rrels. He took out his knife and whittled through the hoops
of a barrel. He resumed his place on the pier. "Break down dat top
line. Git movin'! Haul out 'at bottom bar'l! Stan' back when dey
comes!"

They came. An avalanche of rolling barrels rolled wildly across the
deck of the pier. The top one on which the hoops were cut landed with a
smash in the centre of an explosive spray of flour. The atmosphere was
suddenly white dust.... Black complexions presently became grey.

Perspiring freight jugglers began to laugh at their fellows. In three
minutes the roof of the pier was echoing back the volleys of
high-pitched laughter which lifted from below. Until noon, and then
through the long afternoon, all that the Wildcat's men did was to laugh
their heads off at the slightest provocation and move more freight than
the ship's cargo booms could handle.

"Ah likes biscuits an' Ah likes bread,
Doan' like 'em plastered on mah head,
Craves to have 'em spread around on mah inside,
'Sted of havin' dough a-drippin' off mah hide."

The pier foreman, passing the Wildcat's crew late in the afternoon,
paused to look the deal over. "Everything all right?"

"Cap'n, yessuh. Dey's good boys. 'Clined to mope some at fust, but dey
got laughin' some way. Since den dey's been movin' 'long."

Without knowing it, the Wildcat had mixed the essence of all the
theories of efficiency into one barrel of flour. The results of the
administered dose were showing on the tally boards in the freight
office at the end of the long pier. The transportation superintendent
sent for the pier foreman. "Jim, who is handling the flour into the
_West King_?"

"Young nigger called Wildcat--right name is Marsden. Got him
yesterday."

"Keep him forever. The _Empire_ docks tomorrow for a mixed cargo for
New Orleans. Sixteen thousand tons. Let this Wildcat boy handle all of
it--as long as he lasts."

2.

On Friday morning Honey Tone groaned himself awake, realizing when his
eyes were open that less than thirty-six hours lay between his fragile
form and blood-tinted trouble. It seemed to him that his self-appointed
guardians clung closer with the passage of the hours, as if they
suspected their soopreem treasury of perfecting a plot which might
include his exit. The obligations of the moment were four thousand
dollars, and in Honey Tone's bulging pocket but three-fourths of that
amount awaited the pay hour which would come with Saturday n