Bannon got up and slowly buttoned his coat.  He was looking about the office, at the mud-tracked floor and the coated windows, and at the hanging shreds of spider web in the corners and between the rafters overhead.

“It ain’t a very cheerful house to live in all day, is it?” he said.  “I don’t know but what we’d better clean house a little.  There’s not much danger of putting a shine on things that’ll hurt your eyes.  We ought to be able to get hold of some one that could come in once in a while and stir up the dust.  Do you know of any one?”

“There is a woman that comes to our boarding-house.  I think they know about her at the hotel.”

He went to the telephone and called up the hotel.

“She’ll be here this afternoon,” he said as he hung up the receiver.  “Will she bring her own scrubbing things, or are we supposed to have them for her?  This is some out of my line.”

Miss Vogel was smiling.

“She’ll have her own things, I guess.  When she comes, would you like me to start her to work?”

“If you’d just as soon.  And tell her to make a good job of it.  I’ve got to go out now, but I’ll be around off and on during the day.”

When the noon whistle blew Bannon and Max were standing near the annex.  Already the bins and walls had been raised more than a foot above the foundation, which gave it the appearance of a great checker-board.

“Looks like business, doesn’t it,” said Max.  He was a little excited, for now there was to be no more delaying until the elevator should stand completed from the working floor to the top, one hundred and sixty feet above the ground; until engines, conveyors, and scales should be working smoothly and every bin filled with grain.  Indeed, nearly everybody on the job had by this time caught the spirit of energy that Bannon had infused into the work.

“I’ll be glad when it gets up far enough to look like something, so we can feel that things are really getting on.”

“They’re getting on all right,” Bannon replied.

“How soon will we be working on the cupola?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow!” Max stopped (they had started toward the office) and looked at Bannon in amazement.  “Why, we can’t do it, can we?”

“Why not?” Bannon pointed toward a cleared space behind the pile of cribbing, where the carpenters had been at work on the heavy timbers, “They’re all ready for the framing.”

Max made no reply, but he looked up as they passed the elevator and measured with his eyes the space remaining between the cribbing and the tops of the posts.  He had yet to become accustomed to Bannon’s methods; but he had seen enough of him to believe that it would be done if Bannon said so.

They were halfway to the office when Max said, with a touch of embarrassment:—­

“How’s Hilda going to take hold, Mr. Bannon?”

“First-class.”

Max’s eyes sparkled.