"Sling out the muckamuck," said Pete calmly.
He fell to with infinite satisfaction, and Jenny came and sat on his knee as he smoked his pipe.
"She is really devilish pretty," said Quin, who had no one to sit on his knee.
The whistle suddenly said that it was half after twelve and that it would be infinitely obliged if all the working gentlemen from everywhere would kindly step up in a goldarned hurry and turn to.
"Turn to, turn too—toot," said the whistle as brutally as any Western Ocean bo'sun.
The full fed reluctant gentlemen of the Mill went back into the battle, waddling and sighing sorely.
"Wish to God it was six o'clock," they said. There's no satisfying everybody, and going to work full of food is horrid, it really is.
What happened in the morning happened in the afternoon, and all the saws yelled and the planers complained and the men jumped till six, when the Engines let steam into the Whistle high up against the Smoke Stack and made it yell wildly that work was over for the day. Mr. Engine-man played a fantasia on that pipe and hooted and tooted and did a dying cadenza that wailed like a lost soul in the pit and then rose up in a triumphant scream that echoed in the hills and died away across the waters of the Fraser shining in the peaceful evening sun.
And night came down, the blessed night, when no man works (unless he be in a night shift, or is a night watchman or a policeman or, or—). How blessed it is to knock off! But there, what do you know about it, if you never played with lumber in a Stick Moola? Nothing, I assure you. Go home and die, man.