Littleton roused himself from his gin stupor. “There he is. That’s Billy.”

The man on the barrel held up a tankard. “A drink,” he called, “to Dingy Danny Roberts, dead last week from a barrel of coal that expostulated down upon his personhood. He was one of Yate’s boys”- murmurs of disdain arose from the crowd, so Greenbill raised his voice-“he might have been one of Yate’s boys, but he was a porter all the same, and we have somewhat in common with those boys, whatever imperative sort of fiend they might follow. A drink, then. May he be the last to go that way.”

It does not take much encouragement for a roomful of porters to tip their glasses. After a moment of rumblings, I know not whether of agreement or discord, Greenbill began again.

“I called this here meeting of our gang because there’s something you should know, boys. Shall I tell you what it is? There’s a shipment of coal coming next week, and it’s Yate and his boys that want to take it away from you.”

Much grumbling and shouting here, so Greenbill had to take a moment to pause.

“See, there’s this scoundrel called Dennis Dogmill, a tobacco man you might have heard named”- he waited for the laughter and hissing to die down-“and he had this idea to make the porters fight against one another. It worked so good that all the shipmen now do the same thing. ‘Which one of you has the lowest price?’ they all want to know. So I went to Yate and I said to him it would be best to work together. Let’s not be different gangs. Let’s be one gang to navigate and together raise up the wages of the porters. And Yate said- and I quote him now, boys- Yate said, ‘I’d burn in hell before usurping with the likes of your rubbish. The men in your gang are nothing but cutpurses and mollies and buggerantos.’ That’s what he said, boys, and it was all I could do to keep from murdering him where he stood for speaking ill of the likes of you.”