“Right you are, bo. We’ll start you in as a passer-boy. I’ll be glad to get rid of that sleep-walker. Hay, Snotty!” he called to a grimy lad with an old bucket. The youth rubbed the back of his greasy glove across the snub of nose that had won him his name, and, shifting his precocious quid, growled:
“Ah, what!”
“Ah, go git your time––or change to another gang. Tell the supe. I’m not fast enough for you. Go on––beat it!”
Mamise saw that she already had an enemy. She protested against displacing another toiler, but Sutton told her that there were jobs enough for the cub.
He explained the nature of Mamise’s duties, talking out of one side of his mouth and using the other for ejaculations of an apparently inexhaustible supply of tobacco-juice. Seeing that Mamise’s startled eyes kept following these missiles, he laughed:
“Do you use chewin’?”
“I don’t think so,” said Mamise, not quite sure of his meaning.
“Well, you’ll have to keep a wad of gum goin’, then, for you cert’n’y need a lot of spit in this business.”
Mamise found this true enough, and the next time Davidge saw her she kept her grinders milling and used the back of her glove with a professional air. For the present, however, she had no brain-cells to spare for mastication. Sutton introduced her to his crew.
“This gink here with the whiskers is Zupnik; he’s the holder-on; he handles the dolly and hangs on to the rivets while I swat ’em. The pill over by the furnace is the heater; his name is Pafflow, and his job is warming up the rivets. Just before they begin to sizzle he yanks ’em out with the tongs and throws ’em to you. You ketch ’em in the bucket––I hope, and take ’em out with your tongs and put ’em in the rivet-hole, and then Zupnik and me we do the rest. And what do we call you? Miss Webling is no name for a workin’-man.”