“I ‘spose a teaspoonful of bakin’ soda, assimilated internally around the environments of his appendix would have spared the strike and cheated me out of bein’ a hero.  As the poet might have said—­’Upon such slender pegs is this, our greatness hung.’”

“Oh, Gawd!” exclaimed Mulling, piously.

“Anyhow, the bitterness in the old man’s inner tubes showed in the bile of his answer, and he told ’em if they wanted more money he’d give ’em a chance to earn it—­they could work nights as well as days.  He intimated further that they’d ought to be satisfied with their wages as they’d undoubtedly foller the same line of business in the next world, and wouldn’t get a cent for feedin’ the fires neither.

“Next mornin’ the strike was called, and the guy that breathed treachery and walk-outs was one ‘Oily’ Heegan, further submerged under the titles of President of the Federation of Fresh Water Firemen; also Chairman of the United Water-front Workmen, which last takes in everything doin’ business along the river except the wharf-rats and typhoid germs, and it’s with the disreputableness of this party that I infected myself to the detriment of labour and the triumph of the law.

“D.  O’Hara Heegan is an able man, and inside of a week he’d spread the strike ’till it was the cleanest, dirtiest tie-up ever known.  The hospitals and morgues was full of non-union men, but the river was empty all right.  Yes, he had a persuadin’ method of arbitration quite convincing to the most calloused, involving the layin’ on of the lead pipe.

“Things got to be pretty fierce bye-and-bye, for they had the police buffaloed, and disturbances got plentyer than the casualties at a butchers’ picnic.  The strikers got hungry, too, finally, because the principles of unionism is like a rash on your mechanic, skin deep—­inside, his gastrics works three shifts a day even if his outsides is idle and steaming with Socialism.

“Oily fed ’em dray loads of eloquence, but it didn’t seem to be real fillin’.  They’d leave the lectures and rob a bakery.

“He was a wonder though; just sat in his office, and kept the ship owners waitin’ in line, swearin’ bitter and refined cuss-words about ‘ignorant fiend’ and ‘cussed pedagogue,’ which last, for Kink’s enlightenment, means a kind of Hebrew meetin’-house.

“These here details my new friend give me, ending with a eulogy on Oily Heegan, the Idol of the Idle.

“‘If he says starve, we starve,’ says he, ’and if he says work, we work.  See!  Oh he’s the goods, he is!  Let’s go down by the river—­mebbe we’ll see him.’  So me and Murdock hiked down Water Street, where they keep mosquito netting over the bar fixtures and spit at the stove.

“We found him, a big mouthed, shifty, kind of man, ’bout as cynical lookin’ in the face as a black bass, and full of wind as a toad fish.  I exchanged drinks for principles of socialism, and doin’ so happened to display my roll.  Murdock slipped away and made talk with a friend, then, when Heegan had left, he steers me out the back way into an alley.  ‘Short cut,’ says he ‘to another and a better place.’