At ten o'clock Monday morning, Bannon, looking out through the dusty
window of the trolley car, caught sight of the elevator, the naked
cribbing of its huge bins looming high above the huddled shanties and
lumber piles about it. A few minutes later he was walking along a
rickety plank sidewalk which seemed to lead in a general direction
toward the elevator. The sidewalks at Calumet are at the theoretical
grade of the district, that is, about five feet above the actual
level of the ground. In winter and spring they are necessary
causeways above seas of mud, but in dry weather every one abandons
them, to walk straight to his destination over the uninterrupted
flats. Bannon set down his hand bag to button his ulster, for the
wind was driving clouds of smoke and stinging dust and an occasional
grimy snowflake out of the northwest. Then he sprang down from the
sidewalk and made his way through the intervening bogs and, heedless
of the shouts of the brakemen, over a freight train which was
creaking its endless length across his path, to the elevator site.

The elevator lay back from the river about sixty yards and parallel
to it. Between was the main line of the C. & S. C, four clear tracks
unbroken by switch or siding. On the wharf, along with a big pile of
timber, was the beginning of a small spouting house, to be connected
with the main elevator by a belt gallery above the C. & S. C. tracks.
A hundred yards to the westward, up the river, the Belt Line tracks
crossed the river and the C. & S. C. right of way at an oblique
angle, and sent two side tracks lengthwise through the middle of the
elevator and a third along the south side, that is, the side away
from the river.

Bannon glanced over the lay of the land, looked more particularly at