“Now,” he said, “you can guide it as nice as walking upstairs.”

They started up, Hilda sitting in the box and holding tightly to the sides, Max climbing the ladders with the end of the line about his wrist.  Bannon joined the laborers, and kept a hand on the hoisting rope.

“You’d better not look down,” he called after her.

She laughed and shook her head.  Bannon waited until they had reached the top, and Max had lifted her out on the last landing; then, at Max’s shout, he made the rope fast and followed up the ladders.

He found them waiting for him near the top of the well.

“We might as well sit down,” he said.  He led the way to a timber a few steps away.  “Well, Miss Vogel, how do you like it?”

She was looking eagerly about; at the frame, a great skeleton of new timber, some of it still holding so much of the water of river and mill-yard that it glistened in the sunlight; at the moving groups of men, the figure of Peterson standing out above the others on a high girder, his arms knotted, and his neck bare, though the day was not warm; at the straining hoist, trembling with each new load that came swinging from somewhere below, to be hustled off to its place, stick by stick; and then out into the west, where the November sun was dropping, and around at the hazy flats and the strip of a river.  She drew in her breath quickly, and looked up at Bannon with a nervous little gesture.

“I like it,” she finally said, after a long silence, during which they had watched a big stick go up on one of the small hoists, to be swung into place and driven home on the dowel pins by Peterson’s sledge.

“Isn’t Pete a hummer?” said Max.  “I never yet saw him take hold of a thing that was too much for him.”

Neither Hilda nor Bannon replied to this, and there was another silence.

“Would you like to walk around and see things closer to?” Bannon asked, turning to Miss Vogel.

“I wouldn’t mind.  It’s rather cold, sitting still.”

He led the way along one side of the structure, guiding her carefully in places where the flooring was not yet secure.

“I’m glad you came up,” he said.  “A good many people think there’s nothing in this kind of work but just sawing wood and making money for somebody up in Minneapolis.  But it isn’t that way.  It’s pretty, and sometimes it’s exciting; and things happen every little while that are interesting enough to tell to anybody, if people only knew it.  I’ll have you come up a little later, when we get the house built and the machinery coming in.  That’s when we’ll have things really moving.  There’ll be some fun putting up the belt gallery, too.  That’ll be over here on the other side.”

He turned to lead the way across the floor to the north side of the building.  They had stopped a little way from the boom hoist, and she was standing motionless, watching as the boom swung out and the rope rattled to the ground.  There was the purring of the engine far below, the straining of the rope, and the creaking of the blocks as the heavy load came slowly up.  Gangs of men were waiting to take the timbers the moment they reached the floor.  The foreman of the hoist gang was leaning out over the edge, looking down and shouting orders.