e 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 vacation; but
MacBride made no apologies when he assigned him the new task--"Go
down and stop this fiddling around and get the house built. See that
it's handling grain before you come away. If you can't do it, I'll
come down and do it myself."

Bannon shook his head dubiously. "Well, I'm not sure--" he began. But
MacBride laughed, whereupon Bannon grinned in spite of himself. "All
right," he said.

It was no laughing matter, though, here on the job this Monday
morning, and, once alone in the little section house, he shook his
head again gravely. He liked Peterson too wel