While this detail was being attended to at the clerk's desk, the judge delivered himself of an informal philippic against the strikers. He aimed a good deal of his discourse at Mrs. Muscovitz: it was only the extreme leniency of the Court, he said, which kept him from ordering her arrest;--as a matter of fact it was past his lunch time. His tirade, which he seemed to enjoy immensely, as he saw the reporter taking notes, was interrupted by the Clerk handing him the new papers. "Yetta Rayefsky, you admit picketing, which means intimidating honest work-people, before the Crown Vest Company this morning; you admit interfering with Officer Brennan, while he was engaged in the performance of his duty. The Court finds you guilty of disorderly conduct. But the officers inform me that this is the first time you have been brought to court. As is my custom, I will discharge you if you promise not to picket any more. Understand that if you are brought before me again, I will send you to prison. Take my advice and go to work. Idleness always breeds trouble. Will you promise not to picket any more?" "No." The judge sat up with a jerk. "Ten days, workhouse," he thundered. And as they led her away, he rapped on his desk with his gavel, and the clerk announced adjournment. "That little Jew girl had more spunk than I gave her credit for," the judge said a few minutes later, in his chambers, to his secretary who was helping him on with his fur-lined coat. "I wonder if she did blackjack Brennan." He had to sit down again to laugh at the idea. "Don't scold me," Yetta said to Braun, when he came into the prison and spoke to her through the grating. "I was tired of lying." Braun said to himself as he went away that it was just like a woman to get away with a big lie and stumble over a little one. CHAPTER XV THE WORKHOUSE In the afternoon Yetta was loaded into "the wagon" with a lot of "drunks" and prostitutes and taken up to the Department dock to wait for the ferry across to the Island. She had not realized how the month's strain had tired her until the excitement was over and she was on the tug in midstream. In sheer weariness, she turned round on her seat and, crossing her arms on its back, buried her face in them. Presently she felt a hand on her shoulder. "Don't take it so hard, Little One," a not unkindly voice said. "It's fierce at first, but you get used to it." She looked up into a face of stained and faded gaudiness. "Oh," the woman said, somewhat taken aback. "You're one of them strikers. Did they beat you up?" "No," Yetta replied, "I got off easy." The woman stood a moment first on one foot and then on the other--she could not think of anything more to say. She went across the boat and told one of her cronies what kind of a shame she thought it was "to run in a nice girl like that."