"Look here, Pete. You've known me a good many years. Do you think I'm
square?"

"I never said you wasn't square."

"You might have given me the benefit of the doubt, anyway. I know you
didn't like my coming down here to take charge. Do you suppose I did? You
were unlucky, and a man working for MacBride can't afford to be unlucky;
so he told me to come and finish the job. And once I was down here he held
me responsible for getting it done. I've got to go ahead just the best I
can. I thought you saw that at first, and that we'd get on all right
together, but lately it's been different."

"I thought I'd been working hard enough to satisfy anybody."

"It ain't that, and you know it ain't. It's just the spirit of the thing.
Now, I don't ask you to tell me why it is you feel this way. If you want
to talk it out now, all right. If you don't, all right again. But if you
ever think I'm not using you right, come to me and say so. Just look at
what we've got to do here, Pete, before the first of January. Sometimes I
think we can do it, and sometimes I think we can't, but we've got to
anyway. If we don't, MacBride will just make up his mind we're no good.
And unless we pull together, we're stuck for sure. It ain't a matter of
work entirely. I want to feel that I've got you with me. Come around in
the afternoon if you happen to be awake, and fuss around and tell me what
I'm doing wrong. I want to consult you about a good many things in the
course of a day."

Pete's face was simply a lens through which one could see the feelings at
work beneath, and Bannon knew that he had struck the right chord at last.
"How is it? Does that go?"

"Sure," said Pete. "I never knew you wanted to consult me about anything,
or I'd have been around before."

Friday afternoon Bannon received a note from Grady saying that if he had
any regard for his own interests or for those of his employers, he would
do well to meet the writer at ten o'clock Sunday morning at a certain
downtown hotel. It closed with a postscript containing the disinterested
suggestion that delays were dangerous, and a hint that the writer's time
was valuable and he wished to be informed whether the appointment would be
kept or not.

Bannon ignored the note, and all day Monday expected Grady's appearance at
the office. He did not come, but when Bannon reached his boarding-house
about eight o'clock that evening, he found Grady in his room waiting for
him.

"I can't talk on an e