along the line. If I ain't
keepin' you up, I'd be glad of your company.'

"'I'm your assistant lunch buster,' says he, and in the course of
things he further explained that he was a tugboat fireman, out on a
strike, givin' me the follerin' information about the tie-up:--

"It all come up over a dose of dyspepsia--"

"Back up," interrupted Kink squirming, "are you plumb bug? Get
together! You're certainly the Raving Kid. Ye must have stone
bruised your heel and got concession of the brain."

"Yes sir! Indigestion," Billings continued. "Old man Badrich, of
the Badrich Transportation Company has it terrible. It lands on his
solar every morning about nine o'clock, gettin' worse steady, and
reaches perihelion along about eleven. He can tell the time of day
by taste. One morning when his mouth felt like about ten-forty-five
in comes a committee from Firemen & Engineers Local No. 21, with a
demand for more wages, proddin' him with the intimations that if he
didn't ante they'd tie up all his boats."

"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