“What do I want of a ladder?  I’ve no use for a man who can’t get up on the timbers.  If a man needs a ladder, he’d better stay abed.”

“That’s where I get fired first thing,” said Bannon.

“Why, you come up all right, with your overcoat on, too.”

“I had to wear it or scratch up the timbers with my bones.  I lost thirty-two pounds up at Duluth.”

Another big timber came swinging up to them at the end of the hoisting rope.  Peterson sprang out upon it.  “I’m going down before I get brushed off,” said Bannon.

“I’ll be back at the office as soon as I get this corbel laid.”

“No hurry.  I want to look over the drawings.  Go easy there,” he called to the engineer at the hoist; “I’m coming down on the elevator.”  Peterson had already cast off the rope, but Bannon jumped for it and thrust his foot into the hook, and the engineer, not knowing who he was, let him down none too gently.

On his way to the office 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.”