to the broken horizon line of South Chicago, whose buildings
hid Lake Michigan, the air was crisp and clear; but on the north, over the
dim shops and blocks of houses that grew closer together as the eye went