The men started with relief, then burst into a jeering laugh. Foley moved toward Barry, then paused and, with hands back in his pockets, watched the two scabs make their preparation to leave, trundling his cigar about with his thin prehensile lips. As they started down the ladder, the Swede sullen, the Italian still trembling, he walked over to them with sudden decision. "Go on back to work," he ordered. The two looked at him in surprised doubt. "Go on!" He jerked his head toward the places they had left. They hesitated; then the Swede lay off his old coat and started back to his place, and the Italian followed, his fearful eyes on the walking delegate. Foley rejoined Barry. "I'm goin' to settle this thing with Driscoll," he said to the pusher, loudly, answering the amazed questioning he saw in the eyes of all the men. "I'm goin' to settle the scab question for good with him. Let them two snakes work till youse hear from me." He paused, then asked abruptly: "Where's Keating?" "Down with the riveters." "So-long, boys," he called to Barry's gang; and at the head of the ladder he gestured a farewell to the gang about the other crane. Then his long body sank through the flooring. At the bottom of the thirty-foot ladder he paused and looked around through the maze of beams and columns. This floor was not boarded, as was the one he had just left. Here and there were little platforms on which stood small portable forges, a man at each turning the fan and stirring the rivets among the red coals; and here and there were groups of three men, driving home the rivets. At regular intervals each heater would take a white rivet from his forge, toss it from his tongs sizzling through the air to a man twenty feet away, who would deftly catch it in a tin can. This man would seize the glowing bit of steel with a pair of pincers, strike it smartly against a beam, at which off would go a spray of sparks like an exploding rocket, and then thrust it through its hole. Immediately the terrific throbbing of a pneumatic hammer, held hard against the rivet by another man, would clinch it to its destiny of clinging with all its might. And then, flashing through the gray air like a meteor at twilight, would come another sparkling rivet. And on all sides, beyond the workmen calmly playing at catch with white-hot steel, and beyond the black crosswork of beams and columns, Foley could see great stretches of housetops that in sullen rivalry strove to overmatch the dinginess of the sky. Foley caught sight of Tom with a riveting gang at the southeast corner of the building, and he started toward him, walking over the five-inch beams with a practiced step, and now and then throwing a word at some of the men he passed, and glancing casually down at the workmen putting in the concrete flooring three stories below. Tom had seen him coming, and had turned his back upon his approach. "H'are you, Buck!" shouted one of the gang.