To McGarver he had been “Bill Wrenn” since the fifth day, when he had kept a hay-bale from slipping back into the hold on the boss’s head.  Satan and Pete still called him “Wrennie,” but he was not thinking about them just now with Tim listening admiringly to his observations on socialism.

Tim fell asleep.  Bill Wrenn lay quiet and let memory color the sky above him.  He recalled the gardens of water which had flowered in foam for him, strange ships and nomadic gulls, and the schools of sleekly black porpoises that, for him, had whisked through violet waves.  Most of all, he brought back the yesterday’s long excitement and delight of seeing the Irish coast hills—­his first foreign land—­whose faint sky fresco had seemed magical with the elfin lore of Ireland, a country that had ever been to him the haunt not of potatoes and politicians, but of fays.  He had wanted fays.  They were not common on the asphalt of West Sixteenth Street.  But now he had seen them beckoning in Wanderland.

He was falling asleep under the dancing dome of the sky, a happy Mr. Wrenn, when he was aroused as a furious Bill, the cattleman.  Pete was clogging near by, singing hoarsely, “Dey was a skoit and ’er name was Goity.”

“You shut up!” commanded Bill Wrenn.

“Say, be careful!” the awakened Tim implored of him. 
Pete snorted:  “Who says to `shut up,’ hey?  Who was it, Satan?”

From the capstan, where he was still smoking, the head foreman muttered:  “What’s the odds?  The little man won’t say it again.”

Pete stood by Bill Wrenn’s mattress.  “Who said `shut up’?” sounded ominously.

Bill popped out of bed with what he regarded as a vicious fighting-crouch.  For he was too sleepy to be afraid.  “I did!  What you going to do about it?” More mildly, as a fear of his own courage began to form, “I want to sleep.”

“Oh!  You want to sleep.  Little mollycoddle wants to sleep, does he?  Come here!”

The tough grabbed at Bill’s shirt-collar across the mattress.  Bill ducked, stuck out his arm wildly, and struck Pete, half by accident.  Roaring, Pete bunted him, and he went down, with Pete kneeling on his stomach and pounding him.

Morton and honest McGarver, the straw-boss, sprang to drag off Pete, while Satan, the panther, with the first interest they had ever seen in his eyes, snarled:  “Let ’em fight fair.  Rounds.  You’re a’ right, Bill.”

“Right,” commended Morton.

Armored with Satan’s praise, firm but fearful in his rubber sneakers, surprised and shocked to find himself here doing this, Bill Wrenn squared at the rowdy.  The moon touched sadly the lightly sketched Anglesey coast and the rippling wake, but Bill Wrenn, oblivious of dream moon and headland, faced his fellow-bruiser.

They circled.  Pete stuck out his foot gently.  Morton sprang in, bawling furiously, “None o’ them rough-and-tumble tricks.”