"Right away."
"All right. We'll try it for a day or so and see how it goes. Tell that boy in the office that he can charge his time up to Saturday night, but he needn't stay around any longer."
Max hurried away. Group after group of laborers, peavies or cant-hooks on shoulders, were moving slowly past him toward the wharf. It was already nearly dark, and the arc lights on the elevator structure, and on the spouting house, beyond the tracks, were flaring. He started toward the wharf, walking behind a score of the laborers.
From the east, over the flats and marshes through which the narrow, sluggish river wanders to Lake Michigan, came the hoarse whistle of a steamer. Bannon turned and looked. His view was blocked by some freight cars that were standing on the C. & S. C. tracks at some distance to the east. He ran across the tracks and out on the wharf, climbing on the timber pile, where Peterson and his gang were, rolling down the big sticks with cant-hooks. Not a quarter of a mile away was a big steamer, ploughing slowly up the river; the cough of her engines and the swash of the churning water at her bow and stern could be plainly heard. Peterson stopped work for a moment, and joined him.
"Well," Bannon said, "we're in for it now. I never thought they'd make such time as this."
"She can lay up here all night till morning, I guess."
Bannon was thinking hard.
"No," he finally said, "she can't. There ain't any use of wasting all day tomorrow unloading that cribbing and getting it across."
Peterson, too, was thinking; and his eyebrows were coming together in a puzzled scowl.
"Oh," he said, "you mean to do it tonight?"