"I'm all right," Mamise pleaded. "I got caught in the jam at the gate and was nearly crushed. That's all. It's glorious up here and I'd rather die than miss it." It was a sight to see. The shipyard was massed with workmen and their families, and every roof was crowded. On a higher platform in the rear the reporters of the moving-picture newspapers were waiting with their cameras. On the roof of a low shed a military band was tootling merrily. And the sky had relented of its rain. The day was a masterpiece of good weather. A brilliant throng mounted to the platform, an admiral, sea-captains and lieutenants, officers of the army, a Senator, Congressmen, judges, capitalists, the jubilant officers of the ship-building corporation. And Mamise was the queen of the day. She was the "sponsor" for the ship and her name stood out on both sides of the prow, high overhead where the launching-crew grinned down on her and called her by her _nom de guerre_, "Moll." The moving-picture men yelled at her and asked her to pose. She went to the rail and tried to smile, feeling as silly as a Sunday-school girl repeating a golden text, and looking it. Once more she would appear in the Sunday supplements, and her childish confusion would make throngs in moving-picture theaters laugh with pleasant amusement. Mamise was news to-day. The air was full of the hubbub of preparation. Underneath the upreared belly of the ship gnomes crouched, pounding the wedges in to lift the hull so that other gnomes could knock the shoring out. There was a strange fascination in the racket of the shores falling over, the dull clatter of a vast bowling-alley after a ten-strike. Painters were at work brushing over the spots where the shores had rested. Down in the tanks inside the hull were a few luckless anonymities with search-lights, put there to watch for leaks from loose rivet-heads. They would be in the dark and see nothing of the festival. Always there has to be some one in the dark at such a time. The men who would saw the holding-blocks stood ready, as solemn as clergymen. The cross-saws were at hand for their sacred office. The sawyers and the other workmen were overdoing their unconcern. Mamise caught sight of Sutton, lounging in violent indifference, but giving himself away by the frenzy of his jaws worrying his quid and spurting tobacco juice in all directions.