They were edging toward the main gate, when some one came hurrying up behind and literally threw himself upon the two lads. "Well, I'll be horn-swaggled if it ain't me good old buddies Jay Thacker and Dick Monaghan," came the precipitous cry. "Mit me, boys, I'm tickled to death to see you all again." Turning, the Brighton boys found themselves face to face with their old friend, Larry Seymour, one of their old Bridgeford crowd who had gone away into the army early in the war. Larry, the life of the party, who could find fun in a funeral and keep things stirring all the time. "Hello, Larry," the chums exclaimed in unison, fairly hugging the newcomer. It had been more than two years since they had last met. And what a lot had happened! Larry was in overalls and begrimed with all the firsthand evidences of toil. "Working in the yard?" asked Dick after the hand-pumping had subsided and they had told somewhat in hurried detail where they had been and what they had been doing since last they were together. "Am I working? Say, bo, if rivets was railroad spikes I'd have built a line to Mars by way of Venus and all around to the moon again," was the bantering reply. "Think we can land a job again?" asked Dick. "Aces beat deuces every time, fellows," was Larry's somewhat flippant reply. "If you guys can't get a job at the works again then the figure of Justice in the courthouse has lost the scales she's been carrying in her good right fist all these years." Dick and Jay were absorbing some of the optimism of their stout-hearted old friend. They had been a bit dubious about being able to get a job right away; and time meant a whole lot when it was only ninety days or so until the opening of Brighton. "Montey Brown still boss of the yard?" queried Jay of the newcomer. He referred to Montague Brown, who for years had been yard superintendent of Bridgeford's bustling shipbuilding industry. Brown had told the boys when they went away into the service that their old jobs would be ready for them. "Bet your life he's still around," was Larry's reassuring reply, to which he added, somewhat facetiously: "Montey couldn't be pried away from Bridgeford Yard by all the king's horses and all the king's men." In lightning style Seymour traced the activities of the old workshop during the period of his re-employment following the expiration of his army term. During the war, it appeared, the yard had sailed serenely along, turning out new tonnage at a record-breaking clip, particularly vessels and equipment for the United States Navy. Since the armistice there had come a change over the works. The places of hundreds of men who had gone out into the service had been taken for the most part by workmen of foreign birth. Many of them illiterate and unappreciative of American freedom, they had fallen easy prey to the radical labor leaders who had sprung up within the works like mushrooms growing overnight.