ity to such an extent
that he descended thereto at great risk to a new suit of clothes
and discovered four men at work on the boiler. They had cut the
rivets and removed the head and at sight of the ruin disclosed
within, Mr. McGuffey was truly shocked--and awed. Why he hadn't
been blown to Kingdom Come months before was a profound mystery.

He came up and joined Mr. Gibney on a pile of old hemp hawser
coiled on the bulkhead. "Danged if I don't feel sorry for old
Scraggsy, for all his meanness," he declared. "It's goin' to cost
him five hundred dollars to patch up the old boiler an' keep the
_Maggie_ runnin' until he can ship a new boiler. The ol' fool
don't know a thing about the job himself an' there's four men
down there, without a foreman, soldierin' on him an' soakin' him
a dollar an' a half an hour overtime. He's in so deep now he
might as well jump into bankruptcy entirely an' put in a set o'
piston rings, repack the pumps an' the stuffin-box, shim up the
bearin's an' do a lot of little things the old _Maggie's_ just
hollerin' to have done."

"To err is human; to forgive divine," Mr. Gibney orated. "Come to
think of it, Mac, we give the old man all that was comin' to him
the other day--a little bit more, mebbe. He must be raw an'
bleedin', an' it wouldn't be sporty to plague him some more."

"Durned if I don't feel like jumpin' into a suit of dungarees an'
helpin' him out in that engine room, Gib."

"Troubles always comes in a flock, Bart. The Squarehead tells me
his new navigatin' officer an' the new engineer has jumped their
jobs. It's a dollar to a dime he asks us to come back if he sees
us half way willin' to be friendly an' forget the past."

"Well," the philosophical McGuffey declared. "Seein' as how we've
reformed, even with money in bank, we might just as well be
workin' as loafin'. There's more money in it. An' if it wasn't
that Scraggs is so ornery there's worse jobs than me an' you had
on the old _Maggie_."

"I been wonderin' if we couldn't reform Scraggsy by heapin' coals
of fire on his head, Bart."

"What d'ye mean? Heapin' coals o' fire on Scraggs'd sure keep an
ash hoist busy."

"Oh, I dunno, Bart. The old man has his troubles. There's Mrs.
Scraggs a-peckin' at him every time he goes home, an' the
_Maggie's_ a worry, not to mention the fact that there ain't much
more'n a decent livin' for him in the green-pea trade. An' he
ain't gittin' any younger, Bart. You got to bear that in mind."