m.

"I want to tell you," she said, "I haven't understood exactly until
tonight--what they said about the accident and the way you've talked about
it--well, some people think you don't think very much about the men, and
that if anybody's hurt, or anything happens, you don't care as long as the
work goes on." She was looking straight at him. "I thought so, too. And
tonight I found out some things you've been doing for him--how you've been
giving him tobacco, and the things he likes best that I'd never have
thought of, and I knew it was you that did it, and not the Company--and
I--I beg your pardon."

Bannon did not know what to reply. They stood for a moment without
speaking, and then she smiled, and said "Good night," and ran up the steps
without looking around.

CHAPTER XIII

It was the night of the tenth of December. Three of the four stories of
the cupola were building, and the upright posts were reaching toward the
fourth. It still appeared to be a confused network of timbers, with only
the beginnings of walls, but as the cupola walls are nothing but a shell
of light boards to withstand the wind, the work was further along than
might have been supposed. Down on the working story the machinery was
nearly all in, and up here in the cupola the scales and garners were going
into place as rapidly as the completing of the supporting framework
permitted. The cupola floors were not all laid. If you had stood on the
distributing floor, over the tops of the bins, you might have looked not
only down through a score of openings between plank areas and piles of
timbers, into black pits, sixteen feet square by seventy deep, but upward
through a grill of girders and joists to the clear sky. Everywhere men
swarmed over the work, and the buzz of the electric lights and the sounds
of hundreds of hammers blended into a confused hum.

If you had walked to the east end of the building, here and there
balancing along a plank or dodging through gangs of laborers and around
moving timbers, you would have seen stretching from off a point not
halfway through to the ground, the annex bins, rising so steadily that it
was a matter only of a few weeks before they would be ready to receive
grain. Now another walk, this time across the building to the north side,
would show you the river house, out there on the wharf, and the marine
tower rising up through the middle with a single arc lamp on the topmost
girder throwing a mottled, checker