"What's up now?"
"Strike! The longshoremen have walked out on us. I was on hand early to oversee the loading, but the whole mob refused to commence. There's some union trouble because The Bedford Castle discharged her cargo with scab labor."
"In Tacoma?"
"No. In Frisco; next to her last trip."
"Why, that's ridiculous! What does Captain Peasley say?"
"He says—I'll have to wait till we're outside before I can repeat what he says."
Together the two hurried to the water-front to find a crowd of surly stevedores loafing about the dock, and an English sea-captain at breakfast in his cabin, his attention divided equally between toast, tea, marmalade and profanity.
"The beggars are mad, absolutely mad," declared the Captain. "I can't understand it. I'm still in my bed when I'm aroused by an insolent loafer who calls himself a walking delegate and tells me his union won't load me until I pay some absurd sum."
"What did you tell him?" inquired Emerson.
"What did I tell him?" Captain Peasley laid down his knife gently and wiped the tea from his drooping mustache, then squared about in his seat. "Here's what I told him as near as my memory serves." Whereupon he broke into a tornado of nautical profanity so picturesquely British in its figures, and so whole-souled in its vigor, that his auditors could not but smile. "Then I bashed him with my boot, and bloody well pursued him over the rail. Two thousand dollars! Sweet mother of Queen Anne! Wouldn't I look well, now, handing four hundred pounds over to those highbinders? My owners would hang me."