Calumet 'K' Part 31

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.

"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 a.s.surance, 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 accomplis.h.i.+ng 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, s.h.i.+niest, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "HERE'S THE SPOUTING HOUSE"]

"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 pa.s.sed 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HE WAS DRAWING LINES ACROSS THE TIMBER]

"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 b.u.t.t of the first timber of the floor, and that's pa.s.sed 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "WELL, THAT'S THE WHOLE TRICK"]

"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 subst.i.tute 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+ny as a mirror, black as a hea.r.s.e, 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: IT WAS A SIMPLE SCHEME]

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."