"Yes, Rod, you will allow it." Marian spoke quietly, but with determination. "The trip to Saint Louis is perfectly safe. Once in the city, I'll take a carriage to the College Club and stay there every minute, except the time that I must spend in giving orders for the bail. No, you two need not look so forbidding. I'm going. And I'm going this identical minute."
Later Marian laughed to remember how swiftly she had overruled every protest. The boys were too tired and dazed to stand against her. It was hardly an hour before she found herself flying down the river, in charge of the faithful Mulcahy, on her way to catch the south-bound train.
"The steam-forge people will do everything in their power to serve you," Roderick had said, as he scrawled the last memoranda for her use. "They know our firm, and they will rush the bail through and have it loaded on the eight-o'clock train. I'll see to it that Mulcahy and two men are at the Grafton dock to meet your train. But if anything should go wrong, Sis, just you hunt up Commodore McCloskey and ask him to help you; for the commodore is our guardian angel, I am convinced of that."
The trip to the city was uneventful. She awoke early, after a good rest, and hurried down to the forge works, a huge smoky foundry near the river. The shop foreman met her with the utmost courtesy and promised that the bail should be made and delivered aboard the afternoon train. Feeling very capable and assured, Marian went back to the club and had spent two pleasant hours in its reading-room when she was called to the telephone.
"Miss Hallowell?" It was the voice of the forge works foreman. "I—er—most unluckily we have mislaid the slip of paper which gave the dimensions of the bail. We cannot go on until we have those dimensions. Do you remember the figures?"
Poor Marian racked her brain. Not one measurement could she call to mind.
"I'll ask my brother over the long-distance," she told the foreman. But even as she spoke, she knew that there was no hope of reaching Roderick. All the long-distance wires were down.
"And not one human being in all Saint Louis who can tell me the size of that bail!" she groaned. "Oh, why didn't I measure it with my own tape-measure—and then learn the figures by heart! Yet—I do wonder! Would Commodore McCloskey know? He has been at the camp so often, and he knows everything about our machinery. Let's see."
Presently Commodore McCloskey's friendly voice rang over the wire.
"Well, sure 'tis good luck that ye caught me at the dock, Miss Marian. The Lucy is just startin' up-river. Two minutes more and I'd have gone aboard. So ye've lost the bail dimensions? Well, well, don't talk so panicky-like. I'll be with ye in two minutes, an' we'll go to the forge together. 'Tis no grand memory I have, but I can give them a workin' idea."