through the pile and his heart grew sick with dismay.
There were drawings of tanks, drawings of substructures and
superstructures in every phase of construction--enough of them
to daunt a skilled engineer. He realized that he had by no means
appreciated the full magnitude of this work, in fact had never figured
on a job anything like this one. He could see at least a week's hard,
constant labor ahead of him--a week's work to be done in three days.
There was no use trying; the time was too short; it was a physical
impossibility to formulate an intelligent proposition in such a
short length of time. Then to Mitchell's mind came the picture of
a wretched, golden-haired girl clinging to the iron fence of the
Pennsylvania depot. He gathered the rolls into his arms.

"At ten-thirty, Thursday," said he.

"Ten-thirty, sharp."

"Thank you. I'll have my bid in."

His muscles ached and his knees were trembling even before he had
reached the street. When he tried to board a 'bus he was waved away,
so he called a cab, piled his blueprints inside of it, and then
clambered in on top of them. He realized that he was badly frightened.

To this day the sight of a blueprint gives Louis Mitchell a peculiar
nausea and a fluttering sensation about the heart. At three o'clock
the next morning he felt his way blindly to his bed and toppled upon
it, falling straightway into a slumber during which he passed through
monotonous, maddening wastes of blue and white, over which ran
serpentine rows of figures.

He was up with the dawn and at his desk again, but by four that
afternoon he was too dazed, too exhausted to continue. His eyes were
playing him tricks, the room was whirling, his hand was shaking until
his fingers staggered drunkenly across the sheets of paper. Ground
plans, substructures, superstructures, were jumbled into a frightful
tangle. He wanted to yell. Instead he flung the drawings about the
room, stamped savagely upon them, then rushed down-stairs and devoured
a table d'hote dinner. He washed the meal down with a bottle of red
wine, smoked a long cigar, then undressed and went to bed amid the
scattered blueprints. He slept like a dead man.

He arose at sun-up, clear-headed, calm. All day he worked like a
machine, increasing his speed as the hours flew. He took good care to
eat and drink, and, above all, to smoke at regular intervals, but he
did not leave his room. By dark he had much of the task behind him; by
midnight he