She hesitated, glancing over the jumble of papers on the desk.

“It hasn’t been kept up very well,” she presently said.  “But it won’t be hard, I think, to straighten it out.”

Bannon leaned on the rail and glanced at the paper on which she had been setting down totals.

“I guess you’d better go home, Miss Vogel.  It’s after nine o’clock.”

“I can finish in an hour.”

“You’d better go.  There’ll be chances enough for night work without your making them.”

She smiled, cleared up the desk, and reached for her jacket, which hung from the nail behind her.  Then she paused.

“I thought I would wait for my brother, Mr. Bannon.”

“That’s all right.  I guess we can spare him.  I’ll speak to him.  Do you live far?”

“No; Max and I are boarding at the same place.”

He had got to the door when she asked:—­

“Shall I put out the light?”

He turned and nodded.  She was drawing on her gloves.  She perhaps was not a very pretty girl, but there was something in her manner, as she stood there in the dim light, her hair straying out from beneath her white “sombrero” hat, that for the moment took Bannon far away from this environment of railroad tracks and lumber piles.  He waited till she came out, then he locked the door.

“I’ll walk along with you myself, if you don’t mind,” he said.  And after they had crossed the Belt Line tracks, and he had helped her, with a little laugh from each of them, to pick her way over the switches and between the freight cars, he said:  “You don’t look much like your brother.”

It was not a long walk to the boarding house but before they had reached it Bannon was nervous.  It was not a custom with him to leave his work on such an errand.  He bade her a brusque good-night, and hurried back, pausing only after he had crossed the tracks, to cast his eye over the timber.  There was no sign of activity, though the two arc lamps were still in place.  “All in, eh,” he said.

He followed the path beside the elevator and on around the end, and then, with an exclamation, he hurried forward; for there was the same idle crowd about the tracks that had been there during the trouble with the section boss—­the same buzz of talk, and the idle laughter and shouting.  As he ran, his foot struck a timber-end, and he sprawled forward for nearly a rod before recovering his balance; then he stopped and looked along the ground.

A long line of timbers lay end to end, the timber hooks across them or near by on the ground, where they had been dropped by the laborers.  On along the path, through the fence openings, and out on the tracks, lay the lines of timber.  Here and there Bannon passed gangs of men lounging on the ground, waiting for the order to move on.  As he passed through the fence, walking on the timbers, and hurried through the crowd, which had been pushed back close to the fence, he heard a low laugh that came along like a wave from man to man.  In a moment he was in front of them all.