ack of catching and placing the
rivets Pafflow began to register his protest against her sex. He took
a low joy in pitching rivets wild, and grinned at her dancing lunges
after them.

Mamise would not tattle, but she began again to lose heart. Sutton's
restless appetite for rivets noted the new delay, and he grasped the
cause of it at once. His first comment was to walk over to the furnace
and smash Pafflow in the nose.

"You try any of that I. W. W. sabotodge here, you----, and I'll stuff
you in a rivet-hole and turn the gun loose on you."

Pafflow yielded first to force and later to the irresistible power of
Mamise's humility. Indeed, her ardor for service warmed his
indifferent soul at last, and he joined with her to make a brilliant
team, hurtling the rivets in red arcs from the coke to the pail with
the precision of a professional baseball battery.

Mamise eventually acquired a womanly deftness in plucking up the rivet
and setting it in place, and Davidge might have seen grounds for
uneasiness in her eager submissiveness to Sutton as she knelt before
him, watched his eye timidly, and glowed like coke under the least
breath of his approval.

CHAPTER III

Sutton was a mighty man in his way, and earning a wage that would have
been accounted princely a year before. All the workers were receiving
immense increase of pay, but the champion riveters were lavishly
rewarded.

The whole shipyard industry was on a racing basis. Plans were being
laid to celebrate the next Fourth of July with an unheard-of number of
launchings. Every boat-building company was trying to put overboard an
absolute maximum of hulls on that day.

"Hurry-up" Hurley, who had driven the first rivets into a steel ship
pneumatically, and Charles M. Schwab, of Bethlehem, were the inspiring
leaders in the rush, and their ambition was to multiply the national
output by ten. The spirit of emulation thrilled all the thrillable
workmen, but the riveters were the spectacular favorites. Their names
appeared in the papers as they topped each other's scores, and Sutton
kept outdoing himself. For special occasions he groomed himself like a
race-horse, resting the day before the great event and then giving
himself up to a frenzy of speed.

On one noble day of nine hours' fury he broke the world's record
temporarily. He drove four thousand eight hundred and seventy-five
three-quarter-inch rivets into place. Then he was carried away to a
twenty-fou