"Yis, youse all sober up for your chewings, but youse can't sober up fer work, some of yez."
"That's so," came Cockney's chirruping shriek. "Them that wasn't workin' jest now shouldn't git anythink ter eat."
Obscene comments on the food were voiced.
"Oh, kickin', kickin'!" said Mike. "You deserve to be given just the Board of Trade Allowance, the way youse are kickin'! Are youse aware that there's more rations there than the Board of Trade grants ye?" He turned to explain to Michael, friendly: "Them fellers whose mothers was rakin' in the ash bucket for a crust would be kickin' if they sat down to ate this day with the captain."
"He gets enough," growled a flat-browed fellow. Mike turned his head slowly and sized up that speaker.
"Well," said he, "I suppose the captain didn't spind his life lying on his back in the parks!" He paused, and nodded his head, to let that soak in, before he added: "So as to get his freezin' job up on the bridge. Do ye begrudge him his pie, damn ye?"
"Pie! Oh pie!" cried one, and there began a great talk about "hand-outs," and "sit-downs," and "throwing the feet,"—slang of American trampdom.
"Well!" said Mike, hearing all that jargon. "I thought it was cattlemen we was. We seem to be a bunch of hoboes, back-door beggars——"
"Front-door!" shouted a sharp, pale-faced little youth. "I always go to the front-door. If it's an old woman what opens I always asks her if she would ask her mother to give something."
Mike glanced at him with the appearance of one who is sick. Michael, cheered up afresh by Mike's recent friendly acknowledgment of his presence, shouted to a man who had flung his empty plate at a rat that ran on one of the pipes: "What are you doing that for? Let the rats alone."