Calumet 'K'

He turned away, waved to the laborers, with an, "All right, boys; go ahead," and walked grandly toward the stairway.

Max whistled.

"I'd like to know where Charlie is," said Peterson.

"He ain't far. I'll find him;" and Max hurried away.

Bannon was sitting in the office chair with his feet on the draughting-table, figuring on the back of a blotter. The light from the wall lamp was indistinct, and Bannon had to bend his head forward to see the figures. He did not look up when the door opened and Max came to the railing gate.

"Grady's been up on the distributing floor," said Max, breathlessly, for he had been running.

"What did he want?"

"He's going to call the men off at ten o'clock if we don't put in a runway and dollies on the distributing floor."

Bannon looked at his watch.

"Is that all he wants?"

Max, in his excitement, did not catch the sarcasm in the question.

"That's all he said, but it's enough. We can't do it"

Bannon closed his watch with a snap.

"No," he said, "and we won't throw away any good time trying. You'd better round up the committee that's supposed to run this lodge and send them here. That young Murphy's one of them – he can put you straight. Bring Pete back with you, and the new man, James."

Max lingered, with a look of awe and admiration.

"Are you going to stand out, Mr. Bannon?" he asked.

Bannon dropped his feet to the floor, and turned toward the table.

"Yes," he said. "We're going to stand out."

Since Bannon's talk with President Carver a little drama had been going on in the local lodge, a drama that neither Bannon, Max, nor Peterson knew about. James had been selected by Carver for this work because of proved ability and shrewdness. He had no sooner attached himself to the lodge, and made himself known as an active member, than his personality, without any noticeable effort on his part, began to make itself felt. Up to this time Grady had had full swing, for there had been no one among the laborers with force enough to oppose him.

The first collision took place at an early meeting after Grady's last talk with Bannon. The delegate, in the course of the meeting, bitterly attacked Bannon, accusing him, at the climax of his oration, of an attempt to buy off the honest representative of the working classes for five thousand dollars. This had a tremendous effect on the excitable minds before him. He finished his speech with an impassioned tirade against the corrupt influences of the money power, and was mopping his flushed face, listening with elation to the hum of anger that resulted, confident that he had made his point, when James arose. The new man was as familiar with the tone of the meetings of laborers as Grady himself. At the beginning he had no wish further than to get at the truth. Grady had not stated his case well. It had convinced the laborers, but to James it had weak points. He asked Grady a few pointed questions, that, had the delegate felt the truth behind him, should not have been hard to answer. But Grady was still under the spell of his own oratory, and in attempting to get his feet back on the ground, he bungled. James did not carry the discussion beyond the point where Grady, in the bewilderment of recognizing this new element in the lodge, lost his temper, but when he sat down, the sentiment of the meeting had changed. Few of those men could have explained their feelings; it was simply that the new man was stronger than they were, perhaps as strong as Grady, and they were influenced accordingly.

There was no decision for a strike at that meeting. Grady, cunning at the business, immediately dropped open discussion, and, smarting under the sense of lost prestige, set about regaining his position by well-planned talk with individual laborers. This went on, largely without James' knowledge, until Grady felt sure that a majority of the men were back in his control. This time he was determined to carry through the strike without the preliminary vote of the men. It was a bold stroke, but boldness was needed to defeat Charlie Bannon; and nobody knew better than Grady that a dashing show of authority would be hard for James or any one else to resist.

And so he had come on the job this evening, at a time when he supposed Bannon safe in bed, and delivered his ultimatum. Not that he had any hope of carrying the strike through without some sort of a collision with the boss, but he well knew that an encounter after the strike had gathered momentum would be easier than one before. Bannon might be able to outwit an individual, even Grady himself, but he would find it hard to make headway against an angry mob. And now Grady was pacing stiffly about the Belt Line yards, while the minute hand of his watch crept around toward ten o'clock. Even if Bannon should be called within the hour, a few fiery words to those sweating gangs on the distributing floor should carry the day. But Grady did not think that this would be necessary. He was still in the mistake of supposing that Peterson and the boss were at outs, and he had arrived, by a sort of reasoning that seemed the keenest strategy, at the conclusion that Peterson would take the opportunity to settle the matter himself. In fact, Grady had evolved a neat little campaign, and he was proud of himself.

Bannon did not have to wait long. Soon there was a sound of feet outside the door, and after a little hesitation, six laborers entered, five of them awkwardly and timidly, wondering what was to come. Peterson followed, with Max, and closed the door. The members of the committee stood in a straggling row at the railing, looking at each other and at the floor and ceiling – anywhere but at the boss, who was sitting on the table, sternly taking them in. James stepped to one side.

"Is this all the committee?" Bannon presently said.

The men hesitated, and Murphy, who was in the centre, answered, "Yes, sir."

"You are the governing members of your lodge?"

There was an air of cool authority about Bannon that disturbed the men. They had been led to believe that his power reached only the work on the elevator, and that an attempt on his part to interfere in any way with their organization would be an act of high-handed tyranny, "to be resisted to the death" (Grady's words). But these men standing before their boss, in his own office, were not the same men that thrilled with righteous wrath under Grady's eloquence in the meetings over Barry's saloon. So they looked at the floor and ceiling again, until Murphy at last answered: —

"Yes, sir."

Bannon waited again, knowing that every added moment of silence gave him the firmer control.

"I have nothing to say about the government of your organization," he said, speaking slowly and coldly. "I have brought you here to ask you this question, Have you voted to strike?"

The silence was deep. Peterson, leaning against the closed door, held his breath; Max, sitting on the railing with his elbow thrown over the desk, leaned slightly forward. The eyes of the laborers wandered restlessly about the room. They were disturbed, taken off their guard; they needed Grady. But the thought of Grady was followed by the consciousness of the silent figure of the new man, James, standing behind them. Murphy's first impulse was to lie. Perhaps, if James had not been there, he would have lied. As it was, he glanced up two or three times, and his lips as many times framed themselves about words that did not come. Finally he said, mumbling the words: —

"No, we ain't voted for no strike."

"There has been no such decision made by your organization?"

"No, I guess not."

Bannon turned to Peterson.

"Mr. Peterson, will you please find Mr. Grady and bring him here."

Max and Peterson hurried out together. Bannon drew up the chair, and turned his back on the committee, going on with his figuring. Not a word was said; the men hardly moved; and the minutes went slowly by. Then there was a stir outside, and the sound of low voices. The door flew open, admitting Grady, who stalked to the railing, choking with anger. Max, who immediately followed, was grinning, his eyes resting on a round spot of dust on Grady's shoulder, and on his torn collar and disarranged tie. Peterson came in last, and carefully closed the door – his eyes were blazing, and one sleeve was rolled up over his bare forearm. Neither of them spoke. If anything in the nature of an assault had seemed necessary in dragging the delegate to the office, there had been no witnesses. And he had entered the room of his own accord.

Grady was at a disadvantage, and he knew it. Breathing hard, his face red, his little eyes darting about the room, he took it all in – the members of the committee; the boss, figuring at the table, with an air of exasperating coolness about his lean back; and last of all, James, standing in the shadow. It was the sight of the new man that checked the storm of words that was pressing on Grady's tongue. But he finally gathered himself and stepped forward, pushing aside one of the committee.

Then Bannon turned. He faced about in his chair and began to talk straight at the committee, ignoring the delegate. Grady began to talk at the same time, but though his voice was the louder, no one seemed to hear him. The men were looking at Bannon. Grady hesitated, started again, and then, bound by his own rage and his sense of defeat, let his words die away, and stood casting about for an opening.

" – This man Grady threatened a good while ago that I would have a strike on my hands. He finally came to me and offered to protect me if I would pay him five thousand dollars."

"That's a lie!" shouted the delegate. "He come to me – "

Bannon had hardly paused. He drew a typewritten copy of Grady's letter from his pocket, and read it aloud, then handed it over to Murphy. "That's the way he came at me. I want you to read it."

The man took it awkwardly, glanced at it, and passed it on.

"To-night he's ordered a strike. He calls himself your representative, but he has acted on his own responsibility. Now, I am going to talk plain to you. I came here to build this elevator, and I'm going to do it. I propose to treat you men fair and square. If you think you ain't treated right, you send an honest man to this office, and I'll talk with him. But I'm through with Grady. I won't have him here at all. If you send him around again, I'll throw him off the job."

The men were a little startled. They looked at one another, and the man on Murphy's left whispered something. Bannon sat still, watching them.

Then Grady came to himself. He wheeled around to face the committee, and threw out one arm in a wide gesture.

"I demand to know what this means! I demand to know if there is a law in this land! Is an honest man, the representative of the hand of labor, to be attacked by hired ruffians? Is he to be slandered by the tyrant who drives you at the point of the pistol? And you not men enough to defend your rights – the rights held by every American – the rights granted by the Constitution! But it ain't for myself I would talk. It ain't my own injuries that I suffer for. Your liberty hangs in the balance. This man has dared to interfere in the integrity of your lodge. Have you no words – "

Bannon arose, caught Grady's arm, and whirled him around.

"Grady," he said, "shut up."

The delegate tried to jerk away, but he could not shake off that grip. He looked toward the committeemen, but they were silent. He looked everywhere but up into the eyes that were blazing down at him. And finally Bannon felt the muscles within his grip relax.

"I'll tell you what I want you to do," said Bannon to the committeemen. "I want you to elect a new delegate. Don't talk about interference – I don't care how you elect him, or who he is, if he comes to me squarely."

Grady was wriggling again.

"This means a strike!" he shouted. "This means the biggest strike the West has ever seen! You won't get men for love or money – "

Bannon gave the arm a wrench, and broke in: —

"I'm sick of this. I laid this matter before President Carver. I have his word that if you hang on to this man after he's been proved a blackmailer, your lodge can be dropped from the Federation. If you try to strike, you won't hurt anybody but yourselves. That's all. You can go."

"Wait – " Grady began, but they filed out without looking at him. James, as he followed them, nodded, and said, "Good night, Mr. Bannon."

Then for the last time Bannon led Grady away. Peterson started forward, but the boss shook his head, and went out, marching the delegate between the lumber piles to the point where the path crossed the Belt Line tracks.

"Now, Mr. Grady," he said, "this is where our ground stops. The other sides are the road there, and the river, and the last piles of cribbing at the other end. I'm telling you so you will know where you don't belong. Now, get out!"

CHAPTER XIV

The effect of the victory was felt everywhere. Not only were Max and Pete and Hilda jubilant over it, but the under-foremen, the timekeepers, even the laborers attacked their work with a fresher energy. It was like the first whiff of salt air to an army marching to the sea. Since the day when the cribbing came down from Ledyard, the work had gone forward with almost incredible rapidity; there had been no faltering during the weeks when Grady's threatened catastrophe was imminent, but now that the big shadow of the little delegate was dispelled, it was easier to see that the huge warehouse was almost finished. There was still much to do, and the handful of days that remained seemed absurdly inadequate; but it needed only a glance at what Charlie Bannon's tireless, driving energy had already accomplished to make the rest look easy. "We're sure of it now. She'll be full to the roof before the year is out." As Max went over the job with his time-book next morning, he said it to every man he met, and they all believed him. Peterson, the same man and not the same man either, who had once vowed that there wouldn't be any night work on Calumet K, who had bent a pair of most unwilling shoulders to the work Bannon had put upon them, who had once spent long, sulky afternoons in the barren little room of his new boarding-house; Peterson held himself down in bed exactly three hours the morning after that famous victory. Before eleven o'clock he was sledging down a tottering timber at the summit of the marine tower, a hundred and forty feet sheer above the wharf. Just before noon he came into the office and found Hilda there alone.

He had stopped outside the door to put on his coat, but had not buttoned it; his shirt, wet as though he had been in the lake, clung to him and revealed the outline of every muscle in his great trunk. He flung his hat on the draughting-table, and his yellow hair seemed crisper and curlier than ever before.

"Well, it looks as though we was all right," he said.

Hilda nodded emphatically. "You think we'll get through in time, don't you, Mr. Peterson?"

"Think!" he exclaimed. "I don't have to stop to think. Here comes Max; just ask him."

Max slammed the door behind him, brought down the timekeeper's book on Hilda's desk with a slap that made her jump, and vaulted to a seat on the railing. "Well, I guess it's a case of hurrah for us, ain't it, Pete?"

"Your sister asked me if I thought we'd get done on time. I was just saying it's a sure thing."

"I don't know," said Max, laughing. "I guess an earthquake could stop us. But why ain't you abed, Pete?"

"What do I want to be abed for? I ain't going to sleep any more this year – unless we get through a day or two ahead of time. I don't like to miss any of it. Charlie Bannon may have hustled before, but I guess this breaks his record. Where is he now, Max?"

"Down in the cellar putting in the running gear for the 'cross-the-house conveyors. He has his nerve with him. He's putting in three drives entirely different from the way they are in the plans. He told me just now that there wasn't a man in the office who could design a drive that wouldn't tie itself up in square knots in the first ten minutes. I wonder what old MacBride'll say when he sees that he's changed the plans."

"If MacBride has good sense, he'll pass anything that Charlie puts up," said Pete.

He was going to say more, but just then Bannon strode into the office and over to the draughting table. He tossed Pete's hat to one side and began studying a detail of the machinery plans.

"Max." He spoke without looking up. "I wish you'd find a water boy and send him up to the hotel to get a couple of sandwiches and a bottle of coffee."

"Well, that's a nice way to celebrate, I must say," Pete commented.

"Celebrate what?"

"Why, last night; throwing Grady down. You ought to take a day off on the strength of that."

"What's Grady got to do with it? He ain't in the specifications."

"No," said Pete, slowly; "but where would we have been if he'd got the men off?"

"Where would we have been if the house had burned up?" Bannon retorted, turning away from the table. "That's got nothing to do with it. I haven't felt less like taking a day off since I came on the job. We may get through on time and we may not. If we get tangled up in the plans like this, very often, I don't know how we'll come out. But the surest way to get left is to begin now telling ourselves that this is easy and it's a cinch. That kind of talk makes me tired."

Pete flushed, started an explanatory sentence, and another, and then, very uncomfortable, went out.

Bannon did not look up; he went on studying the blue print, measuring here and there with his three-sided ruler and jotting down incomprehensible operations in arithmetic on a scrap of paper. Max was figuring tables in his time-book, Hilda poring over the cash account. For half an hour no one spoke. Max crammed his cap down over his ears and went out, and there were ten minutes more of silence. Then Bannon began talking. He still busied his fingers with the blue print, and Hilda, after discovering that he was talking to himself rather than to her, went on with her work. But nevertheless she heard, in a fragmentary way, what he was saying.

"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 to-day 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."

"Pete," he said, coming upon him in the marine tower a little later, "I've got over my stomach-ache. Is it all right?"

"Sure," said Pete; "I didn't know you was feeling bad. I was thinking about that belt gallery, Charlie. Ain't it time we was putting it up? I'm getting sort of nervous about it."

"There ain't three days' work in it, the way we're going," said Bannon, thoughtfully, his eyes on the C. & S. C. right-of-way that lay between him and the main house, "but I guess you're right. We'll get at it now. There's no telling what sort of a surprise party those railroad fellows may have for us. The plans call for three trestles between the tracks. We'll get those up to-day."

To Pete, building the gallery was a more serious business. He had not Bannon's years of experience at bridge repairing; it had happened that he had never been called upon to put up a belt gallery before, and this idea of building a wooden box one hundred and fifty feet long and holding it up, thirty feet in air, on three trestles, was formidable. Bannon's nonchalant air of setting about it seemed almost an affectation.

Each trestle was to consist of a rank of four posts, planted in a line at right angles to the direction of the gallery; they were to be held together at the top by a corbel. No one gave rush orders any more on Calumet K, for the reason that no one ever thought of doing anything else. If Bannon sent for a man, he came on the run. So in an incredibly short time the fences were down and a swarm of men with spades, post augers, picks, and shovels had invaded the C. & S. C. right-of-way. Up and down the track a hundred yards each way from the line of the gallery Bannon had stationed men to give warning of the approach of trains. "Now," said Bannon, "we'll get this part of the job done before any one has time to kick. And they won't be very likely to try to pull 'em up by the roots once we get 'em planted."

But the section boss had received instructions that caused him to be wide-awake, day or night, to what was going on in the neighborhood of Calumet K. Half an hour after the work was begun, the picket line up the track signalled that something was coming. There was no sound of bell or whistle, but presently Bannon saw a hand car spinning down the track as fast as six big, sweating men could pump the levers. The section boss had little to say; simply that they were to get out of there and put up that fence again, and the quicker the better. Bannon tried to tell him that the railroad had consented to their putting in the gallery, that they were well within their rights, that he, the section boss, had better be careful not to exceed his instructions. But the section boss had spoken his whole mind already. He was not of the sort that talk just for the pleasure of hearing their own voices, and he had categorical instructions that made parley unnecessary. He would not even tell from whom he had the orders. So the posts were lugged out of the way and the fence was put up and the men scattered out to their former work again, grinning a little over Bannon's discomfiture.

Bannon's next move was to write to Minneapolis for information and instructions, but MacBride, who seemed to have all the information there was, happened to be in Duluth, and Brown's instructions were consequently foggy. So, after waiting a few days for something more definite, Bannon disappeared one afternoon and was gone more than an hour. When he strode into the office again, keen and springy as though his work had just begun, Hilda looked up and smiled a little. Pete was tilted back in the chair staring glumly out of the window. He did not turn until Bannon slapped him jovially on the shoulders and told him to cheer up.