“I want to tell you,” she said, “I haven’t understood exactly until tonight—­what they said about the accident and the way you’ve talked about it—­well, some people think you don’t think very much about the men, and that if anybody’s hurt, or anything happens, you don’t care as long as the work goes on.”  She was looking straight at him.  “I thought so, too.  And tonight I found out some things you’ve been doing for him—­how you’ve been giving him tobacco, and the things he likes best that I’d never have thought of, and I knew it was you that did it, and not the Company—­and I—­I beg your pardon.”

Bannon did not know what to reply.  They stood for a moment without speaking, and then she smiled, and said “Good night,” and ran up the steps without looking around.

CHAPTER XIII

It was the night of the tenth of December.  Three of the four stories of the cupola were building, and the upright posts were reaching toward the fourth.  It still appeared to be a confused network of timbers, with only the beginnings of walls, but as the cupola walls are nothing but a shell of light boards to withstand the wind, the work was further along than might have been supposed.  Down on the working story the machinery was nearly all in, and up here in the cupola the scales and garners were going into place as rapidly as the completing of the supporting framework permitted.  The cupola floors were not all laid.  If you had stood on the distributing floor, over the tops of the bins, you might have looked not only down through a score of openings between plank areas and piles of timbers, into black pits, sixteen feet square by seventy deep, but upward through a grill of girders and joists to the clear sky.  Everywhere men swarmed over the work, and the buzz of the electric lights and the sounds of hundreds of hammers blended into a confused hum.

If you had walked to the east end of the building, here and there balancing along a plank or dodging through gangs of laborers and around moving timbers, you would have seen stretching from off a point not halfway through to the ground, the annex bins, rising so steadily that it was a matter only of a few weeks before they would be ready to receive grain.  Now another walk, this time across the building to the north side, would show you the river house, out there on the wharf, and the marine tower rising up through the middle with a single arc lamp on the topmost girder throwing a mottled, checkered shadow on the wharf and the water below.

At a little after eight o’clock, Peterson, who had been looking at the stairway, now nearly completed, came out on the distributing floor.  He was in good spirits, for everything was going well, and Bannon had frankly credited him, of late, with the improvement in the work of the night shifts.  He stood looking up through the upper floors of the cupola, and he did not see Max until the timekeeper stood beside him.