The smell of green pine sap and coal smoke competed with the salt flats.
Along two miles of reclaimed tidal frontage, twelve deep-water berths stood complete in straight, uncompromising lines of treated oak decking and black-tarred steel wooden support posts.
Giles Croft stood on the upper narrow high walkway of Grain Elevator Station One. His notebook was tucked into his armpit. Meanwhile, he checked the tension on the main drive belt with a flat wooden ruler.
“Three-eighths of an inch bending under twenty pounds load,” Giles muttered.
“Acceptable for hardened rubber. If the splice holds through the afternoon, we won’t throw the belt when the hopper car dumps.”
Below him, an endless black rubber belt, four feet wide and supported on troughed steel idler rollers, hummed with a quiet, greasy rhythm.
It emerged from an underground concrete bunker beneath the railway siding, climbed an inclined steel truss at a twenty-degree angle. Then it ended in a canvas trimming chute suspended directly over the main hatch of an eight-hundred-ton merchant carrack from the western islands.
Kenneth Drake leaned against the handrail beside him, watching the harbor mouth through a brass spotter’s glass.
