"Now, look here, Charlie--"

"Hold on, Pete. Don't get mad. It's facts, that's all. Here's these two
weeks gone. You see that, all right enough. Now, the way this work's laid
out, a man's got to make every day count right from the start if he wants
to land on his feet when the house is done. Maybe you think somebody up in
the sky is going to hand you down a present of two extra weeks so the lost
time won't count. That would be all right, only it ain't very likely to
happen."

"Well," said Peterson, "what are you getting at? What do you want me to
do? Perhaps you think it's easy."

"No, I don't. But I'll tell you what to do. In the first place you want to
quit this getting out on the job and doing a laborer's work. The office is
paying out good money to the men that should do that. You know how to lay
a corbel, but just now you couldn't tell me how much cribbing was coming.
You're paid to direct this whole job and to know all about it, not to lay
corbels. If you put in half a day swinging a sledge out there on the
spouting house, how're you going to know that the lumber bills tally, and
the carpenters ain't making mistakes, and that the timber's piled right.
Here today you had a dozen men throwing away their time moving a lot of
timber that ought to have been put in the right place when it first came
in."

Peterson was silent.

"Now tomorrow, Pete, as soon as you've got the work moving along, you'd
better go over to the electric light company and see about having the
whole ground wired for arc lamps,--so we can be ready to put on a night