Hilda thought he was joking until she looked up and saw his face.

“Didn’t it—­didn’t it kill him?” she asked.

“I don’t remember exactly.  I think there were some shavings there.”  He stood looking at her for a moment.  “Do you know,” he said, “if Grady comes up on the job again, I believe I’ll tell him that story?  I wonder if he’d know what I meant.”

The spouting house, or “river house,” was a long, narrow structure, one hundred feet by thirty-six, built on piles at the edge of the wharf.  It would form, with the connecting belt gallery that was to reach out over the tracks, a T-shaped addition to the elevator.  The river house was no higher than was necessary for the spouts that would drop the grain through the hatchways of the big lake steamers, twenty thousand bushels an hour—­ it reached between sixty and seventy feet above the water.  The marine tower that was to be built, twenty-four feet square, up through the centre of the house, would be more than twice as high.  A careful examination convinced Bannon that the pile foundations would prove strong enough to support this heavier structure, and that the only changes necessary would be in the frame of the spouting house.  On the same day that the plans arrived, work on the tower commenced.

Peterson had about got to the point where startling developments no longer alarmed him.  He had seen the telegram the day before, but his first information that a marine tower was actually under way came when Bannon called off a group of laborers late in the afternoon to rig the “trolley” for carrying timber across the track.

“What are you going to do, Charlie?” he called.  “Got to slide them timbers back again?”

“Some of ’em,” Bannon replied.

“Don’t you think we could carry ’em over?” said Peterson.  “If we was quiet about it, they needn’t be any trouble?”

Bannon shook his head.

“We’re not taking any more chances on this railroad.  We haven’t time.”

Once more the heavy timbers went swinging through the air, high over the tracks, but this time back to the wharf.  Before long the section boss of the C. & S. C. appeared, and though he soon went away, one of his men remained, lounging about the tracks, keeping a close eye on the sagging ropes and the timbers.  Bannon, when he met Peterson a few minutes later, pointed out the man.

“What’d I tell you, Pete?  They’re watching us like cats.  If you want to know what the C. & S. C. think about us, you just drop one timber and you’ll find out.”

But nothing dropped, and when Peterson, who had been on hand all the latter part of the afternoon, took hold, at seven o’clock, the first timbers of the tower had been set in place, somewhere down inside the rough shed of a spouting house, and more would go in during the night, and during other days and nights, until the narrow framework should go reaching high into the air.  Another thing was recognized