[rockercoaster]

I Found No Peace by Webb Miller, published 1936, which is an autobiographical work by a reporter and war correspondent. I actually got the dates slightly wrong, this would have been the first decade of the 20th, not the 1890s as I thought (he wasn't old enough in that decade for the episode in question to have fallen in the 19th century, it was probably in something like 1905-1908).

Page 13 in my copy (I had trouble finding the passage in the scan I found on Internet Archive, I think it's a later printing that is somewhat abridged). He's writing of working for the state highway department, making road cuts and shoveling gravel:

> Some deliberately delayed the physical calls of nature in the morning until after they came to work. That give them the opportunity of taking ten minutes off. The nonshirkers applied blunt Anglo-Saxon terms to that particular trick.

Given his supplying the term "shirk" in that sentence and the characterization of their label for it as "Anglo-Saxon", I think what he's getting at is they called them "shit shirkers", which is pretty funny.