Calumet 'K'

"Those railroad chaps are laying for us, sure enough," he said. "I've been talking to MacBride himself – over at the telephone exchange; he ain't in town – and he said that Porter – he's the vice-president of the C. & S. C. – Porter told him, when he was in Chicago, that they wouldn't object at all to our building the gallery over their tracks. But that's all we've got to go by. Not a word on paper. Oh, they mean to give us a picnic, and no mistake!"

With that, Bannon called up the general offices of the C. & S. C. and asked for Mr. Porter. There was some little delay in getting the connection, and then three or four minutes of fencing while a young man at the other end of the line tried to satisfy himself that Bannon had the right to ask for Mr. Porter, let alone to talk with him, and Bannon, steadily ignoring his questions, continued blandly requesting him to call Mr. Porter to the telephone. Hilda was listening with interest, for Bannon's manner was different from anything she had ever seen in him before. It lacked nothing of his customary assurance, but its breeziness gave place to the most studied restraint; he might have been a railroad president himself. He hung up the receiver, however, without accomplishing anything, for the young man finally told him that Mr. Porter had gone out for the afternoon.

So next morning Bannon tried again. He learned that Porter was in, and all seemed to be going well until he mentioned MacBride & Company, after which Mr. Porter became very elusive. Three or four attempts to pin him down, or at least to learn his whereabouts, proved unsuccessful, and at last Bannon, with wrath in his heart, started down town.

It was nearly night before he came back, and as before, he found Pete sitting gloomily in the office waiting his return. "Well," exclaimed the night boss, looking at him eagerly; "I thought you was never coming back. We've most had a fit here, wondering how you'd come out. I don't have to ask you, though. I can see by your looks that we're all right."

Bannon laughed, and glanced over at Hilda, who was watching him closely. "Is that your guess, too, Miss Vogel?"

"I don't think so," she said. "I think you've had a pretty hard time."

"They're both good guesses," he said, pulling a paper out of his pocket, and handing it to Hilda. "Read that." It was a formal permit for building the gallery, signed by Porter himself, and bearing the O. K. of the general manager.

"Nice, isn't it?" Bannon commented. "Now read the postscript, Miss Vogel." It was in Porter's handwriting, and Hilda read it slowly. "MacBride & Company are not, however, allowed to erect trestles or temporary scaffolding in the C. & S. C. right-of-way, nor to remove any property of the Company, such as fences, nor to do anything which may, in the opinion of the local authorities, hinder the movement of trains."

Pete's face went blank. "A lot of good this darned permit does us then. That just means we can't build it."

Bannon nodded. "That's what it's supposed to mean," he said. "That's just the point."

"You see, it's like this," he went on. "That man Porter would make the finest material for ring-oiling, dust proof, non-inflammable bearings that I ever saw. He's just about the hardest, smoothest, shiniest, coolest little piece of metal that ever came my way. Well, he wants to delay us on this job. I took that in the moment I saw him. Well, I told him how we went ahead, just banking on his verbal consent, and how his railroad had jumped on us; and I said I was sure it was just a misunderstanding, but I wanted it cleared up because we was in a hurry. He grinned a little over that, and I went on talking. Said we'd bother 'em as little as possible; of course we had to put up the trestles in their property, because we couldn't hold the thing up with a balloon.

"He asked me, innocent as you please, if a steel bridge couldn't be made in a single span, and I said, yes, but it would take too long. We only had a few days. 'Well,' he says, 'Mr. Bannon, I'll give you a permit.' And that's what he gave me. I bet he's grinning yet. I wonder if he'll grin so much about three days from now."

"Do you mean that you can build it anyway?" Hilda demanded breathlessly.

He nodded, and, turning to Pete, plunged into a swift, technical explanation of how the trick was to be done. "Won't you please tell me, too?" Hilda asked appealingly.

"Sure," he said. He sat down beside her at the desk and began drawing on a piece of paper. Pete came and looked over his shoulder. Bannon began his explanation.

"Here's the spouting house, and here's the elevator. Now, suppose they were only fifteen feet apart. Then if we had two ten-foot sticks and put 'em up at an angle and fastened the floor to a bolt that came down between 'em, the whole weight of the thing would be passed along to the foundation that the ends of the timbers rest on. But you see, it's got to be one hundred and fifty feet long, and to build it that way would take two one hundred-foot timbers, and we haven't got 'em that long.

"But we've got plenty of sticks that are twenty feet long, and plenty of bolts, and this is the way we arrange 'em. We put up our first stick (x) at an angle just as before. Then we let a bolt (o) down through the upper end of it and through the floor of the gallery. Now the next timber (y) we put up at just the same angle as the first, with the foot of it bearing down on the lower end of the bolt.

"That second stick pushes two ways. A straight down push and a sideways push. The bolt resists the down push and transmits it to the first stick, and that pushes against the sill that I marked a. Now, the sideways push is against the butt of the first timber of the floor, and that's passed on, same way, to the sill.

"Well, that's the whole trick. You begin at both ends at once and just keep right on going. When the thing's done it looks this way. You see where the two sections meet in the middle, it's just the same as the little fifteen-foot gallery that we made a picture of up here."

"I understand that all right," said Pete, "but I don't see yet how you're going to do it without some kind of scaffolding."

"Easy. I ain't going to use a balloon, but I've got something that's better. It'll be out here this afternoon. Come and help me get things ready."

There was not much to do, for the timber was already cut to the right sizes, but Bannon was not content till everything was piled so that when work did begin on the gallery it could go without a hitch. He was already several days behind, and when one is figuring it as fine as Bannon was doing in those last days, even one day is a serious matter. He could do nothing more at the belt gallery until his substitute for a scaffold should arrive; it did not come that afternoon or evening, and next morning when he came on the job it still had not been heard from. There was enough to occupy every moment of his time and every shred of his thought without bothering about the gallery, and he did not worry about it as he would have worried if he had had nothing to do but wait for it.

But when, well along in the afternoon, a water boy found him up on the weighing floor and told him there was something for him at the office, he made astonishing time getting down. "Here's your package," said Max, as Bannon burst into the little shanty. It was a little, round, pasteboard box. If Bannon had had the office to himself, he would, in his disappointment, have cursed the thing till it took fire. As it was, he stood speechless a moment and then turned to go out again.

"Aren't you going to open it, now you're here?" asked Max.

Bannon, after hesitating, acted on the suggestion, and when he saw what it was, he laughed. No, Brown had not forgotten the hat! Max gazed at it in unfeigned awe; it was shiny as a mirror, black as a hearse, tall, in his eyes – for this was his first near view of one – as the seat of a dining-room chair. "Put it on," he said to Bannon. "Let's see how it looks on you."

"Not much. Wouldn't I look silly in a thing like that, though? I'd rather wear an ordinary length of stovepipe. That'd be durable, anyway. I wonder what Brown sent it for. I thought he knew a joke when he saw one."

Just then one of the under-foremen came in. "Oh, Mr. Bannon," he said, "I've been looking for you. There's a tug in the river with a big, steel cable aboard that they said was for us. I told 'em I thought it was a mistake – "

It was all one movement, Bannon's jamming that hat – the silk hat – down on his head, and diving through the door. He shouted orders as he ran, and a number of men, Pete among them, got to the wharf as soon as he did.

"Now, boys, this is all the false work we can have. We're going to hang it up across the tracks and hang our gallery up on it till it's strong enough to hold itself. We've got just forty-eight hours to do the whole trick. Catch hold now – lively."

It was a simple scheme of Bannon's. The floor of the gallery was to be built in two sections, one in the main house, one in the spouting house. As fast as the timbers were bolted together the halves of the floor were shoved out over the tracks, each free end being supported by a rope which ran up over a pulley. The pulley was held by an iron ring fast to the cable, but perfectly free to slide along it, and thus accompany the end of the floor as it was moved outward. Bannon explained it to Pete in a few quick words while the men were hustling the big cable off the tug.

"Of course," he was concluding, "the thing'll wabble a good deal, specially if it's as windy as this, and it won't be easy to work on, but it won't fall if we make everything fast."

Pete had listened pretty closely at first, but now Bannon noticed that his attention seemed to be wandering to a point a few inches above Bannon's head. He was about to ask what was the matter when he found out. It was windier on that particular wharf than anywhere else in the Calumet flats, and the hat he had on was not built for that sort of weather. It was perfectly rigid, and not at all accommodated to the shape of Bannon's head. So, very naturally, it blew off, rolled around among their feet for a moment, and then dropped into the river between the wharf and the tug.

Bannon was up on the spouting house, helping make fast the cable end when a workman brought the hat back to him. Somebody on the tug had fished it out with a trolling line. But the hat was well past resuscitation. It had been thoroughly drowned, and it seemed to know it.

"Take that to the office," said Bannon. "Have Vogel wrap it up just as it is and ship it to Mr. Brown. I'll dictate a letter to go with it by and by."

For all Bannon's foresight, there threatened to be a hitch in the work on the gallery. The day shift was on again, and twenty-four of Bannon's forty-eight hours were spent, when he happened to say to a man: —

"Never mind that now, but be sure you fix it to-morrow."

"To-morrow?" the man repeated. "We ain't going to work to-morrow, are we?"

Bannon noticed that every man within hearing stopped work, waiting for the answer. "Sure," he said. "Why not?"

There was some dissatisfied grumbling among them which he was quite at a loss to understand until he caught the word "Christmas."

"Christmas!" he exclaimed, in perfectly honest astonishment. "Is to-morrow Christmas?" He ran his hand through his stubby hair. "Boys," he said, "I'm sorry to have to ask it of you. But can't we put it off a week? Look here. We need this day. Now, if you'll say Christmas is a week from to-morrow, I'll give every man on the job a Christmas dinner that you'll never forget; all you can eat and as much again, and you bring your friends, if we work to-morrow and we have her full of wheat a week from to-day. Does that go?"

It went, with a ripping cheer to boot; a cheer that was repeated here and there all over the place as Bannon's offer was passed along.

So for another twenty-four hours they strained and tugged and tusselled up in the big swing, for it was nothing else, above the railroad tracks. There was a northeast gale raging down off the lake, with squalls of rain and sleet mixed up in it, and it took the crazy, swaying box in its teeth and shook it and tossed it up in the air in its eagerness to strip it off the cable. But somewhere there was an unconquerable tenacity that held fast, and in the teeth of the wind the long box grew rigid, as the trusses were pounded into place by men so spent with fatigue that one might say it was sheer good will that drove the hammers.

At four o'clock Christmas afternoon the last bolt was drawn taut. The gallery was done. Bannon had been on the work since midnight – sixteen consecutive hours. He had eaten nothing except two sandwiches that he had stowed in his pockets. His only pause had been about nine o'clock that morning when he had put his head in the office door to wish Hilda a Merry Christmas.

When the evening shift came on – that was just after four – one of the under-foremen tried to get him to talking, but Bannon was too tired to talk. "Get your tracks and rollers in," he said. "Take down the cable."

"Don't you want to stay and see if she'll hold when the cable comes down?" called the foreman after him as he started away.

"She'll hold," said Bannon.

CHAPTER XV

Before December was half gone – and while the mild autumn weather serenely held, in spite of weather predictions and of storm signs about the sun and days of blue haze and motionless trees – the newspaper-reading public knew all the outside facts about the fight in wheat, and they knew it to be the biggest fight since the days of "Old Hutch" and the two-dollar-a-bushel record. Indeed, there were men who predicted that the two-dollar mark would be reached before Christmas, for the Clique of speculators who held the floor were buying, buying, buying – millions upon millions of dollars were slipping through their ready hands, and still there was no hesitation, no weakening. Until the small fry had dropped out the deal had been confused; it was too big, there were too many interests involved, to make possible a clear understanding, but now it was settling down into a grim fight between the biggest men on the Board. The Clique were buying wheat – Page & Company were selling it to them: if it should come out, on the thirty-first of December, that Page & Company had sold more than they could deliver, the Clique would be winners; but if it should have been delivered, to the last bushel, the corner would be broken, and the Clique would drop from sight as so many reckless men had dropped before. The readers of every great newspaper in the country were watching Page & Company. The general opinion was that they could not do it, that such an enormous quantity of grain could not be delivered and registered in time, even if it were to be had.

But the public overlooked, indeed it had no means of knowing, one important fact. The members of the Clique were new men in the public eye. They represented apparently unlimited capital, but they were young, eager, overstrung; flushed with the prospect of success, they were talking for publication. They believed they knew of every bushel in the country that was to be had, and they allowed themselves to say that they had already bought more than this. If this were true, Page was beaten. But it was not true. The young men of the Clique had forgotten that Page had trained agents in every part of the world; that he had alliances with great railroad and steamer lines, that he had a weather bureau and a system of crop reports that outdid those of the United States Government, that he could command more money than two such Cliques, and, most important of all, that he did not talk for publication. The young speculators were matching their wits against a great machine. Page had the wheat, he was making the effort of his career to deliver it, and he had no idea of losing.

Already millions of bushels had been rushed into Chicago. It was here that the fight took on its spectacular features, for the grain must be weighed and inspected before it could be accepted by the Board of Trade, and this could be done only in "regular" warehouses. The struggle had been to get control of these warehouses. It was here that the Clique had done their shrewdest work, and they had supposed that Page was finally outwitted, until they discovered that he had coolly set about building a million-bushel annex to his new house, Calumet K. And so it was that the newspapers learned that on the chance of completing Calumet K before the thirty-first of December hung the whole question of winning and losing; that if Bannon should fail, Page would be short two million bushels. And then came reporters and newspaper illustrators, who hung about the office and badgered Hilda, or perched on timber piles and sketched until Bannon or Peterson or Max could get at them and drive them out. Young men with snap-shot cameras way-laid Bannon on his way to luncheon, and published, with his picture, elaborate stories of his skill in averting a strike – stories that were not at all true.

Far out in Minnesota and Montana and South Dakota farmers were driving their wheat-laden wagons to the hundreds of local receiving houses that dotted the railroad lines. Box cars were waiting for the red grain, to roll it away to Minneapolis and Duluth – day and night the long trains were puffing eastward. Everywhere the order was, "Rush!" Railroad presidents and managers knew that Page was in a hurry, and they knew what Page's hurries meant, not only to the thousands of men who depended on him for their daily bread, but to the many great industries of the Northwest, whose credit and integrity were inextricably interwoven with his. Division superintendents knew that Page was in a hurry, and they snapped out orders and discharged half-competent men and sent quick words along the hot wires that were translated by despatchers and operators and yard masters into profane, driving commands. Conductors knew it, brakemen and switchmen knew it; they made flying switches in defiance of companies' orders, they ran where they used to walk, they slung their lunch pails on their arms and ate when and where they could, gazing over their cold tea at some portrait of Page, or of a member of the Clique, or of Bannon, in the morning's paper.

Elevator men at Minneapolis knew that Page was in a hurry, and they worked day and night at shovel and scale. Steamboat masters up at Duluth knew it, and mates and deck hands and stevedores and dockwallopers – more than one steamer scraped her paint in the haste to get under the long spouts that waited to pour out grain by the hundred thousand bushels. Trains came down from Minneapolis, boats came down from Duluth, warehouse after warehouse at Chicago was filled; and over-strained nerves neared the breaking point as the short December days flew by. Some said the Clique would win, some said Page would win; in the wheat pit men were fighting like tigers; every one who knew the facts was watching Charlie Bannon.

The storm came on the eighteenth of the month. It was predicted two days ahead, and ship masters were warned at all the lake ports. It was a Northwest blizzard, driven down from the Canadian Rockies at sixty miles an hour, leaving two feet of snow behind it over a belt hundreds of miles wide. But Page's steamers were not stopping for blizzards; they headed out of Duluth regardless of what was to come. And there were a bad few days, with tales of wreck on lake and railroad, days of wind and snow and bitter cold, and of risks run that supplied round-house and tug-office yarn spinners with stories that were not yet worn out. Down on the job the snow brought the work to a pause, but Bannon, within a half-hour, was out of bed and on the ground, and there was no question of changing shifts until, after twenty-four hours, the storm had passed, and elevator, annex and marine tower were cleared of snow. Men worked until they could not stagger, then snatched a few hours' sleep where they could. Word was passed that those who wished might observe the regular hours, but not a dozen men took the opportunity. For now they were in the public eye, and they felt as soldiers feel, when, after long months of drill and discipline, they are led to the charge.

Then came two days of biting weather – when ears were nipped and fingers stiffened, and carpenters who earned three dollars a day envied the laborers, whose work kept their blood moving – and after this a thaw, with sleet and rain. James, the new delegate, came to Bannon and pointed out that men who are continually drenched to the skin are not the best workmen. The boss met the delegate fairly; he ordered an oilskin coat for every man on the job, and in another day they swarmed over the building, looking, at a distance, like glistening yellow beetles.

But if Chicago was thawing, Duluth was not. The harbor at the western end of Lake Superior was ice-bound, and it finally reached a point that the tugs could not break open the channel. This was on the twenty-third and twenty-fourth. The wires were hot, but Page's agents succeeded in covering the facts until Christmas Day. It was just at dusk, after leaving the men to take down the cable, that Bannon went to the office.

A newsboy had been on the grounds with a special edition of a cheap afternoon paper. Hilda had taken one, and when Bannon entered the office he found her reading, leaning forward on the desk, her chin on her hands, the paper spread out over the ledger.

"Hello," he said, throwing off his dripping oilskin, and coming into the enclosure; "I'm pretty near ready to sit down and think about the Christmas tree that we ain't going to have."

She looked up, and he saw that she was a little excited; her eyes always told him. During this last week she had been carrying the whole responsibility of the work on her shoulders.

"Have you seen this?" she asked.

"Haven't read a paper this week." He leaned over the desk beside her and read the article. In Duluth harbor, and at St. Mary's straits, a channel through the ice had been blasted out with dynamite, and the last laden steamer was now ploughing down Lake Michigan. Already one steamer was lying at the wharf by the marine tower, waiting for the machinery to start, and others lay behind her, farther down the river. Long strings of box cars filled the Belt Line sidings, ready to roll into the elevator at the word.

Bannon seated himself on the railing, and caught his toes between the supports.

"I'll tell you one thing," he said, "those fellows have got to get up pretty early in the morning if they're going to beat old Page."

She looked at him, and then slowly folded the paper and turned toward the window. It was nearly dark outside. The rain, driving down from the northeast, tapped steadily on the glass. The arc lamp, on the pole near the tool house, was a blurred circle of light. She was thinking that they would have to get up pretty early to beat Charlie Bannon.

They were silent for a time – silences were not so hard as they had been, a few weeks before – both looking out at the storm, and both thinking that this was Christmas night. On the afternoon before he had asked her to take a holiday, and she had shaken her head. "I couldn't – I'd be here before noon," was what she had said; and she had laughed a little at her own confession, and hurried away with Max.

She turned and said, "Is it done – the belt gallery?"

He nodded. "All done."

"Well – " she smiled; and he nodded again.

"The C. & S. C. man – the fellow that was around the other day and measured to see if it was high enough – he's out there looking up with his mouth open. He hasn't got much to say."

"You didn't have to touch the tracks at all?"

"Not once. Ran her out and bolted her together, and there she was. I'm about ready for my month off. We'll have the wheat coming in to-morrow, and then it's just walking down hill."

"To-morrow?" she asked. "Can you do it?"

"Got to. Five or six days aren't any too much. If it was an old house and the machinery was working well, I'd undertake to do it in two or three, but if we get through without ripping up the gallery, or pounding the leg through the bottom of a steamer, it'll be the kind of luck I don't have." He paused and looked at the window, where the rain was streaking the glass. "I've been thinking about my vacation. I've about decided to go to the St. Lawrence. Maybe there are places I'd like better, but when a fellow hasn't had a month off in five years, he doesn't feel like experiments."