Shorty stood and looked at Jock, with the utmost malignity in his face, and said finally, "Get your goddam hook and spoon yourself." Jock was greatly surprised, and returned, "Who the hell are you?" Shorty snapped instantly, "Who the hell are you?" And then he was fired. This is the second "quitting mad" I've seen. The feeling seems to be something like the irrepressible desire that gets piled up sometimes in the ranks of the army to "tell 'em to go to hell" and take the consequences. It's the result of accumulated poisons of overfatigue, long hours, overwrought nerves, "the military discipline of the mills." The practical advantage of being "given the hook" is that you can draw your pay immediately; whereas, if you simply leave, you have to wait for the end of the two weeks' period. I ate my dinner at the Greek's. "Make me some tea that's hot, George. This wasn't. Oh, and a double bowl of shredded; I've got a hole to fill up." George kept the best of the four Greek restaurants. It had a certain variety. It splurged into potato salad, and a few other kinds, and went into omelets that were very acceptable. The others confined themselves to fried things, with a few cereals and skimmed milk. I looked up from my shredded wheat. George was wiping up a rill of gravy and milk from the porcelain table, and a man was getting ready to sit down opposite. It was Herb, the pit craneman. "Always feed here?" he asked. "Yes," I said, "best place in town, isn't it?" He nodded. "How big is Bouton? how many people has it?" I asked. He grinned slowly, and put his elbows on the table. He was a Pennsylvania Dutchman, with worry settling over good nature in a square face. "Twenty thousand," he said. "It seems small for twenty thousand," I returned; "like a little village. There's really only one store, isn't there,--the company store,--where they keep anything? Only one empty newspaper, no theatre, unless you count that one-story movie place, no enterprise--" "A one-man town," he said, quickly. "Nearly every house in town is owned by Mr. Burnham. Now look here, suppose a man works like hell to fix things up, to work around and get a pretty damn good garden, puts a lot of money into making his house right. Suppose he does, and then gets into a scrap with his boss. What can he do? The company owns his house, the company owns every other damn thing in town. He's got to beat it--all his work shot to hell. That's why nobody does anything.--Hey, ham and--Where you workin' now? Ain't seen yer in the pit." "I'm on the floor, helpin' on Number 7." "Att-a-boy!" At last, Saturday night. Everyone felt Sunday coming, with twenty-four hours of drunkenness or sleep alluringly ahead. The other shift had tapped the furnace at three o'clock. We might not tap again, and that was nice to think about. A front-wall and a hot back-wall we went through as if it were better fun than billiards.