"No--not hard exactly. I didn't know he was so poor. Somehow you don't think about it that way when you see them working. I don't know that I ever thought about it at all before." "You think he won't give us any trouble?" "I'm sure he won't. I--I had to promise I'd go again pretty soon." "Maybe you'll let me go along." "Why--why, yes, of course." She had been hesitating, looking down and picking at the splinters on the gate post. Neither was Bannon quick to speak. He did not want to question her about the visit, for he saw that it was hard for her to talk about it. Finally she straightened up and looked at him. "I want to tell you," she said, "I haven't understood exactly until tonight--what they said about the accident and the way you've talked about it--well, some people think you don't think very much about the men, and that if anybody's hurt, or anything happens, you don't care as long as the work goes on." She was looking straight at him. "I thought so, too. And tonight I found out some things you've been doing for him--how you've been giving him tobacco, and the things he likes best that I'd never have thought of, and I knew it was you that did it, and not the Company--and I--I beg your pardon." Bannon did not know what to reply. They stood for a moment without speaking, and then she smiled, and said "Good night," and ran up the steps without looking around. CHAPTER XIII It was the night of the tenth of December. Three of the four stories of the cupola were building, and the upright posts were reaching toward the fourth. It still appeared to be a confused network of timbers, with only the beginnings of walls, but as the cupola walls are nothing but a shell of light boards to withstand the wind, the work was further along than might have been supposed. Down on the working story the machinery was nearly all in, and up here in the cupola the scales and garners were going into place as rapidly as the completing of the supporting framework permitted. The cupola floors were not all laid. If you had stood on the distributing floor, over the tops of the bins, you might have looked not only down through a score of openings between plank areas and piles of timbers, into black pits, sixteen feet square by seventy deep, but upward through a grill of girders and joists to the clear sky. Everywhere men swarmed over the work, and the buzz of the electric lights and the sounds of hundreds of hammers blended into a confused hum.