ten o'clock Monday morning
Ill luck had attended Peterson , the constructor , especially since August . MacBride , the head of the firm , disliked unlucky men , and at the end of three months his patience gave out , and he telegraphed Charlie Bannon to leave the job he was completing at Duluth and report at once at the home office . Rumors of the way things were going at Calumet under the hands of his younger co-laborer had reached Bannon , and he was not greatly surprised when MacBride told him to go to Chicago Sunday night and supersede Peterson . 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 .