"Your friend's appetite sames as dilicate as his wor-rkin' powers,"
observed Hogan as he watched the Englishman stoop and disappear through
the doorway.

Madden smiled. "We didn't work any too hard this afternoon, did we?"

Mike and Pierre proved droll companions, ready to jibe at anyone or
anything in perfect good nature, so that it was an hour before Leonard
strolled outside. As he had no further duty, he climbed a long ladder to
the top of the high dock wall and walked forward toward the bridge.

By this time the sun had set and left the world filled with a luminous
yellow afterglow. The estuary of the Thames had widened abruptly off
Sheerness, and far to the south was the dim line of chalk cliffs that
England thrusts toward France. Overhead stretched a translucent
yellow-green sky with the long black line of the _Vulcan's_ smoke
marking it.

Leonard moved across the bridge slowly.

There was almost perfect silence over the great structure below him,
save for the slow creaking of new joints in the iron plates, the
softened chough-choughing of the tug ahead.

There were several paint barrels piled up on the bridge, slung there no
doubt by machinery, to prevent the men having to toil up with it from
below. The boy leaned against one of these barrels, gazing into the
yellow flood of light that bathed everything in its own saffron. His
heart beat high with a feeling of the hazard of the ocean. He tried
to fancy what would happen to the huge dock as it adventured through