"'Well,' he says, 'a wet sample may mean she grades 92 and a dry one that she grades 94. A sampler can get a good many of them wet. I don't have to tell you how.'
"So I passed the word," continued Hansen. "At the end of the season half of the samplers were offered jobs with the company. It was easy, of course, for them to find from the records who was getting wet sugar. Not a dry sugar man got a job. You ask Tobin. He was one of the guys who held out for honesty. But it was a hard season for Tobin, with his health bad and three kids. So next season he lined up. So did most of them. Inside of three years there was not a sampler on the dock who was not taking them wet."
"But put me wise," said Gard. "If I am going to get a sampler's job next year you better pass the word to me so I will know how to hold it."
"I guess you know enough about raw sugar," said the sampler, "to know that it drinks up moisture like a sponge when it gets a chance. Well, they are not careful in keeping out the damp air when it is aboard ship, and it often comes handy, not altogether by accident, for a sack of sugar to get a chance to lie on a wet board. The sugar on the outside naturally gets a little damp, and if you will turn a sack over you may find a wet side to it. The first lesson is to take your samples from the wet side of the sack and from the part near the outside.
"But maybe the sugar has been kept pretty dry. Well it is up to the sampler to get a little moisture into his tube. If it is a warm day a few drops of sweat may be gathered by a scrape of the back of your hand. Every drop is worth its weight in gold a hundred times to the refiners. It would surprise you to learn how cleverly the sampler learns to spit a bit of tobacco juice into his tube. You have worked on the docks for a long time. You never saw it done, did you? But they were at it all the time. I bet the Government has paid a million dollars for tobacco juice in the last ten years. Cunningham, here, has grown fat eating tobacco."
"But does everybody on the dock take wet samples?" asked the detective.
"Surest thing you know," said Hansen. "Ask them."
"How about it, Cunningham?" queried Gard.
"I need the work," said the fat man.