“Take a day off—­schoolboy trick—­enough to make a man tired.  Might as well do it, though.  We ain’t going to get through.  The office ought to do a little work once in a while just to see what it’s like.  They think a man can do anything.  I’d like to know why I ain’t entitled to a night’s sleep as well as MacBride.  But he don’t think so.  After he’d worked me twenty-four hours a day up to Duluth, and I lost thirty-two pounds up there, he sends me down to a mess like this.  With a lot of drawings that look as though they were made by a college boy.  Where does he expect ’em to pile their car doors, I’d like to know.”

That was the vein of it, though the monologue ran on much longer.  But at last he swung impatiently around and addressed Hilda.  “I’m ready to throw up my hands.  I think I’ll go back to Minneapolis and tell MacBride I’ve had enough.  He can come down here and finish the house himself.”

“Do you think he would get it done in time?” Hilda’s eyes were laughing at him, but she kept them on her work.

“Oh, yes,” he said wearily.  “He’d get the grain into her somehow.  You couldn’t stump MacBride with anything.  That’s why he makes it so warm for us.”

“Do you think,” she asked very demurely, indeed, “that if Mr. MacBride had been here he could have built it any faster than—­than we have, so far?”

“I don’t believe it,” said Bannon, unwarily.  Her smile told him that he had been trapped.  “I see,” he added.  “You mean that there ain’t any reason why we can’t do it.”

He arose and tramped uneasily about the little shanty.  “Oh, of course, we’ll get it done—­just because we have to.  There ain’t anything else we can do.  But just the same I’m sick of the business.  I want to quit.”

She said nothing, and after a moment he wheeled and, facing her, demanded abruptly:  “What’s the matter with me, anyway?” She looked at him frankly, a smile, almost mischievous, in her face.  The hard, harassed look between his eyes and about his drawn mouth melted away, and he repeated the question:  “What’s the matter with me?  You’re the doctor.  I’ll take whatever medicine you say.”

“You didn’t take Mr. Peterson’s suggestion very well—­about taking a holiday, I mean.  I don’t know whether I dare prescribe for you or not.  I don’t think you need a day off.  I think that, next to a good, long vacation, the best thing for you is excitement.”  He laughed.  “No, I mean it.  You’re tired out, of course, but if you have enough to occupy your mind, you don’t know it.  The trouble today is that everything is going too smoothly.  You weren’t a bit afraid yesterday that the elevator wouldn’t be done on time.  That was because you thought there was going to be a strike.  And if just now the elevator should catch on fire or anything, you’d feel all right about it again.”

He still half suspected that she was making game of him, and he looked at her steadily while he turned her words over in his mind.  “Well,” he said, with a short laugh, “if the only medicine I need is excitement, I’ll be the healthiest man you ever saw in a little while.  I guess I’ll find Pete.  I must have made him feel pretty sore.”