Samuel Merwin - Calumet K

"I'll be glad when it gets up far enough to look like something, so we can feel that things are really getting on."

"They're getting on all right," Bannon replied.

"How soon will we be working on the cupola?"

"Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow!" Max stopped (they had started toward the office) and looked at Bannon in amazement. "Why, we can't do it, can we?"

"Why not?" Bannon pointed toward a cleared space behind the pile of cribbing, where the carpenters had been at work on the heavy timbers, "They're all ready for the framing."

Max made no reply, but he looked up as they passed the elevator and measured with his eyes the space remaining between the cribbing and the tops of the posts. He had yet to become accustomed to Bannon's methods; but he had seen enough of him to believe that it would be done if Bannon said so.

They were halfway to the office when Max said, with a touch of embarrassment:—

"How's Hilda going to take hold, Mr. Bannon?"

"First-class."

Max's eyes sparkled.

"She can do anything you give her. Her head's as clear as a bell."

For the moment Bannon made no reply, but as they paused outside the office door he said:

"We'd better make a point of dropping in at the office now and then during the day. Any time you know I'm out on the job and you're up this way, just look in."

Max nodded.

"And nights when we're working overtime, there won't be any trouble about your getting off long enough to see your sister home. She won't need to do any night work."

They entered the office. Miss Vogel was standing by the railing gate, buttoning her jacket and waiting for Max. Behind her, bending over the blue prints on the table, stood Peterson, apparently too absorbed to hear the two men come in. Bannon gave him a curious glance, for no blue prints were needed in working on the annex, which was simply a matter of building bins up from the foundation. When Max and his sister had gone the foreman looked around, and said, with a show of surprise:—

"Oh, hello, Charlie. Going up to the house?"

"Yes."

Peterson's manner was not wholly natural. As they walked across the flats his conversation was a little forced, and he laughed occasionally at certain occurrences in the morning's work that were not particularly amusing.

Bannon did not get back to the office until a half hour after work had commenced for the afternoon. He carried a large bundle under one arm and in his hand a wooden box with a slot cut in the cover. He found the scrubwoman hard at work on the office floor. The chair and the unused stool were on the table. He looked about with satisfaction.

"It begins to look better already," he said to Miss Vogel. "You know we're not going to be able to keep it all clean; there'll be too many coming in. But there's going to be a law passed about tracking mud inside the railing."

He opened his 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 on, until spires and towers and gray walls were massed in confusion, hung a veil of smoke, like a black cloud, spreading away farther than eye could see. This was Chicago.

Bannon climbed to the ground and took a last look about the work before going to the office. The annex was growing slowly but surely; and Peterson, coatless and hatless as usual, with sleeves rolled up, was at work with the men, swinging a hammer here, impatiently shouldering a bundle of planks there. And Bannon saw more clearly what he had known before, that Peterson was a good man when kept within his limitations. Certainly the annex could not have been better started.

When Bannon entered the office, Miss Vogel handed him a sheet of paper. He came in through the gate and stood at the desk beside her to have the light of the lamp. It was a balance sheet, giving the results of her examination of the books.

"All right, eh?" he said. A glance had been enough to show him that hereafter there would be no confusion in the books; the cashier of a metropolitan bank could not have issued a more businesslike statement. He tossed it on the desk, saying, "You might file it."

Then he took time to look about the office. It was as clean as blackened, splintered planks could be made; even the ceiling had been attacked and every trace of cobweb removed.

"Well," he said, "this is business. And we'll keep it this way, too."

She had faced about on the stool and was looking at him with a twinkle in her eye.

"Yes," she said, evidently trying not to laugh; "we'll try to."

He was not looking at her as she spoke, but when, a moment later, the laugh broke away from her, he turned. She was looking at his feet. He glanced down and saw a row of black footprints leading from the door to where he stood, one of them squarely in the centre of the new mat. He gazed ruefully, then he reached into his pocket and drew out a quarter, dropping it in the box.

"Well—" he said, wiping his feet; but the whistle just then gave a long blast, and he did not finish the sentence.

After supper Bannon and Peterson sat in the room they occupied together. In the walk home and during supper there had been the same sullen manner about the younger man that Bannon had observed at noon. Half a day was a long time for Peterson to keep to himself something that bothered him, and before the close of dinner he had begun working the talk around. Now, after a long silence, that Bannon filled with sharpening pencils, he said:

"Some people think a lot of themselves, don't they, Charlie?"