Until that last sentence Bannon had been only half listening.  He made no sign, indeed, of having heard anything, but stood hacking at the pine railing with his pocket-knife.  He was silent so long that at last Peterson arose to go.  Bannon shut his knife and wheeled around to face him.

“Hold on, Pete,” he said.  “We’d better talk this business out right here.”

“Talk out what?”

“Oh, I guess you know.  Why don’t we pull together better?  What is it you’re sore about?”

“Nothing.  You don’t need to worry about it.”

“Look here, Pete.  You’ve known me a good many years.  Do you think I’m square?”

“I never said you wasn’t square.”

“You might have given me the benefit of the doubt, anyway.  I know you didn’t like my coming down here to take charge.  Do you suppose I did?  You were unlucky, and a man working for MacBride can’t afford to be unlucky; so he told me to come and finish the job.  And once I was down here he held me responsible for getting it done.  I’ve got to go ahead just the best I can.  I thought you saw that at first, and that we’d get on all right together, but lately it’s been different.”

“I thought I’d been working hard enough to satisfy anybody.”

“It ain’t that, and you know it ain’t.  It’s just the spirit of the thing.  Now, I don’t ask you to tell me why it is you feel this way.  If you want to talk it out now, all right.  If you don’t, all right again.  But if you ever think I’m not using you right, come to me and say so.  Just look at what we’ve got to do here, Pete, before the first of January.  Sometimes I think we can do it, and sometimes I think we can’t, but we’ve got to anyway.  If we don’t, MacBride will just make up his mind we’re no good.  And unless we pull together, we’re stuck for sure.  It ain’t a matter of work entirely.  I want to feel that I’ve got you with me.  Come around in the afternoon if you happen to be awake, and fuss around and tell me what I’m doing wrong.  I want to consult you about a good many things in the course of a day.”

Pete’s face was simply a lens through which one could see the feelings at work beneath, and Bannon knew that he had struck the right chord at last.  “How is it?  Does that go?”

“Sure,” said Pete.  “I never knew you wanted to consult me about anything, or I’d have been around before.”

Friday afternoon Bannon received a note from Grady saying that if he had any regard for his own interests or for those of his employers, he would do well to meet the writer at ten o’clock Sunday morning at a certain downtown hotel.  It closed with a postscript containing the disinterested suggestion that delays were dangerous, and a hint that the writer’s time was valuable and he wished to be informed whether the appointment would be kept or not.

Bannon ignored the note, and all day Monday expected Grady’s appearance at the office.  He did not come, but when Bannon reached his boarding-house about eight o’clock that evening, he found Grady in his room waiting for him.