“All right,” he said.  “You’re the boss now.”

And then in a moment the straining hawsers were hauling cars up into the house.  The seals were broken, the doors rolled back, and the wheat came pouring out.  The shovellers clambered into the cars and the steam power shovels helped the torrent along.  It fell through the gratings, into steel tanks, and then the tireless metal cups carried it up, up, up, ’way to the top of the building.  And then it came tumbling down again; down into garners, and down again into the great weighing hoppers, and recognized and registered and marketable at last, part of the load that was to bury the Clique that had braved it out of sight of all but their creditors, it went streaming down the spouts into the bins.

The first of the barges in the river was moved down beside the spouting house, her main hatch just opposite the tower.  And now Pete, in charge there, gave the word, and the marine leg, gravely, deliberately descended.  There is a magnificent audacity about that sort of performance.  The leg was ninety feet long, steel-booted, framed of great timbers, heavy enough to have wrecked the barge like a birch baric canoe if it had got away.  It went down bodily into the hold and the steel boot was buried in wheat.  Then Pete threw another lever, and in a moment another endless series of cups was carrying the wheat aloft.  It went over the cross-head and down a spout, then stretched out in a golden ribbon along the glistening white belt that ran the length of the gallery.  Then, like the wheat from the cars, it was caught up again in the cups, and shot down through spouts, and carried along on belts to the remotest bins in the annex.

For the first few hours of it the men’s nerves were hair springs, but as time went on and the stream kept pouring in without pause, the tension relaxed though the watch never slackened.  Men patted the bearings affectionately, and still the same report came to Bannon, “All cool.”

Late that night, as the superintendent was figuring his weighing reports, he said to Bannon, “At this rate, we’ll have several hours to spare.”

“We haven’t had our accident yet,” said Bannon, shortly.

It happened within an hour, at the marine leg, but it was not serious.  They heard a splintering sound, down in the dark, somewhere, and Pete, shouting to them to throw out the clutch, climbed out and down on the sleet-clad girders that framed the leg.  An agile monkey might have been glad to return alive from such a climb, but Pete came back presently with a curious specimen of marine hardware that had in some way got into the wheat, and thence into the boot and one of the cups.  Part way up it had got jammed and had ripped up the sheathing of the leg.  They started the leg again, but soon learned that it was leaking badly.

“You’ll have to haul up for repairs, I guess,” the captain called up to them.

“Haven’t time,” said Pete, under his breath, and with a hammer and nails, and a big piece of sacking, he went down the leg again, playing his neck against a half-hour’s delay as serenely as most men would walk downstairs to dinner.  “Start her up, boys,” he called, when the job was done, and, with the leg jolting under his hands as he climbed, he came back into the tower.