They had cut the
rivets and removed the head and at sight of the ruin disclosed
within, Mr. McGuffey was truly shocked--and awed. Why he hadn't
been blown to Kingdom Come months before was a profound mystery.
He came up and joined Mr. Gibney on a pile of old hemp hawser
coiled on the bulkhead. "Danged if I don't feel sorry for old
Scraggsy, for all his meanness," he declared. "It's goin' to cost
him five hundred dollars to patch up the old boiler an' keep the
_Maggie_ runnin' until he can ship a new boiler. The ol' fool
don't know a thing about the job himself an' there's four men
down there, without a foreman, soldierin' on him an' soakin' him
a dollar an' a half an hour overtime. He's in so deep now he
might as well jump into bankruptcy entirely an' put in a set o'
piston rings, repack the pumps an' the stuffin-box, shim up the
bearin's an' do a lot of little things the old _Maggie's_ just
hollerin' to have done."
"To err is human; to forgive divine," Mr. Gibney orated. "Come to
think of it, Mac, we give the old man all that was comin' to him
the other day--a little bit more, mebbe. He must be raw an'
bleedin', an' it wouldn't be sporty to plague him some more.
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