Steel: The Diary of a Furnace Worker

III THE OPEN-HEARTH—NIGHT-SHIFTS

"Have a cigarette, Pete," I said, offering a Camel to a very fat and boyish-looking Russian.

"No t'ank."

"What, no smoke?" I asked, incredulous.

"No, no smoke."

"No drink?" I asked, wondering if I had found a Puritan.

"Oh, drink" he said with profound emphasis; and continuing, he told me of other solaces he found in this mortal life.

"Look!" cried some one.

Herb, the craneman, in a fit of extreme playfulness had thrown some wet green paint forty feet through the air at the pit boss, greening the whole side of his face. Al was doing a long backward dodge, and slapping a hand to his painted face, supposing it a draught of hot metal. When he perceived that he wasn't killed, he picked up cinder-hunks and bombarded the crane-box. It sounded like hail on tin.

Pete, the Russian melter, came out on the gallery behind the furnaces, and I could see by the way he looked the pit over, that he was picking a man for furnace work. Somebody had stayed out and they were short a helper. He looked at the fat workman beside me, and then grunted.

This was the third time he had picked Russians in preference to the rest of us, who are Serbian, Austrian, and American.

The next day I went on the floor, and tackled Pete.

"How about a chance on the floor?" I said, standing in front of him to keep him from lurching away.

"Y' get chance 'nuff, don' worry."

"If I can't get a crack at learning this game in Bouton, I'll go somewhere I can," I said, boiling up a little.

Dick Reber, the Pennsylvania-Dutch melter, came up.

"I want a chance on the floor," I said.

"All right, boy, go on Number 7 to-day."

I made all speed to Number 7. "Is he doing that," I thought, as I picked up my shovel, "because I'm an American?"

I looked up and saw the big ladle-bucket pouring hot metal into a spout in the furnace-door, accompanied by a great swirl of sparks and flame, spurting upward with a sizzle.

"At last," I said, "I'm going to make steel."

The steel starts in as "scrap" in the mill-yard. Scrap from anywhere in America; a broken casting, the size of a man's trunk, down to corroded pipe, or strips the thickness of your nail, salvaged in bales. The overhead crane gathers them all from arriving flat cars by a magnet as big as a cart wheel, and the pieces of steel leap to meet it with apparent joy, stick stoutly for a moment, and fall released into iron charge-boxes. By trainloads they pass out of the stockyard and into the mill, where the track runs directly in front of the furnace-doors. There the charging-machine dumps them quickly into the belly of the furnace. It does its work with a single iron finger, about ten feet long and nearly a foot thick, lifting the box by a cleat on the end, and poking it swiftly into the flaming door. Old furnaces charged by hand hold from twenty-five to thirty-five tons; new ones, up to two hundred and fifty.

That is the first step in starting to make a "heat," which means cook a bellyful to the proper temperature for steel, ready to tap into a ladle for ingot-making. Next comes "making front-wall," which signifies that no self-respecting brick, clay, or any other substance, can stand a load of metal up to steel-heat without being temporarily relined right away for the next draft of flame. We do that relining by shoveling dolomite into the furnace. The official known as second-helper wields a Brobdingnag spoon, about two inches larger than a dinner-plate and fifteen feet long, which a couple of third-helpers, among them myself, fill with dolomite. By use of the spoon, he carefully spreads the protection over the front-wall.

But the sporting job on the open-hearth comes a bit later, and consists in "making back-wall." Then all the men on the furnace and all the men on your neighbor's furnace form a dolomite line, and marching in file to the open door, fling their shovelfuls across the flaming void to the back-wall. It's not a beginner's job. You must swing your weapon through a wide arc, to give it "wing," and the stuff must hop off just behind the furnace-door and rise high enough to top the scrap between, and land high. I say it's not a beginner's job, though it's like golf—the first shovelful may be a winner. What lends life to the sport is the fact that everybody's in it—it's the team play of the open-hearth, like a house-raising in the community.

Another thing giving life is the heat. The mouth of the furnace gapes its widest, and you must hug close in order to get the stuff across. Every man has deeply smoked glasses on his nose when he faces the furnace. He's got to stare down her throat, to watch where the dolomite lands. It's up to him to place his stuff—the line isn't marching through the heat to warm its hands. Here's a tip I didn't "savvy" on my first back-wall. Throw your left arm high at the end of your arc, and in front of your face; it will cut the heat an instant, and allow you to see if you have "placed" without flinching. It's really not brawn,—making back-wall,—but a nimble swing and a good eye, and the art of not minding heat.

After that is done, she can cook for a while and needs only watching. The first-helper gives her that, passing up and down every few minutes to look through the peepholes in her furnace-doors. He puts his glasses down on his nose, inspects the brew, and notices if her stomach's in good shape. If the bricks get as red as the gas flame, she's burning the living lining out of her. But he keeps the gas blowing in her ends, as hot as she'll stand it without a holler. On either end the gas, and on top of it the air. The first-helper, who is cook of the furnace, makes a proper mixture out of them. The hotter he can let the gas through, the quicker the brew is cooked, and the more "tonnage" he'll make that week.

"Get me thirty thousand pounds," said the first-helper when I was on the furnace that first night. Fifteen tons of molten metal! I was undecided whether to bring it in a dipper or in my hat. But it's no more than running upstairs for a handkerchief in the bureau. You climb to a platform near the blower, where the stuff is made, and find a man there with a book. Punch him in the arm and say, "Thirty thou' for Number 7." He will swear moderately and blow a whistle. You return to the furnace, and on your heels follows a locomotive dragging a bucket, the ladle, ten feet high. Out of it arise the fumes of your fifteen tons of hot metal. The overhead crane picks it up and pours it through a spout into the furnace. As it goes in, you stand and direct the pouring. The craneman, as he tilts or raises the bucket, watches you for directions, and you stand and make gentle motions with one hand, thus easily and simply controlling the flux of the fifteen tons. That part of the job always pleased me. It was like modeling Niagara with a wave of the hand. Sometimes he spills a little, and there is a vortex of sparks, and much molten metal in front of the door to step on.

She cooks in anywhere from ten hours to twenty-four. The record on this floor is ten, which was put over by Jock. He has worked on most of the open-hearths, I learn, from Scotland to Colorado.

When it's time for a test, the first-helper will take a spoon about the size of your hand and scoop up some of the soup. But not to taste. He pours it into a mould, and when the little ingot is cool, breaks it with a sledge. Everyone on the furnace, barring myself, looks at the broken metal and gives a wise smile. I'm not enough of a cook. They know by the grain if she has too much carbon or needs more, or is ready to tap, or isn't. With too much carbon, she'll need a "jigger," which is a few more tons of hot metal, to thin her out.

That's about the whole game—abbreviated—up to tap-time. It takes, on an average, eighteen hours, and your shift may be anything from ten to twenty-four. Of course, there are details, like shoveling in fluor-spar to thin out the slag. Be sure you clear the breast of the furnace, with your shovelful, when you put that into her. Spar eats the dolomite as mice eat cheese.

At intervals the first-helper tilts the whole furnace forward, and she runs out at the doors, which is to drain off the slag that floats on top of the brew. But after much weariness it's tap-time and the "big boss" comes to supervise.

Move aside the shutters covering the round peepholes on her doors, at this time, and you'll see the brew bubbling away like malt breakfast-food ready to eat. But there's a lot of testing before serving. When it is ready, you run to the place where you hid your little flat manganese shovel and take it to the gallery back of the furnace, near the tap-spout. There you can look down on the pit strewn with those giant bucket-ladles and sprinkled with the clean-up men, who gather painfully all that's spilled or slobbered of hot metal, and save it for a second melting. The whole is swept by the omnipresent crane.

At a proper and chosen instant, the senior melter shouts, "Heow!" and the great furnace rolls on its side on a pair of mammoth rockers, and points a clay spout into the ladle held for it by the crane. Before the hot soup comes rushing, the second-helper has to "ravel her out." That function of his almost destroyed my ambition to learn the steel business. Raveling is poking a pointed rod up the tap-spout, till the stopping is prodded away. You never know when the desired but terrific result is accomplished. When it is, he retires as you would from an exploding oil-well. The brew is loose. It comes out, red and hurling flame. Into the ladle it falls with a hiss and a terrifying "splunch." The first and second helpers immediately make matters worse. They stagger up with bags (containing fine anthracite) and drop them into the mess. They have a most damning effect. The flames hit the roof of the pit, and sway and curl angrily along the frail platform on which you stand. Some occult reasoning tells them how many of these bags to drop in, whether to make a conflagration or a moderate house-burning.

The melter waits a few minutes and then shouts your cue. You and another helper run swiftly along the gallery to the side of the spout. At your feet is a pile of manganese, one of the heaviest substances in the world, and seeming heavier than that. It's your job and your helper's to put the pile into the cauldron. And you do it with all manner of speed. The tap stream—at steel heat—is three feet from your face, and gas and sparks come up as the stream hits the ladle. You're expected to get it in fast. You do.

There are almost always two ladles to fill, but you have a "spell" between. When she's tapped, you pick up a piece of sheet iron and cover the spout with it. That's another job to warm frost-bitten fingers. Use gloves and wet burlap—it preserves the hands for future use.

One more step, and the brew is an ingot. There are several tracks entering the pit, and at proper seasons a train of cars swings in, bringing the upright ingot moulds. They stand about seven feet high from their flats. When the ladle is full and slobbering a bit, the craneman swings her gingerly over the first mould. Level with the ladle's base, and above the train of moulds, runs the pouring platform, on which the ingot-men stand.

By means of rods a stopper is released from a small hole in the bottom of the ladle. In a few seconds the stream fills a mould, and the attendant shuts off the steel like a boy at a spigot. The ladle swings gently down the line, and the proper measure of metallic flame squirts into each mould. A trainload of steel is poured in a few minutes.

But this is when all omens are propitious. It's when the stopper-man has made no mistakes. But when rods jam and the stopper won't stop, watch your step, and cover your face. That fierce little stream keeps coming, and nothing that the desperate men on the pouring platform can do seems likely to stem it. Soon one mould is full. But the ladle continues to pour, with twenty tons of steel to go. It can't be allowed to make a steel floor for the pit. It must get into those moulds.

So the craneman swings her on to the next mould, with the stream aspurt. It's like taking water from the teakettle to the sink with a punctured dipper: half goes on the kitchen floor. But the spattering of molten metal is much more exciting. A few little clots affect the flesh like hot bullets. So, when the craneman gets ready to swing the little stream down the line, the workers on the platform behave like frightened fishes in a mill pond. Then, while the mould fills, they come back, to throw certain ingredients into the cooling metal.

These ingots, when they come from the moulds virgin steel, are impressive things—especially on the night turn. Then each stands up against the night air like a massive monument of hardened fire. Pass near them, and see what colossal radiators of heat they are. Trainloads of them pass daily out of the pit to the blooming-mill, to catch their first transformation. But my spell with them is done.

I stood behind the furnace near the spout, which still spread a wave of heat about it, and Nick, the second-helper, beside me yelling things in Anglo-Serbian, into my face. He was a loose-limbed, sallow-faced Serbian, with black hair under a green-visored cap, always on the back of his head. His shirt was torn on both sleeves and open nearly to his waist, and in the uncertain lights of the mill his chest and abdomen shone with sweat.

"Goddam you, what you think. Get me"—a long blur of Serbian, here—"spout, quick mak a"—more Serbian with tremendous volume of voice—"furnace, see? You get that goddam mud!"

When a man says that to you with profound emotion, it seems insulting, to say, "What" to it. But that was what I did.

"All right, all right," he said; "what the hell, me get myself, all the work"—blurred here—"son of a—third-helper—wheelbarrow, why don' you —— quick now when I say!"

"All right, all right, I'll do it," I said, and went away. I was never in my life so much impressed with the necessity of doing it. His language and gesture had been profoundly expressive—of what? I tried to concentrate on the phrases that seeped through emotion and Serbian into English. "Wheelbarrow"—hang on to that; "mud"—that's easy: a wheelbarrow of mud. Good!

I got it at the other end of the mill—opposite Number 4.

"Hey! don't use that shovel for mud!" said the second-helper on Number 4.

So I didn't.

I wheeled back to the gallery behind Seven, and found Nick coming out at me. When he saw that hard-won mud of mine, I thought he was going to snap the cords in his throat.

"Goddam it!" he said, when articulation returned, "I tell you, get wheelbarrow dolomite, and half-wheelbarrow clay, and pail of water, and look what you bring, goddam it!"

So that was it—he probably said pail of water with his feet.

"Oh, all right," I said, smiling like a skull; "I thought you said mud. I'll get it, I'll get it."

This is amusing enough on the first day; you can go off and laugh in a superior way to yourself about the queer words the foreigners use. But after seven days of it, fourteen hours each, it gets under the skin, it burns along the nerves, as the furnace heat burns along the arms when you make back-wall. It suddenly occurred to me one day, after someone had bawled me out picturesquely for not knowing where something was that I had never heard of, that this was what every immigrant Hunky endured; it was a matter of language largely, of understanding, of knowing the names of things, the uses of things, the language of the boss. Here was this Serbian second-helper bossing his third-helper largely in an unknown tongue, and the latter getting the full emotional experience of the immigrant. I thought of Bill, the pit boss, telling a Hunky to do a clean-up job for him; and when the Hunky said, "What?" he turned to me and said: "Lord! but these Hunkies are dumb."

Most of the false starts, waste motion, misunderstandings, fights, burnings, accidents, nerve-wrack, and desperation of soul would fall away if there were understanding—a common language, of mind as well as tongue.

But then, I thought, all this may be because I'm oversensitive. I had this qualm till one day I met Jack. He was an old regular-army sergeant, a man about thirty. He had come back from fixing a bad spout. They had sledged it out—sledged through the steel that had crept into the dolomite and closed the tap-hole.

"Do you ever feel low?" he said, sitting down on the back of a shovel. "Every once'n while I feel like telling 'em to take their job and go to hell with it; you strain your guts out, and then they swear at you."

"I sometimes feel like a worm," I said, "with no right to be living any way, or so mad I want to lick the bosses and the president."

"If you were first-helper, it wouldn't be so bad," he mused; "you wouldn't have to bring up that damn manganese in a wheelbarrow—and they wouldn't kick you round so much." "Will I ever get that job?"

We were washing up at one end of the mill, near the Bessemers. There was plenty of hot water, and good broad sinks. I took off my shirt and threw it on top of a locker; the cinder on the front and sleeves had become mud.

Forty men stood up to the sinks, also with their shirts off, their arms and faces and bodies covered with soap, and saying: "Ah, ooh," and "ffu," with the other noises a man makes when getting clean. Every now and then somebody would look into a three-cornered fragment of looking-glass on one of the lockers, and return to apply soap and a scrubbing-brush to the bridge of his nose.

A group of Slovene boys, who worked on the Bessemer, picked on one of their number, and covered him with soap and American oaths. Somebody told an obscene story loudly in broken English.

The men who had had a long turn or a hard one washed up silently, except for excessive outbreaks if anybody took their soap. Some few hurried, and left grease or soot on their hands or under their eyes.

"I wash up a little here," said Fred, the American first-helper on Number 7, "and the rest at home. Once after a twenty-four hour shift, I fell asleep in the bathtub, and woke up to find the water cold. Of course, you can't really get this stuff off in one or two washups. It gets under your skin. When the furnace used to get down for repairs, and we were laid off, I'd be clean at the end of a week." He laughed and went off.

I had scraped most of the soot from arms and chest, and was struggling desperately with the small of my back. A thick-chested workman at the next bowl, with fringes of gray hair, and a scar on his cheek, grabbed the brush out of my hand.

"Me show you how we do in coal-mine," he said; and proceeded vigorously to grind the bristles into my back, and get up a tremendous lather, that dripped down on my trousers to the floor.

"You wash your buddy's back, buddy wash yours," he said.

I went out of the open-hearth shelter slowly, and watched the line—nearly a quarter of a mile long—of swinging dinner-buckets. Some were large and round, and had a place on top for coffee; some were circular and long; some were flat and square. I looked at the men. They were the day-shift coming in.

"I have finished," I said to myself automatically. "I'm going to eat and go to bed. I don't have to work now."

I looked at the men again. Most of them were hurrying; their faces carried yesterday's fatigue and last year's. Now and then I saw a man who looked as if he could work the turn and then box a little in the evening for exercise. There were a few men like that. The rest made me think strongly of a man holding himself from falling over a cliff, with fingers that paralyzed slowly.

I stepped on a stone and felt the place on my heel where the limestone and sweat had worked together, to make a burn. I'd be hurrying in at 5.00 o'clock that day, and they'd be going home. It was now 7.20. That would be nine and a half hours hence. I had to eat twice, and buy a pair of gloves, and sew up my shirt, and get sleep before then. I lived twenty minutes from the mill. If I walk home, as fast as I can drive my legs and bolt breakfast, seven hours is all I can work in before 3.30. I'll have to get up then to get time for dinner, fixing up my shirt, and the walk to the mill.

I wonder how long this night-shift of gray-faced men, with different-sized dinner-buckets, will be moving out toward the green gate, and the day-shift coming in at the green gate—how many years?

The car up from the nail mill stopped just before it dove under the railroad bridge.

"I'm in luck."

I suddenly had a vision of how the New York subway looked: its crush, its noise, its overdressed Jews, its speed, its subway smell. I looked around inside the clattering trolley-car. Nobody was talking. The car was filled for the most part with Slavs, a few Italians, and some negroes from the nail mill. Everyone, except two old men of unknown age, was under thirty-five. They held their buckets on their laps, or put them on the floor between their legs. Six or eight were asleep. The rest sat quiet, with legs and neck loose, with their eyes open, steady, dull, fixed upon nothing at all.

IV EVERYDAY LIFE

I came into the mill five minutes late one morning, and went to the green check-house at the gate, to pick 1611, the numerical me, from the hook. A stumpy man in a chair looked up and said: "What number?"

I gave it. "An easy way to lose forty-three cents," I thought, feeling a little sore at the stumpy man, and going out through the door slowly.

I increased my step along the road to the open-hearth, and reached my locker just as the Pole who shared it was leaving.

"Goddam gloves!" he was saying. "Pay thirty-five cents—three days—goddam it—all gone—too much. What you think?"

"I think the leather ones at fifty cents last better," I said.

He made a guttural noise, signifying disgust, and left.

I opened the locker, and disentangled my working-clothes, still damp from the last shift, from the Pole's. I removed all my "good" clothes, and stood for a minute naked and comfortable. The thermometer had registered 95° when I got up, at 4.00.

For the past few days I had been demoted to the pit; there had been no jobs open on the floor. As I took up my gloves and smoked glasses, I wondered how I could get back to furnace work.

Pete was moving with his lurching short steps past Six.

"How about helping to-day on the floor?" I said.

He snapped back quickly in his blurred voice, "You work th' pit, tell y'—goddam quick, want y' on the floor."

I looked back at him, swore to myself, and went slowly down the pit stairs.

I couldn't find the gang at first, but later found half of them: Peter the Russian, the short Wop, the Aristocrat, and a couple more, all under furnace Eight, cleaning out cinder. The Aristocrat was trying to get the craneman to bring up one of the long boxes with curved bottoms for slag. The craneman was damning him. There was one too many at the job,—four is enough to clean cinder,—so I threw a bit of slag at Peter (for old time's sake) and passed on.

I met Al, and said, "Where are they working?"

"Clean up the pipes," he said.

The Croat, Marco, Joe, and Fritz were at Number 6, with forks. You see, the pipes run up the ladle's side and release a stopper for pouring the steel. They are covered with fire clay, which is destroyed after one or two ladlings and has to be knocked off and replaced. We loosened the clay with sledges, and Marco watered down the pipes with a hose, to cool them. They were moderately warm when Fritz and I started piling them on the truck. Once or twice the pipe touched Fritz's hand through a hole in his glove, and he yowled, and then laughed. Once or twice I yowled and laughed also.

When we piled near the top, we swung in unison, and tossed the pipe into the air. It was like piling wood.

I caught a torn piece of my pants on a sharp bit of slag while carrying two pipes, and acquired a rip halfway from pocket to knee. Marco had a safety pin for me at once; he kept emergency ones in his shirt-front.

We finished the job in half an hour, and pushed the truck till it came under jurisdiction of a crane. Marco fixed the hooks rather officiously, pushing Fritz and me aside. There is, I suppose, more snobbishness induced by the manner of crane-hooking than in any other pit function. The crane swung the pipes on holders and dropped them in front of the blacksmith shop. We carried them into the shop, Marco and I working together. Inside there were half a dozen small forges, some benches, and a drop hammer. It was the place where ladles and spoons were repaired. The blacksmiths and helpers gave us friendly, but condescending glances.

As we walked back, we saw the crane swing a ladle from the moulds into which it had been pouring toward the dumping pit in front of Five. When the giant bucket approached, the chain hooked to the bottom lifted slowly, and dregs half-steel, half-ash, rolled out into the dump. After a little cooling, we would clean up there. With the chain released, the bucket righted itself with a shuddering clank, and swayed in the air scattering bits of slag and burnt fire clay.

A little later, we did a three-hour job on those dregs. We loosened the slag with picks first, and then lifted forkfuls and shovelfuls into the crane-carried boxes. A good deal of scrap was in the lot, probably the makings of half a ton of steel. This, of course, went into a separate box. I hooked up a couple of big scrap-hunks, weighing perhaps 500 pounds each, and took some sport out of it. That is one small matter, at least, where a grain of judgment and ingenuity has place. A badly hooked scrap-hunk may fall and break a neck, or simply tumble and waste everybody's time. Loosening up with the pick, too, demands a slight knack and smacks faintly of the miner's skill. We had to go down into a pit, where there was heated slag on all sides, using boards to save scorching our shoe leather. In turning up fractures eight or ten inches thick, there would be an inner four inches still red-hot.

At eleven o'clock, I was working at a fair pace, flinging moderately husky forkfuls over a ten-foot space into the box, when Marco looked up.

"Hey," he called.

I glanced at him for a moment. He was smiling. "Rest yourself," he said; "we work hard when de big bosses come."

During the next fifty shovelfuls, the remark went the rounds of my head, trying to get condemned. My memory threw up articles in the "Quarterly Journal of Economics," with "inefficiency and the labor-slackers," and "moral irresponsibility of the worker on the job," and so forth, in them. A couple of sermons and a vista of editorial denunciations of the laboring man who is no longer willing to do "an honest day's work for an honest day's pay," seemed to bring additional pressure for righteous indignation. I asked the following questions of myself, one for every two forkfuls:—

"Isn't it morally a bad thing to soldier, anyway?

"Is Marco a moral enormity?

"Do business men soldier?

"Isn't 'Get to hell out of here if you don't want to work' the answer? Or has the twelve-hour day something to do with it?

"Can these five or six thousand unskilled workmen take any interest in their work, or must they go at it with a consciousness similar to that of the slaves who put up the Pyramids?"

I had to use the pick at this point, which broke up the inquiry, and I left the questions unanswered.

I saw wheelbarrowing ahead for the afternoon, and corralled the only one properly balanced, when I started work at 1.00 P.M., keeping it near me during a scrap-picking hour, until the job should break. At 2.15, it did. Al said: "Get over and clean out under Seven. If we can ever get this goddam stuff cleaned out—" That was an optimism of Al's.

One of the new men and I worked together all afternoon: pick at the slag, shovel, wheelbarrow, dump in the box, hook up to crane. Start over. There was a lot of dolomite and old fine cinder, very dusty, but not hot. This change in discomfort furnished a sensation almost pleasurable. I found out that everyone hid his shovel at the end of the shift, beside piles of brick in the cellar of the mill, under dark stairways, and so forth. I hadn't yet acquired one, but used mostly a fork, which isn't so personal an instrument, and of which there seemed to be a common supply. I felt keen to "acquire" though.

After supper, I wrote in my diary and thought a bit before going to bed. There's a genuine technique of the shovel, the pick, and especially of the wheelbarrow, I thought. That damn plank from the ground to the cinder-box! It takes all I can muster to teeter the wheelbarrow up, dump without losing the thing quite, and bring it down backward without barking my shins. There's a bit of technique, too, in pairing off properly for a job, selecting your lick of work promptly and not getting left jobless to the eyes of the boss, capturing your shovel and hiding it at the end of the turn, keeping the good will of the men you're with on team-work, distinguishing scrap from cinder and putting them into the proper boxes, not digging for slag too deeply in the pit floor, and so forth and so on.

I wonder if I shall learn Serbian, or Russian, or Hungarian? There seems to be a Slavic polyglot that any one of a half-dozen nationalities understands. That word, "Tchekai!—Watch out!"—even the Americans use it. It's a word that is crying in your ears all night. Watch out for the crane that is taking a ladle of hot metal over your head, or a load of scrap, or a bundle of pipes; watch out for the hot cinder coming down the hole from the furnace-doors; watch out for "me" while I get this wheelbarrow by; and "Heow! Tchekai!" for the trainload of hot ingots that passes your shoulder.

I set my alarm for five o'clock, and got into bed with the good-night thought of "The devil with Pete Grayson! I'll get on that furnace!"

Another day went by, hewing cinders in the pit. I tried to figure to myself persuasive or threatening things I could say to the melters, to let me work on the floor. A shrewd-looking little man with moustachios worked near me.

"Did you ever work on the floor?" I asked.

"Oh, yes," he said: "too much hot; to hell with the money!"

They pay you two cents more an hour on the floor. At twenty minutes to five I went upstairs to my locker. Dick Reber, senior melter, stopped me.

"Need a man to-night; want to work?" he said; "always short, you know, on this —— long turn."

"Sure," I said.

That was one way to get promoted, I thought, and wondered how I'd stand fourteen more hours on top of the ten I had had.

"Beat it," yelled the melter.

Jack and I got our flat manganese shovels, and went on the run to the gallery. We were tapping at last. This furnaceful had cooked twenty-two hours. Nick was kneeling on water-soaked bagging, on the edge of the hot spout. He dug out the mud in the tap-hole with a pointed rod and sputtered oaths at the heat. Every few minutes the spout would burn through the bagging to his knees. He would get up, refold the bagging, and kneel again to the job.

Finally the metal gurgled out, a small stream the size of two fingers. Nick dodged back, and it swelled to a six-inch torrent.

"Heow, crane!"

Pete Grayson had come out, and was bawling something very urgently at the pit crane. The ladle swung closer; we could feel the increased wave of heat.

He looked over at us and held up two fingers. That meant both piles of manganese that lay on the gallery next the crane were to be shoveled in—double time for us, in the heat.

"Heow!" yelled the melter.

Jack and I leaped forward to the manganese, and our shovels scraped on the iron gallery. I saw Jack slapping his head to put out a little fire that had started on the handkerchief wound round his neck. I slapped a few sparks that stung my right leg. We finished half the pile.

There was something queer about this heat. The soles of my feet—why in hell should the gallery burn so! There was a blazing gas in the air—my nostrils seemed to flame as they took it in. This was different from most manganese shoveling. My face glowed all over in single concentrated pain. What was it? I saw Jack shoveling wildly in the middle of that second pile. We finished it in a panic.

"What was the matter with that damn ladle?" I asked as we got our breath in the opening between the furnaces.

"Spout had a goddam hole in the middle," he said; "ladle underneath, see?"

I did. The fire-clay of the spout had given way, and a hole forming in the middle let the metal through. That made it necessary, in order to catch the steel, to bring the ladle close, till part of it was under the platform on which we worked. The heat and gas from the hot steel in the ladle had been warming the soles of our feet, and rising into our faces.

"Here's a funny thing," I said, looking down. One of the sparks which had struck my pants burned around, very neatly taking off the cuff and an inch or two of the pant-leg. The thing might have been done with a pair of shears.

I came out of the mill whistling and feeling pretty much "on the crest." I'd worked their damn "long turn," and stood it. It wasn't so bad, all except that ladle that got under the manganese. I ate a huge breakfast, with a calm sense of virtue rewarded, and climbed into bed with a smile on my lips.

The alarm clock had been ringing several minutes before I realized what it was up to. I turned over to shut it off, and found needles running into all the muscles of my back. I struggled up on an elbow. I had a "hell of a head." The alarm was still going.

I fought myself out of bed and shut it off; stood up and tried to think. Pretty soon a thought came over me like an ache: it was "Fourteen hours!" That was beginning in fifty-five minutes—fourteen hours of back-walls, and hot ladles, and—Oh, hell!—I sat down again on the bed, and prepared to lift my feet back in.

Then I got up, and washed fiercely, threw on my clothes, and went downstairs, and out into the afternoon sun.

Down by the restaurant, I met the third-helper on Eight.

"Long turn wouldn't be so bad, if there weren't no next day," he said, with a sort of smile.

In the mill was a gang of malignant men; things all went wrong; everybody was angry and tired; their nerves made mistakes for them.

"I only wish it were next Sunday!" I said to someone.

"There aren't any goddam Sundays in this place," he returned. "Twenty-four hours off between two working days ain't Sunday."

I thought that over. The company says they give you one day off every two weeks. But it's not like a day off anywhere else. It's twenty-four hours sandwiched between two work-days. You finish your night-week at 7.00 Sunday morning, having just done a week of one twenty-four hour shift, and six fourteens. You've got all the time from then till the next morning! Hurrah! How will you use it? If you do the normal thing,—eat breakfast, and go to bed for eight hours,—that brings you to 5.00 o'clock. Will you stay up all night? you've had your sleep. Yes, but there's a ten-hour turn coming at 7.00. You go to bed at 11.00, to sleep up for your turn. There's an evening-out of it! Hurrah again! But who in hell does the normal thing? Either you go on a tear for twenty-four hours,—you only have it twice a month,—or you sleep the twenty-four, if the week's been a bad one. Or—and this is common in Bouton—you get sore at the system and stay away a week—if you can afford it.

"Hey, you, get me a jigger, quick. Ten thou'."

"All right," I said, and shut off my mind for the day.

I usually had bad words and bad looks from "Shorty." Jack calls him "that dirty Wop." Late one afternoon he produced a knife and fingered it suggestively while he talked. So I always watched him with all the eyes I had.

One day we had shoveled in manganese together over a hot ladle, and I noticed that he was in a bad mood. We finished and leaned against the rail.

"Six days more," he said very quietly.

I looked up, surprised at his voice.

"What do you mean?"

"Six days more, this week, me quit this goddam job."

"What's the matter?"

"Oh, —— me lose thirteen pound this job, what the hell!"

"What job will you get now?"

"I don't know, I don't know; any damn job better than this," he said very bitterly.

Having adopted the quitting idea, these six days were too much to endure. A little later, Jock was ready to make front-wall. He saw Shorty and said, "Get me that hook and spoon."

Shorty stood and looked at Jock, with the utmost malignity in his face, and said finally, "Get your goddam hook and spoon yourself."

Jock was greatly surprised, and returned, "Who the hell are you?"

Shorty snapped instantly, "Who the hell are you?"

And then he was fired.

This is the second "quitting mad" I've seen. The feeling seems to be something like the irrepressible desire that gets piled up sometimes in the ranks of the army to "tell 'em to go to hell" and take the consequences. It's the result of accumulated poisons of overfatigue, long hours, overwrought nerves, "the military discipline of the mills."

The practical advantage of being "given the hook" is that you can draw your pay immediately; whereas, if you simply leave, you have to wait for the end of the two weeks' period.

I ate my dinner at the Greek's.

"Make me some tea that's hot, George. This wasn't. Oh, and a double bowl of shredded; I've got a hole to fill up."

George kept the best of the four Greek restaurants. It had a certain variety. It splurged into potato salad, and a few other kinds, and went into omelets that were very acceptable. The others confined themselves to fried things, with a few cereals and skimmed milk. I looked up from my shredded wheat. George was wiping up a rill of gravy and milk from the porcelain table, and a man was getting ready to sit down opposite. It was Herb, the pit craneman.

"Always feed here?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, "best place in town, isn't it?"

He nodded.

"How big is Bouton? how many people has it?" I asked.

He grinned slowly, and put his elbows on the table. He was a Pennsylvania Dutchman, with worry settling over good nature in a square face.

"Twenty thousand," he said.

"It seems small for twenty thousand," I returned; "like a little village. There's really only one store, isn't there,—the company store,—where they keep anything? Only one empty newspaper, no theatre, unless you count that one-story movie place, no enterprise—"

"A one-man town," he said, quickly. "Nearly every house in town is owned by Mr. Burnham. Now look here, suppose a man works like hell to fix things up, to work around and get a pretty damn good garden, puts a lot of money into making his house right. Suppose he does, and then gets into a scrap with his boss. What can he do? The company owns his house, the company owns every other damn thing in town. He's got to beat it—all his work shot to hell. That's why nobody does anything.—Hey, ham and—Where you workin' now? Ain't seen yer in the pit."

"I'm on the floor, helpin' on Number 7."

"Att-a-boy!"

At last, Saturday night. Everyone felt Sunday coming, with twenty-four hours of drunkenness or sleep alluringly ahead. The other shift had tapped the furnace at three o'clock. We might not tap again, and that was nice to think about. A front-wall and a hot back-wall we went through as if it were better fun than billiards.

"Look out for me, I've got the de'il in me," from Jock, Scotch First on Number 8. I looked up, and the crazy fool had a spoon—they weigh over a hundred—between his legs, dragging it like a kid with a broomstick. As it bounced on the broken brick floor, he yelled like a man after a Hun.

"Who's the maun amang ye, can lick a Scotchman?" he cried, dropping the spoon to the floor.

"Is this the best stuff you can show on Number 8?" said Fred slowly. He dived for Jock's waist, and drew it to him, though the Scotchman tried to break his grip with one of his hands and with the other thrust off his opponent's face. When Fred had him tight, he caught one of Jock's straying arms, bent it slowly behind his back, and contrived a hammerlock.

"You're no gentlemen,"—in pain; "you're interruptin' my work."

Fred relaxed, and Jock jumped away.

"Come over to a good furnace, goddam it, and fight it out!" he yelled, from a distance that protected his words.

The charging-machine, in its perpetual machine-tremolo, shook past and stopped. George slid down from his seat, and came over to Number 8's gang.

"Well, Fred, how in hell's the world usin' yer?"

"Ask me that to-morrow."

"Well, guys, good night; I'm dead for forty minutes."

He picked up a board some six feet long and about six inches in width. He laid himself carefully on it, and was sleeping inside of a minute.

I looked at him enviously for a few minutes. Suddenly it occurred to me that the board lay over a slit in the floor. It was the opening through which the pipes that attach to the gas-valve rise and fall. When gas is shifted from one end of the furnace to the other, the pipes emerge through the slit to a height several feet from the floor. Finally Fred made the same discovery, and a broad smile spread over his face. He continued to watch George, his grin deepening. At last he turned to the second-helper.

"Throw her over," he said.

Nick threw the switch. Slowly and easily the valve-pipes rose, lifting George and the head of his bed into the air, perilously. An immense and ill-controlled shout swelled up and got ready to burst inside the witnesses. George slept on, and the bed passed forty-five degrees. In another second it rolled off the side of the pipes, and George, scared, half-asleep, and much crumpled, rolled over on the furnace floor. It was several seconds before he recovered profanity.

The pure joy of that event spread itself over the entire shift.

When the light from the melting scrap-iron inside the furnace shot back, it lit up the hills and valleys in Nick's face. I noticed how sharp the slope was from his cheek-bones to the pit of his cheeks, and the round holes in which his eyes were a pool at the bottom. His lips moved off his white teeth, and twisted themselves, as a man's do with effort. He looked as if he were smiling. I picked up my shovel, and shoved it into the dolomite pile, with a slight pressure of knee against right forearm that eases your back. The thermometer in the shade outside was 95°. I wondered vaguely how much it was where Nick stood, with the doors open in his face.

We walked back together after the front-wall to the trough of water.

"Not bad when you get good furnace, good first-helper," he said. "Fred good boy, but furnace no good. A man got to watch himself on this job," he went on bitterly; "he pull himself to pieces."

"I can't manage quite enough sleep," I said, wondering if that was the remark of a tenderfoot.

"Sometime—maybe one day a month—I feel all right, good, no sleepy," he went on. "Daytime work, ten hour, all right, feel good; fourteen hour always too much tired. Sometime, goddam, I go home, I go to bed, throw myself down this way." He threw both arms backward and to the side in a gesture of desperate exhaustion, allowing his head to fall back at the same time. "Goddam, think I no work no more. No day nuff sleep for work," he concluded.

Later on in the day, I saw Jimmy let the charge-up man, George, take the spoon and make front-wall. The heat "got his goat." "I lose about ten or fifteen pounds every summer," he said, "but I get it back in the winter. My wife is after me the whole time to leave this game. I tell her every year I will. Better quit this business, buddy, while you're young, before you get stuck like me."

I walked home with Stanley, the Pole. He always called me Joe, the generic name for non-Hunky helpers.

"Say, Joe," he said, as we came under the railroad bridge, "what's your name right?"

"Charlie," I answered. "By the way, where have you been?"

"Drunk, Charlie," he answered, smiling cheerfully.

"Ever since I saw you in the pit?"

"Three week," he stated, with satisfaction; "beer, whiskey, everyt'ing. What the hell, work all time goddam job, what the hell?"

V WORKING THE TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR SHIFT

7 A.M. Sunday

I tried to get a lot of sleep last night for handling the long turn; managed about nine hours. When I came to the locker, Stanley was there, dressed, cleaning his smoked glasses.

"How much sleep last night?" I asked.

"Oh, six, seven hour," said Stanley.

"You're a damned fool," I said; "this is the long turn."

"I know, I know," he returned, "I have t'ing to do. No have time sleep."

I looked at him. He had a big frame, but his limbs were hung on it, like clothes on hooks. His face was a gray pallor, sharply caving in under the cheek-bones. His eyes were very dull, and steady. I'd noticed those eyes of his before, and never could decide whether they showed a kind of sullen defiance, or resignation, or were just extraordinarily tired.

"Two month more," he said.

"Two month more what?"

"Two month more this work every Sunday—goddam work all day like hell, all night like hell. Pretty soon go back to good job."

I knew what he meant now. He had told me weeks before, when we had hewed cinders together in the pit, how he was a rougher in a Pittsburgh mill. Worked only twelve hours a day and no Sundays.

"No more goddam long turn," he concluded; "work of rougher slack now, all right October."

He moved off slowly, with no spring in his step, and no energy expended beyond what was absolutely necessary to move him.

I walked out on the floor to look at the clock. The night gang on every furnace was washing up, very cheerfully and with an extraordinary thoroughness. They were slicking up for the once a fortnight twenty-four-hour party. Nearly everyone drank through his day off, or raised hell in some extraordinary manner. It was too precious and rare to spend in less violent reaction to the two weeks' fatigue. I looked at them and tried not to be envious. The first-helper on Seven was taking a last look through the peepholes as he put on his collar. A great Slavic hulk on Number 5 was brushing his clothes with unheard of violence.

Dick Reber passed by. He saw me leaning against a girder buttoning my shirt.

"Front-wall, Number 5, you!" he bawled.

I was sore at myself for having been seen standing about doing nothing. But I was sore at Dick also, unreasonably. I went back to my locker, got my gloves, and went to Number 5. I began filling the spoon, with the help of "Marty," the Wop. He glared at me, and interfered with my shovel twice when we went together to the dolomite pile. Marty had made enemies widely on the furnaces because of a loud mouth, and an officiousness that sat ridiculously on his stature and his ignorance of steel-making.

I was glad when the front-wall was done. I took the hook down, and went over to the fountain in back of Five, cooled my head, neck, and arms, and went over to Seven, without taking a swallow. I had decided to have only two drinks of water in the half-day.

Dick Reber saw me coming up and, I think in punishment for loafing, said: "Clean up under there. I want you to clean all that filth out, all of it, from behind that girder."

It was near the locker and under the flooring, in a sort of shelf, where lime, dolomite, dirt, old gloves, shoes, filth of all sorts had accumulated. I cleaned it out with a broom and a stick. It took me half an hour.

"All right," said the first-helper; "now get me ten thousand."

So I went off to the Bessemer, rather glad of the walk. I climbed the stairs to the pouring platform, and watched the recorder, who had left his book, operate the levers. The shifting engine backed a ladle under, and slowly the huge pig-iron mixer, bubbling and shooting out a tide of sparks, dipped and allowed about 20,000 pounds to drop into the ladle.

"Ten thou' for Seven," I said.

In another five minutes, the engine brought up a ladle for my ten thousand, and the boy dipped it out for me with the miraculous levers.

"All right," I said; and ran down the stairs fast enough to catch a ride back past the furnaces, on the step of the locomotive.

The second-helper grabbed the big hook which came down slowly on a chain from the crane, and stuck it into the bottom of the ladle. As the chain lifted, the ladle tipped, and poured the ten thousand pounds with a hiss. But the craneman was careless, which isn't usual. Fred kept saying, "Whoop, whoop!" but he went right on spilling for quite a spell before he recovered control.

"Dolomite," said the first-helper to me, after the "jigger" was poured.

I went to a box full of the white gravel, at the end of the mill, and yelled at Herb, the craneman. A box of dolomite is about eight feet square and three high. This one was perched on top of a dolomite pile, ten feet off the ground. I struggled up on top, and took the hooks Herb gave me from the crane,—eight-inch hooks,—and put them into the corners of the box, using both hands. Then I slid down, and the box rose and swung over my head.

Herb settled it neatly on our own little dolomite pile in front of Seven. I slipped out the front hooks, and the back ones lifted and dumped the load, with a soft swish, nearly on the low part of the old pile.

There was a little time to sit down after this—perhaps ten minutes. I smoked a Camel, which had spent the last shift in my shirt pocket. It was a melancholy Camel, and tended to twist up in my nose, but it tasted sweet. I sat on Seven's bench, and watched Fred take his rod and move aside the shutters of the peepholes, to give final looks at the furnace. She must be nearly ready. He looked back at me, and I knew that meant "test."

I grabbed tongs, lying spread out by the anvil, clamped hold of the mould, and ran with them to about ten feet from number two door of the furnace. Fred had the test-spoon lifted and shoved into the door; he moved it around in the molten steel, and brought it out full, straining his body tense to hold it level and not lose the test. I shifted the mould a little on the ground, and closed my hands as tight as I could on the tongs, so the mould wouldn't slip and turn. He poured easily and neatly, just filling the mould, and flung the spoon violently on the floor, to shake off the crusting steel on the handle.

I ran with mould and tongs to the water-trough in front of Eight, and plunged it in, the steam coming up in a small cloud. I brought it out and held it on the anvil, end-wise, with the tongs, while Nick flattened in the top slightly on both edges, to make it break easily. Nick broke the ingot in two blows, and Fred and the melter consulted over the fragments.

"All right," said Dick.

We were about to tap. I went after my flat manganese shovel, but it was gone from the locker. Some dog-gone helper has nailed it. I took out an ordinary flat shovel.

In back of the furnace Nick was already busy with a "picker," prodding away the stopping from the tap. He burned his hands once, swore, gave it up, went halfway along the platform away from the tap, returned, and went at it again. Finally, the steel escaped, with its usual roar of flame and its usual splunch as it fell into the ladle.

I stepped back, and nearly into "Shorty," who had come to help shovel manganese. "Where you get shovel?" he said, with his eyes blazing, pointing to mine.

"Out of my locker," I said.

He started toward it, and I held it away from him.

"I tell you that goddam shovel mine—" he began; but Dick, from the other side of the spout, shouted at us how many piles to shovel, and Shorty shut up. We were to get in the first big pile and the next little one.

The ladle was beginning to fill. "Heow!" yelled Dick.

Shorty and I went forward and put in the manganese. It was hot, but I took too much interest in shoveling faster than Shorty, to care. Then came the second ladle, during which Shorty's handkerchief caught on fire, and made him sputter a lot, and rid himself of some profanity in Anglo-Italian.

I went to that trough by Eight afterward, to wash off the soot and cinder, and put my head under water, straight down. I knew back-wall was coming, and sat down a minute, wondering, rather vaguely, how I was going to feel at six or seven the next morning.

Back-wall came. I had bad luck with it, trying too hard. It was too hot for one thing. There are times when a back-wall will be so cool you can hesitate a long second, as you fling your shovelful, and make sure of your aim; at others, your face scorches when you first swing back, and you let the stuff off any fashion, to get out of the heat. There's a third-helper on Five, I'm glad to say, who is worse than I. They put him out of the line this time; he was just throwing into the bottom of the furnace.

Everyone develops an individual technique. Jimmy's is bending his knees, and getting his shovel so low that it looks like scooping off the floor. Fred's is graceful, with a smart snap at the end.

Then front-wall. I start in search of a spoon and a hook. It's not easy to get one to suit the taste of my first-helper. There's one that looks twenty feet,—I haven't any technical figures on spoons,—but it's too long, I know, for Fred. There's a spoon three feet shorter, just right. Hell—with two inches melted off the end! I pick a short one in good repair,—he can use the thing or get his own,—and drag it to Seven, giving the scoop a ride on the railroad track, to ease the weight. Fred has put a hook over number one door; so I hurry, and lift the spoon handle with gloved hands to slip it on the hook. If it's not done quickly, you'll get a burn; you're an arm's length from molten steel, and no door between. I get it on, and pick up a shovel.

Front-wall can be very easy,—you can nearly enjoy it, like any of the jobs,—if the furnace is cool, and there's a breeze blowing down the open spaces of the mill. And, too, if the spoon hangs right in the hook, and the first-helper turns it a little for you, then you can stand off, six feet from the flame, and toss your gravel straight into the spoon's scoop. You hardly go to the water fountain to cool your head when the stunt's over. On number one the hook hung wrong, the spoon wouldn't turn in it, and you had to hug close, and pour, not toss. I tried a toss on my second shovel, and half of it skated on the floor.

"Get it on the spoon, goddam you!" from Nick.

So I did.

After that, we sat around for twenty minutes. Fred looked at the furnace once or twice, and changed the gas. Several gathered in front of Seven—Jock, Dick, the melter, Fred, and Nick.

"Do you know what my next job's going to be?" said Fred.

The others looked up.

"In a bank."

"Nine to five," said Dick. "Huh! gentlemen's hours."

"Saturday afternoons, and Sundays," said Fred.

The other faces glowed and said nothing.

"This wouldn't be so bad if there were Sundays," said Fred.

"I'll tell you, there'll come a time," broke in the melter, "when Gary and all the other big fellers will have to work it themselves—no one else will."

"Now in the old country, a man can have a bit of fun," said the Scotchman. "Picnics, a little singin' and drinkin',—and the like. What can a man do here? We work eight hours in Scotland. They work eight hours in France, in Italy, in Germany—all the steel mills work eight hours, except in this bloody free country."

The melter broke in again. "It's the dollar they're after—the sucking dollar. They say they're going to cut out the long turn. I heard they were going to cut out the long turn when I went to work in the mill, as a kid. I'm workin' it, ain't I? Christ!"

I left, to shovel in fluor spar with Fred.

When we finished, Fred said: "You better get your lunch now, if you want it. Then help Nick on the spout."

I ate in the mill restaurant. My order was roast beef, which included mashed potato, peas, and a cup of coffee—for thirty-five cents. Then I had apple pie and a glass of milk. The waiters are a fresh Jew, named Beck, and a short, fat Irish boy, called Pop. There is a counter, no tables; the food is clean.

I went back to help Nick on the spout, and found him already back on the gallery with a wheelbarrow of mud. He looked up gloomily and said: "One more."

I dumped the wheelbarrow, and went after more, bounced it over tracks and a hose, and up and down a little board runway to where the mud-box stands. After filling up, I went back slowly, dangerously, swayingly, over bits of dolomite and coal, navigated the corner of the gallery by a hair's tolerance, and dropped the handles of the wheelbarrow by Nick with relief. It's bad on my back, that's it. I'd rather do two back-walls, and tap three times in high heat, than wheel these exacting loads of mud.

Nick knelt on the other side of the spout, and I gave him the mud with my shovel, to repair the holes and broken places of the spout, which the last flow of molten steel had carried away. When he finished the big holes, I gave him small gobs of mud, dipping my hands in a bucket of water between each two, to keep the stuff from sticking. A wave of weakening heat rose constantly from the spout still hot from the last flow. I prayed God Nick would hurry. He made a smooth neat surface on the whole seven-feet of spout, rounding the edges with his hands.

When I came back from the spout, Fred was in front of the furnace, blue glasses on his nose, inspecting the brew. He put his glasses back on his cap, glanced at me, and pointed to a pile of dolomite and slag which had been growing in front of Number 3 door.

"All right," I said, and picked up a shovel from the dolomite pile. For a couple of minutes, I shoveled the stuff down the slag hole, and remembered vividly the bygone pit-days. Then I would have been cleaning up around the buggy. For a minute I felt vastly superior to pit people. I earned two cents more an hour, and threw down a hole the dolomite and dirt they cleared away.

I began to feel a little tired in back and legs, and repeated Fred's formula on how to get away with a long turn: "Take it like any other day to five o'clock. Then work for midnight. Anyone can stand it from midnight to morning." I did a front-wall on that basis.

"Watch those buggies!"

I ran over to the furnace and glanced down the slag hole, yelling back, "Half full." Then Fred went to an electric switch, and the whole furnace tilted till the hot running slag flowed over at the doors, and dripped into the buggy-car beneath, in the pit. I held my hand up as one of them filled, and Fred caught the pitching furnace with the switch, and stopped the flow of slag.

4 P.M. Sunday

Number 8 furnace tapped, and I shoveled manganese into the ladle with that man from Akron, who is new, and who, I noticed, burned his fingers in the same way I did on my first day. Then back-wall and front-wall, and Jock saying all the while, "It's a third gone, lads."

5 P.M. Sunday

I felt much more tired after this first ten hours than later; it was the limp fatigue that comes from too much heat. I ate fried eggs and a glass of milk, and then my appetite took a start and I ordered cold lamb and vegetables. When I finished, I went back into the mill to my locker, and took out a cigarette. I sat on a pile of pipes against a main girder, intending to smoke; the cigarette went out, and I slept a half hour.

Things were going first-rate from six to nine. Jigger, clean up scrap, front-wall Number 6, front-wall Number 8. I couldn't distinguish between this and any other night shift; the food must have acted for sleep. But after nine the hours dragged. From 9.20 to 10.00 was a couple of hours.

In the middle of a front-wall, I saw the efficiency man, Mr. Lever, come through and stare at the furnace, walk around a little, and stare profoundly at the furnace. Mr. Lever was pointed in two places, I noticed for the first time. He had a pointed stomach, and his face worked into a point at his nose. I noticed carefully that he had a receding chin and a receding forehead. As he watched us scoop the dolomite, drag up to the spoon, dump, scoop up the dolomite, and do it over, for three quarters of an hour, I thought about him. I wanted to go up to him, and give him my shovel. I had to struggle against that impulse—to go up to him and give him my shovel.

The evening dragged. I fought myself, to keep from looking at the clock. I fought for several hours after ten o'clock, and then, when I thought dawn must be breaking, went up and found it ten minutes of eleven.

I did feel relieved at twelve, and went out to the restaurant, saying: "Hell, anyone can wait till morning."

Sometimes, when things are hurried, when tapping is near or a spout is to be fixed, you have to eat still drenched in sweat. But to-night I had time, and at quarter of twelve hung my shirt on the hot bricks at the side of the furnace, and stood near the doors in the heat, to dry my back and legs. I then washed soot and dolomite dust from ears and neck, and dipped my left arm, which was burned, in cold water. At twelve I put on the dried shirt, and went to eat.

Half the men wash, half don't. There were a number of open-hearth helpers in the restaurant, with black hands and faces, two eating soup, two with their arms on the counter. Their faces lacked any expression beyond a sullen fatigue; but their eyes roved, following Beck about. Lefflin had his arms on the counter and his face on them.

I ate ham and eggs, which included coffee, fried potatoes, two slices of bread, and a glass of milk.

Walking back to the furnaces was an effort of will. I climbed the embankment to the tracks very slowly, the stones and gravel loosening and tumbling downhill at each step. I tried hard to concentrate on a calculation of the probable number of front-walls to come. Then I wondered if it wouldn't pay to cut out breakfast in the morning, and get nine hours of sleep instead of eight and a quarter. Friselli came up the bank behind me. He is third on Number 6.

"Well," I said, "make lots of money to-night."

"What's the good money, kill yourself?" he said, and went past me along the tracks.