Number 8 was preparing to make front-wall. I felt weary, and full of ham and eggs, and very desirous of sitting down right there on the floor. But Jock, the first-helper on Eight, said, "Oh, Walker!" when he saw me, and we began.
Through that front-wall Jock was tiring. He worked in little spurts. For "half a door" he would sing, and goad us on in half-Scotch, and for the next half he would be silent, and wipe his face with his sleeve. After that door, he came up to us and said with profound conviction, "It's a lang turn, it's a lang turn."
When we finished, Jock lay down on a bench.
It's a part of a third-helper's duties to keep five or six bags of fine anthracite coal on the little gallery back of the furnace, near the spout. I went after that little job now. Fifty pounds of coal in a thick paper bag isn't much to carry, till you get doing it a couple of days running.
I sat on the seat where the Wop stays who works the furnace-doors; they call him the "pull up." That had some sacks and a cushion, and was broad, with a girder for back. I fell asleep.
Something twisting and pinching my foot woke me up. It was the first-helper. "Fifteen thousand, quick!" he said. I got up with a jerk, feeling not so sleepy as I expected, but immeasurably stiff. I moved in a wobbly fashion down toward the Bessemer. I felt as if I were limping in four or five directions. Very vigorously and insistently I thought of one thing. I would look at the clock opposite Number 6 when I went by, and possibly, very probably, a whole pile of hours had been knocked off. Then I thought with a sting that we had not tapped, and it couldn't be more than three o'clock. It was two!
"Fifteen thousand," I said to myself, "quick"; and climbed the iron stairs to the Bessemer platform.
When I came back, I walked beside the locomotive as it dragged the ladle and the fifteen thousand pounds of molten pig iron. Through closing eyes I watched the charging-machine thrust in the spout. That long finger lifted the clay thing from its resting-place on the big saw-horses between furnaces. Then, moving on the rails, the machine adjusted itself in front of number two door, and shoved the spout in with a jar.
I stood lazily watching the pouring of the molten steel. Fred motioned slowly with his hands, with "Up a little, whoop!" as the stream flowed very cleanly into the spout and furnace. Then came the noise of lifting, that characteristic crane grind, with a rising inflection as it gained speed and moved off. "Pretty soon tapping, after tapping back-wall, front-wall, the spout, morning," I meditated.
"Well, how in hell are you?" It was Al, the pit boss.
"Fine!" I said as loudly as I could; and went and sat down at once. My chin hit my chest. I stopped thinking, but didn't go to sleep.
"Test!" yelled Fred.
We tested three times, and then tapped. There were two ladles, with four piles of manganese, to shovel in. A third-helper from Number 4, a short stocky Italian, shoveled with me. The ladle swung slightly closer to the gallery than usual, and sent up a bit more gas and sparks. We put out little fires on our clothes six or seven times. After the first ladle, the Italian put back the sheet iron over the red-hot spout, and after the second ladle, I put it on. We rested between ladles, in a little breeze that came through between furnaces.
"What you think of this job?" he asked.
"Pretty bad," I said, "but pretty good money."
He looked up, and the veins swelled on his forehead. His cheeks were inflamed, and his eyes showed the effects of the twenty hours of continuous labor.
"To hell with the money!" he said, with quiet passion; "no can live."
The words sank into my memory for all time.
The back-wall was, I think, no hotter than usual, but men's nerves made them mind things they would have smirked at the previous morning. The third-helper on Eight and Nick quarreled over a shovel, and Nick sulked till Fred went over and spoke to him. Once the third-helper got in Nick's way. "Get out, or I'll break your goddam neck!" And so on—
I felt outrageously sore at everyone present—not least, myself. After that back-wall all except Fred threw their shovels with violence on the floor, and went to the edge of the mill. They stood about in the little breeze that had come up there, in a state of fatigue and jangled nerves, looking out on a pale streak of morning just visible over freight cars and piles of scrap.
We made front-wall, and when it was over, I went to the bench by the locker and sat down, to try to forget about the spout. I had been forgetting about it for twenty minutes when Nick came up, and shook me, thinking I had fallen asleep.
"Mud," he said.
I got him mud.
Nick fixed up the spout amid an inclination to cursing in Serbian, and gave me commands in loud tones in the same language. I felt exceedingly indifferent to Nick and to the spout, and finished up in a state of enormous indifference to all things save the chance of sleep. Jack, the second-helper of Eight, was making tea, having dipped out some hot steel with a test-spoon, and set a tea-pot on it.
"Want some?" he said.
I nodded.
Watching him make it, and drinking the tea woke me up.
"What time is it?" I asked.
"Four-thirty," said he.
"Thanks for the tea."
Then the summoning signal for a third-helper rang out—a sledge-hammer pounding on sheet iron. They were "spooning up," that is, making front-wall, on Number 6. All through that stunt I was wide awake, quite refreshed, though with the sense, the conviction, that I had been in the mill, doing this sort of thing, for a week at the inside.
Coming back to Seven from that, I found Fred flat on his back, looking "all in." Jock came up for a drink of water, and looked over at me.
"You look to me," he remarked, "like the breaking up of a bad winter." He laughed.
5 A.M. Monday
The sun came into the mill, looking very pallid and sick beside the bright light from the metal. I watched the men on Eight make back-wall, and heard the sounds; I sat on the bench, my legs as loose as I could make them, my head forward, eyes just raised.
"Lower, lower, goddam you, lower!" came a desperate command to the "pull-up" man to close the furnace doors.
"Get out—"
"One more—"
"Up, up, goddam it! where are your ears?"
"Come on, men, last door."
"My shovel you son-of-a—!"
Now they were tapping on Number 6. The melter came out of his shanty; he had had a sleep since the last furnace tapped. He rubbed his eyes, and went out on the gallery. I could hear his "Heow." Four poor devils were standing in the flame, putting in manganese. Thank God, I don't shovel for Six.
"A jigger," from Fred.
"Sure."
When I went for it, the sores on the bottom of my feet hurt, so that I walked on the edges of my shoes. I was so delighted with the idea of its being six o'clock, with no back-walls ahead, that I almost took pleasure in that foot. I stopped in front of a fountain and put my right arm under the water.
The recorder in the Bessemer was asleep. He was a boy of twenty. I woke him up, and grinned in his face.
"Fifteen thou' for Number 7."
"You go to hell, with your goddam Number 7!"
I grinned at him again, knew it was just the long turn, knew he'd give me that fifteen thousand pounds; went down stairs again—
Twenty minutes of seven. It's light. Nobody talks, but everyone dresses in a hurry. Everyone's face looks grave from fatigue—eyes dead. We leave at ten minutes of seven.
7 A.M. Monday
It's a problem—a damn problem—whether to walk fast and get home quick, or walk slow and sort of rest. I try to go fast, and have the sense of lifting my legs, not with the muscles, but with something else. I shake my head to get it clearer. One bowl of oatmeal. Coffee. "I feel all right." I get up and am conscious of walking home quietly and evenly, without any further worry about the difficulty of lifting my feet. "The long turns, they're not so bad," I say out loud, and stumble the same second on the stairs. I get up, angry, and with my feet stinging with pain. Old thought comes back: "Only seven to eight hours sleep. Bed. Quick." I push into my room—the sun is all over my bed. Pull the curtain; shut out a little. Take off my shoes. It's hard work trying to be careful about it, and it's darn painful when I'm not careful. Sit on the bed, lift up my feet. Feel burning all over; wonder if I'll ever sleep. Sleep.
At the end of every shift, when I walked toward the green mill-gate just past the edge of the power house, I could look over toward the blast-furnaces. There were five of them, standing up like mammoth cigars some hundred feet in height. A maze of pipes, large as tunnels, twisted about them, and passed into great boilers, three or four of which arose between each two furnaces. These, I learned, were "stoves" for heating the blast. I had had in mind for several days asking for a transfer to this interesting apparatus. There was less lifting of dead weight on the blast-furnace jobs than on the open-hearth. Besides, I wanted to see the beginning of the making of steel—the first transformation the ore catches, on its way toward becoming a steel rail, or a surgical instrument.
I went to see the blast-furnace superintendent, Mr. Beck, at his house on Superintendent's Hill.
"I'm working on the open-hearth," I said, "and want very much to get transferred to the blast-furnace. I intend to learn the steel business, and want to see the beginnings of things."
"How much education?" he asked.
"I graduated from college," I said, "Yale College." Would that complicate the thing, I wondered, or get in the way? I wanted badly to sit down for a talk, tell him the whole story—army, Washington, hopes and fears; I liked him a good deal. But he was in a hurry—perhaps that might come on a later day.
We talked a little. He said I ought to come into the office for a while and "learn to figure burdens." I replied that I wanted the experience of the outside, and a start at the bottom.
"All right," he said, "I'll put you outside. Come Monday morning."
On Monday morning I followed the cindered road inside the gate for three hundred yards, turned off across a railroad track, and passed a machine-shop. The concrete bases of the blast-furnaces rose before me. Somebody had just turned a wheel on the side of one of the boiler-like "stoves," and a deafening blare, like tons of steam getting away, broke on my eardrums. I asked where the office was.
"Through there."
Up some steps, over a concrete platform, past the blaring "stove," I went, to the other side of the furnaces, and found there a flat dirty building—the office. Inside was Mr. Beck, who turned me over at once to Adolph, the "stove-gang boss."
I was a little anxious over this introduction to things, and thought it might embarrass or prevent comradeships. But it didn't. No one knew, or if he did, ever gave it a thought. It may perhaps have accounted for Adolph's letting me keep my clothes in his shanty that night, and for considerable conversation he vouchsafed me on the first day. But my individuality passed quickly, very quickly; I became no more than a part of that rather dingy unit, the stove-gang.
While I was putting on my clothes in Adolph's sheet-iron shanty, he grinned and said: "Last time, pretty dirty job, too, eh?"
"Yes," I said, "open-hearth."
He led me out of the shanty, past three stoves, up an iron staircase, past a blast-furnace, and through a "cast-house." That is not as interesting as I hoped. It is merely a place of many ditches, or run-ways, that lead the molten iron from the furnace to the ladle. Very little iron is ever "cast," since the blast-furnaces here make iron only for the sake of swiftly transporting it, while still hot, to the Bessemer and open-hearth, for further metamorphosis into steel.
We came at last to more stoves, a set of three for No. 4 blast-furnace. Near the middle one was a little group of seven men, three of them with a bar, which they thrust and withdrew constantly in an open door of the stove. Inside were shelving masses and gobs of glowing cinder.
"You work with these feller," Adolph said; and passed out of sight along the stoves.
I watched carefully for a long time, which was a cardinal rule of practice with me on joining up with a new gang. It was best, I thought, to shut up, and study for a spell the characters of the men, the movements and knacks of the job. I think this reserve helped, for the men were first to make advances, and before the day was out, I had a life-history from most of them.
"Where you work, las' job?" asked a little Italian with a thin blond moustache, after he had finished his turn on the crowbar.
"Open-hearth," I said, "third-helper."
"I work three week open-hearth," he said, "too hot, no good."
"Hot all right," I said; "how's this job?"
"Oh, pretty good, this not'ing," he said; "sometime we go in stove, clean 'em up, hot in there like hell. Some day all right, some day no good."
I had been watching the stove, and caught the simple order of movements. Two or three men, with long lunging thrusts, loosened the glowing cinder inside a fire-box; another pulled it out with a hoe into a steel wheelbarrow; another dumped the load on a growing pile of cinder over the edge of the platform. When one of the men disappeared for a chew, I grabbed the wheelbarrow at hauling-out time, and worked into the job.
In fifteen minutes that fire-box was cleared out, and we moved to the next stove. We skipped that; the door was locked and wedged. I learned later that, if we had opened it, the blast (being "on" in the stove) would in all likelihood have killed us. It blows out with sufficient pressure to carry a man forty yards. But the next stove we tackled. I tried the thrusting of the bar this time. The trick is to aim well at a likely crack, thrust in hard and together, and with all the weight on the bar, spring it up and down till the cinder gives. It was good exercise without strain, and so cool in comparison with open-hearth work that I took real joy in the hot cinder. The heat was comparable to a wood fire, and only occasionally was it necessary to hug close.
We did five stoves, taking the wheelbarrow with us, and carrying it up the steps, when we passed from one level to another. After the five came a lull. Two of the men rolled cigarettes, the rest reinforced a chew that already looked as big as an apple in the cheek. For both these comforting acts "Honest Scrap" was used, a tobacco that is stringy and dark, and is carried in great bulk, in a paper package.
The men sat on steps or leaned against girders. A short Italian near me, with quick movements, and full of unending talk, looked up and asked the familiar question, "What job you work at last time?"
"Open-hearth," I said.
"How much pay?"
"Forty-five cents an hour."
"No like job?"
"No, like this job better," I returned.
He paused. Then, "What job you work at before open-hearth?"
"Oh," I said, "I was in the army."
His face became alert at once, and interested. The others stopped talking, also, and looked over at me.
"Me have broder in de American army; no in army, mysel'; me one time Italian army. How long time you?"
"Nearly two years," I said.
"Oversea?"
"Yes, but didn't get to front, before war over. No fight," I answered, adopting abbreviated style, as I sometimes did. It seemed unnecessary and a little discourteous to use a rounded phrase, with all the adorning English particles.
He jumped down from the steps and took up a broom, executing a shoulder arms or two, and the flat-hand Italian salute, performed with a tremendous air.
"Here," I said, "bayonet."
I took the broomstick, and did the bayonet exercises. The gang stood up and watched with delight, making comments in several languages. Especially the eyes of the Italians danced. The incident left a genial social atmosphere.
Adolph came in from behind one of the stoves as I was concluding a "long point."
"Come on," he said, looking at me with a grin; and when I had followed him, "I show you furnace, li'l bit."
He took me to a stair-ladder near the skip that ascended to the top of Number 5. For every furnace, a skip carries up the ore and other ingredients for melting inside. It is a funicular-like thing, a continuous belt, with boxes attached, running from the "hopper" at the top of the furnace to the "stockroom" underground.
We started to climb the steps at the left of the belt. There was a little rail between us and the moving boxes of ore.
"See dat," said Adolph, pointing through at the boxes. "Keep head inside," he said, "keep hand inside, cut 'em off quick." He illustrated the amputation, with great vivacity, on his throat and wrists.
It was a climb of five minutes to the furnace-top. We paused to look at the mounting boxes.
"Ore?" I asked.
He nodded.
Pretty soon the iron ceased coming, and a white stone took its place in the boxes.
"What's that?"
"Limestone," he said. "Next come coke. Look."
We were near enough to the top to see the boxes tilt, and the hopper open and swallow the dumping of stone. In a minute or two, we stepped out on the platform on top of the furnace.
Adolph looked at me and grinned. "You smell dat gas?" he asked.
I nodded. He referred to the carbon monoxide that I knew issued from the top of all blast-furnaces.
"You stay li'l bit, pretty soon you drunk," he said.
"Let's not," I returned.
"You stay li'l bit more," he continued, his grin broadening, "pretty soon you dead."
I learned in later days that this was perfectly accurate.
We stood on a little round platform fifteen or twenty feet across, with the hopper in the centre gobbling iron ore and limestone. A layer of ore dust, an inch thick, covered the flooring, and a faint odor of gas was in the air. Each of the other five furnaces had a similar lookout, and a narrow passageway connected them with the tops of the stoves. The top of these gigantic shafts likewise had a diameter of some fifteen feet; there were little railings about them, and in the centre a trapdoor.
"What's that for?" I asked.
"Go inside to clean 'em out," he returned.
I wondered, with a few flights of imagination, what that job would be like, and remembered that the Italian with the blond moustache had spoken of the duty in uncomplimentary terms.
We could look forth from this eminence and see the whole mill yard, which was nearly a mile in extent. Over the "gas house"—a large building I hadn't noticed before, the source of gas for the open-hearth—and far to the left, were the Bessemers, spouting red gold against a very blue sky. On their right rose the familiar stacks of the open-hearth. I looked intently at them and wondered what Number 7 did at that moment—front-wall, back-wall, or tapping its periodic deluge of hot steel?
In the foreground, a variety of gables, and then the irregular roof, far beyond, that I knew must be the blooming-mill, because of the interesting yard with the muscular cranes, tossing about bars and shapes and sheets of steel. An immense system of railways everywhere, running down as far as the river bank, where were piles of cinder, and a trainload of ladles moving there to dump. A half-mile away another ironclad cluster of buildings, the tube mill, the nail mill, and the rest, with convenient rails running up to them.
I turned around. Near by, slightly beyond the foot of the skips, was that impressive hill of red dust, the ore pile. Iron ore was being taken away for the skips with one of those spider-like mechanisms that combine crane, derrick, and steam-shovel. It was built hugely, two uprights forty or fifty feet high, at a distance, I estimate, of a hundred yards, with their bases secured to railway cars. A crossbeam joined them, which was itself a monorail, along which a man-carrying car ran. From that car dropped chains, attaching themselves at the bottom to the familiar automatic shovel or scoop.
First the whole arrangement moved—the uprights, the crosspiece, and the monorail car—very slowly over the whole hill of ore, to a good spot for digging. Then the monorail car sped to the chosen position, and the shovel fell rapidly into the ore. With a mouthful secure, the chains lifted a little, enough to clear the remaining ore, and the car ran its mouthful to the hill's edge, to dump into special gondolas on railroad tracks. The whole gigantic ore-hill was within easy reach of a single instrument.
"Ought to last a while," I said.
"Will be gone in a month," he returned.
We went down the ladder-steps, and stopped near one of the furnaces. I rather hoped the stove-gang boss would talk. He did.
"Ever work blast-furnace before?" he began.
"No," I said; "I have worked on the open-hearth furnaces a little. But before that I spent about two years in the army."
"Me in Austrian army," he said musingly, "fifteen year ago. Sergeant artillery."
I thought about that, and it occurred to me that he retained something of the artillery sergeant still, necessarily adapted a little to the exigencies of American blast-stoves. I found he knew about ordnance, and boasted of Budapest cannon-makers.
"How do you like this country?" I asked.
"America, all right," he said.
"Good country?" I pushed him a little.
"Mak' money America," he explained; "no good live. Old country fine place live."
We developed that a little. We discussed cities. He asked me about London and Paris, and other European cities. Which did I like best, cities over there or American cities? I said American cities. He asked what was the difference. I thought a minute, comparing New York and London. European cities did not have the impressive forty-story edifices of American, and looked puny with four or five.
"Ah," he said, "tall buildings no look good. Budapest good city, no can build over five story."
Here was unlooked-for discrimination. I began feeling provincial. He went on to describe the cleanliness of Budapest, and to contrast it with Pennsylvania cities of his acquaintance. He certainly had me hands down.
He continued: "No can build stack that t'row smoke into neighbor's house. Look at dis place," he said, pointing to Bouton, "look at Pittsburgh."
I said no more, but nodded swift agreement.
He was a little more encouraging about the United States when it came to government.
"You have a man president; that no good, after four year you kick him out. My country sometime get king, that's all right, sometime get damn bad one. No can kick him out."
But he relapsed into censure again when he came to American women. "Women," he said, "in my country do more work than men this country."
"They have more time, here," I said, "and don't have to work so hard."
"American women, when you meet 'em, always ask: 'How much money in de pock?' What they do? Dress up,—hat, dress, shoe,—walk all time Main Street. Bah!"
It was a refreshing shock to receive this outspoken critique of America from a Hunky, a Hungarian stove-gang boss of a blast-furnace. I was amused very much by it, except the phrase "America all right mak' money, old country place live." I coupled it up with some talks I had had with men on the open-hearth. America, steel-America, which was all they knew, was very largely a place of long hours, gas, heat, Sunday work, dirty homes, big pay. There was a connection in that, I thought, with the gigantic turnover figures of laborers in steel, the restless moving from job to job that had been growing in recent years so fast. Too many men were treating America as a good place for taking a fortune out of. The impulse toward learning English, building a home, and becoming American, certainly wasn't strong in steel-America. But I left these questions in the back of my head, and returned to the stove gang at Adolph's command.
In a few days I was well in the midst of my gang-novitiate. We got formally introduced by name one day in front of No. 12 stove. The little Italian with the black moustache said: "What's your name?"
"Charlie," I said, knowing that first names were the thing.
"All right," he said, "that's Jimmy, Tony, Joe. Mike not here. You know Mike? Slavish. John, that's me. That's John too wid de bar.—Hey!" with an arresting yell, that made the others look up, "Dis is Charlie!"
I became a part of an exclusive group of seven men, who had worked together for about two years. There is a cohesiveness and a structure of tradition about a semipermanent mill-group of this sort that marks it off from the casual-labor gang. The physical surroundings remain unaltered, and methods and ways of thought grow up upon them. I was struck by the amount of character a man laid bare in twelve hours of common labor. There are habits of temper, of cunning and strength, of generosity and comradeship, of indifference, that it is capable of throwing into relief beyond any a priori reasoning. It begins by being extensively intimate in personal and physical ways; you know every man's idiosyncrasies in handling a sledge or a bar or a shovel, and the expression of his face under all phases of a week's work; you know naturally the various garments he wears on all parts of his body. You proceed to acquaint yourself, as the work throws up opportunity, with the mannerisms and qualities of his spirit. It is astonishing, with the barrier of a different language, only partly broken down by a dialect-American, how little is ultimately concealed or kept out of the common understanding.
I was impressed by the precise practices established in doing the work. Every motion and every interval of the job had been selected by long trial. If you didn't think the formula best, try it out. Many considerations went into its selection—to-day's fatigue, to-morrow's, and next month's. It had an eye for gas effect, for the boss's peculiar character, and for all material obstacles, many of which were far from obvious.
When the flue dust had been removed from the blast-stoves, I found wheeling and dumping it an easy and congenial set of movements, and consequently took off my loads at a great speed.
At once I became a target, "Tak' it eas'—What's the matter with you; tak' it eas'."
John—Slovene, and Stoic—put in an explanation: "Me work on this job two year, me know; take it easy. You have plenty work to do."
"Take it easy," I said, "and no get tired, eh? feel good every day?"
"You no can feel good every day," he amended quickly. "Gas bad, make your stomach bad."
So I slowed up on my wheelbarrow loads, sat on the handles, and spat and talked, till I found I was going too slow. There was a work-rhythm that was neither a dawdle nor a drive; if you expected any comfort in your gang life of twelve hours daily, you had best discover and obey its laws. It might be, from several points of view, an incorrect rhythm, but, at all events, it was a part of the gang mores. And some of its inward reasonableness often appeared before the day was out, or the month, or the year.
Everybody wore good clothes to work, and changed in the shanty to their furnace outfit. I usually came in a brown suit, which had been out in the rain a good many times and was fairly shapeless. One day I entered the mill in a gray suit, which fitted and was moderately pressed.
At the dinner-bucket hour in the shanty, I was asked by John the Italian: "How much you pay for suit, Charlie?"
I was embarrassed, fearing vaguely explanations that might have to follow a declaration of price. I suddenly recalled the fact that the suit had been given me by my brother, so that I didn't know the price, and said so.
"My brother give me suit, I don't know how much he pay," I said. That dumped me into another quandary.
"What job your brother have?" I was immediately asked.
I thought a moment and answered truthfully again.
"My brother, priest," I said.
That arrested immediate attention, and I was looked at with respect and curiosity.
Tony finally said, "Why you no be priest, Charlie?"
"Oh," I answered, laughing, "I run away; I like raise hell too much be priest." This was pretty accurate, too.
"O Charlie!" they bellowed.
After that, the gang were friends to the death.
One day I was promoted to stove-tender or hot-blast man on Number 6.
The keeper of the furnace was a negro. When he was rebuilding the runways for the tapped metal, I noticed that his movements were sure and practised. He patted and shaped the mud-clay in the runway, like a potter moulding a vessel. When it was tap time, he bored the tap hole with the electric drill easily and neatly; when the metal flowed, he knew the exact moment to lift the gates for drawing away slag. I watched him to see how he managed the four white men that worked for him. They were Austrians, and I found they joked together and showed no resentment of status. Commands were given with a nod or gesture. With the Americans on the furnace, the relation was the traditional one. The negro was light and seemed too slightly built for the job, but he performed it very efficiently, and so did his gang.
The blower was Old McLanahan, a man somewhere between thirty-five and sixty. A long, successful life of inebriety had given him a certain resignation to the ills of man, and enabled him to keep the heart of a viveur throughout his life. His skin appeared thrown like a bag over an assemblage of loosely fitted bones—the only considerable part of him being a paunch which coursed forward into a moderate point.
He was rather proud of being a blower on furnace No. 6.
After the slag had been sampled he said: "Where d'ye eat, boy?"
"I eat at Mrs. Farrell's."
"How much?"
"Seven a week."
"Too much. Pretty goddam good is it?"
"Damn good food," I said.
"Is Mrs. Farrell a widder woman?"
"No," I said, "she's not."
"Well," he said, "if you hear of a damn fine little widder woman, let me know will yer?"
"Sure," I said.
"I'm lookin' for a place ter board, and most of all I'm lookin' for a little widder woman ter honor wid holy matrimony."
After tapping that morning at 8.00, McLanahan took a silver dollar out of his pocket. "If it comes heads," he said, "I'm goin' out to-night, see, I'm goin' out ter find a woman."
He flipped the coin and it fell tails. "Don't count," said he, "two out of three."
This flip fell heads.
"Hah," he said, "if this comes heads, I'm goin' out to-night ter find a woman."
It fell tails.
"Hell!" he said, "Don't count, flipped it with the wrong hand."
He kept this up all day. Finally at 5.30 the coin came heads. He picked the coin up and put it in his pocket.
"Goin' out, to-night," he said.
"Boss wants to keep Number 6 lookin' right. Go down below, and clean out all that flue dust."
I shoveled between the stone arches of the furnace base, that curved overhead like the culverts of a bridge. Sometimes the flue dust was wet and clotted with mud, and came up in cakes on the shovel; sometimes it was light, and flew in your nose and eyes. I made a pile of it six feet high, and shaped it into a brick-red pyramid with my shovel. I washed the arches white with a hose.
"Change 'em before we tap," McLanahan ordered, nodding at the stoves.
I went among the rangy hundred-foot shafts with a certain sense of control over great forces. Every set differs in its special crankiness. Number 9's have stiff-working valves, but are powerful heaters; Number 8's are cool stoves, but their valves slide genially into place. I always a little dreaded "blowing her off." Resting my arms on the edge of the wheel, and grabbing the top with my hands, I wrenched it over to the left, and the blast began. The immense volumes of compressed air escaped with a gradually accelerated blare. I gritted my teeth a little, and my ears sang.
Then came "putting on the gas." I climbed to a little platform near the combustion chamber, and with a hunk of iron scrap for hammer, knocked out some wedges that held tight a door. By now I knew just the pressure for making the iron slab creep on its rollers. I braced my feet and pulled with back and arms.
Through the door, the combustion chamber glowed red. I went down the steps and slowly turned the gas-pipe crank, bringing an eight-inch pipe close to the red opening. I dodged the back flare as it ignited.
When the "new" stove was on, and the "old" one lit for reheating, I went to the pyrometer shanty. In a little hut among the furnaces were tell-tale discs, that let you know if you were keeping your heat right. I found my heat curve was smooth with only a tiny hump.... Two Hunkies were inside the shanty.
"Nine-thirty," said one.
"How do you know?" I asked.
He pointed to the end of the curve on the disc, that was opposite the 9.30 mark on the circumference.
"Saves me a watch," he said, with a grin.
After supper that evening, I mended a sleeve of my shirt that had been torn on a piece of cinder in the cast-house. Sounds of conversation were rising from the porch. I went out and found Mr. Farrell sitting in a rocker with one leg on the railing and his face screwed into an attitude of thinking. Mrs. Farrell, having done the dishes, had come out to knit, and a lanky visitor, who leaned uncomfortably against the railing, was doing the talking. The conversation was political.
"Before I came to this town, nobody had the guts to vote Democratic," said the visitor. "I'm from Democratic parts," he went on, "and when I first come here I used to go round. 'Come, come,' I said, 'you fellers is Democrats, you know you is. Sign up.' 'We know it,' they'd say, 'but we can't afford ter, there's the wife and kids—we can't afford ter, we've got a job and we're goin' to keep it.' That's how bad it was."
"You mean—"
"I mean you voted with the Company or pretty quick you moved out of Bouton, for you hadn't any job to work at.... I used ter work at glass blowin', that's a real business—"
"Mr. Herder is always telling us how much better the glass business is than the steel business," said Mrs. Farrell. "You'll have to get used to that." She gave everybody a smoothing-out smile.
It was fun when you could pick up "dope" in the course of a morning's sweat. I learned one Sunday a few pointers about judging conditions through the peepholes. If there is a lot of movement, your furnace is O.K. If the cinder begins to settle into the tuyère, your furnace is cold. If she looks reddish, cold; blue, O.K. Don't be fooled by different colored glasses in the peepholes.
One day we kept the stoves on "all heat" for the furnace was cold. "All you can give her, goddam it," McLanahan said, looking through the peepholes. McLanahan was always a little ridiculous. Anxiety made him hop about and waddle from peephole to peephole, like a hen looking for grain.
I heaved on the hot-blast chain, and the indicator climbed.
We had a pleasant, light brown chocolaty slag, that day, which meant good iron. When the metal runs out with large white speckles, she has too much sulphur; when she smokes, you'll get good iron.
The other day they had too large a load of ore for the coke and stone in her.
"Sledge!" yelled the keeper.
A cinder-snapper brought up two, and held the bar while the keeper and first-helper sledged. They worked well, and I watched with fascination the hammer head whirl dizzily, and land true at the bar.
At last the liquid slag broke through, jet-black as if it were molten coal, flowing thickly down the clay spout. The clay notch was hammered and eaten away, and had to be remade.
I watched the stove-tender on Number 7 as he opened the cold-air valve. His motions were exactly calculated—the precise blow, to an ounce, to loosen that wedge.
"How long have you been stove-tender?" I asked.
"Ten years," he said.
"Go down to the stockroom and tell the skip-man, one more coke," said McLanahan.
I was glad to get a glimpse of that part of the blast-furnace operation. Gondola cars bring up ore and the other ingredients of blast-furnace digestion, and run over tracks with gaps between the sleepers. The cars, by means of their collapsible bottoms, drop the loads down through, and the material falls into an underground "stockroom."
I entered it by climbing down two ladders, and found the skip-man at the base of one of the endless chains. The chamber had the appearance of a mine gallery de luxe. I looked at the tons of ore moving upward neatly, efficiently. What an incalculable saving of labor and time, this endless chain affair with its continually moving boxes, over the old manner of hoisting painfully, in few-pound lots, by hand!
I gave McLanahan's order to the skip-man and went up the ladders.
You've got to tap, "when the iron's right," and when a little later the keeper held the steam drill in front of the mud wall of the tap hole, the steam stayed at home. There was no time for a steam-fitter.
Young Lonergan and I beat it for the electric drill. It was heavy enough to make us waddle as we carried it on the run.
"That's bludy funny," said McLanahan. The electric drill wouldn't electrify. A hurry call followed for the electrician. He smiled benignly while twelve sweaty men looked on. And in thirty seconds he fixed the connection, and we tapped in time to save the iron.
When the drill had almost bored through the hard mud in the tap hole, the keeper shoved in a crowbar, and a couple of helpers sledged rhythmically for one minute. Then the molten iron broke the mud into bits, and tumbled out. Little sheets of flame from the slag skated along the top of the red river. It rose in the runway with bubbles and smoke on top. The keeper grabbed a scraper—an exaggerated hoe—and started the slag through a side ditch.
"Now try it," said Old Mac.
By then, I had the test spoon ready, scooped up a bubbling ten pounds, carried it carefully, and poured it into two moulds.
When I had broken the little ingots, still red, Mac said, "Too much sulphur."
By now the metal stream had run to the edge of the cast-house and was falling spatteringly into a ladle ten feet below.
Somebody said, "Whoop!" The negro keeper opened the iron gate of a new runway, and the metal rolled on its way to a second ladle. There were five to fill, each on a railway car. I noticed the switch engine was getting ready to drag the trainload of molten metal to the Bessemer.
"Heow!" out of Old Lonergan's throat. The bottom of one ladle had fallen out and was letting down molten iron on the track. There was nothing to do but watch it. We did that. It covered the track like a red blood-clot, and ran off sizzling, and curdling in the sand. It cooled, blackened, and clotted over one rail—about 10,000 pounds.
"Who clean dat up?" I heard a Sicilian cinder-snapper say with a blank smile.
After the furnaceful of metal had all flowed forth, we prepared to plug that tap.
I went over to the other side of the tap hole, and picked up a piece of sheet iron. A shallow puddle of iron was still molten in the runway. The tap hole was crusting over with cooling iron, still aglow. I dropped the sheet iron over the runway. The helpers came up behind and dropped others.
"Hey, you," said the keeper summoning a helper. They swung out the "mud gun" on a kind of crane and pointed its muzzle into the glowing aperture. It was a real gun, looked like a six-inch fieldpiece, but fired projectiles of mud by steam instead of powder.
"Quick," said the keeper.
I pushed a wheelbarrow towering with mud up to the sheet iron; then, with a long scoop-shovel standing against the furnace, shoveled mud in the gun. The keeper stood almost over the runway with only the rapidly heating sheet-iron between himself and the liquid-metal puddle beneath. He operated a little lever that shot mud charges by steam into the hole. Every time he shot the gun, I took a new scoop of mud. We worked as fast as our arms let us. Some of the helpers kick at this part of their duties, but it is cooler by several degrees than the open-hearth, and thinking of those sizzling nights lightens it for me. Besides, it has excitement and requires a streak of skill.
I spent several days with young Lonergan helping the water-tender, Ralph.
"Water connections damn important thing," said Lonergan. I was beginning to see why. The whole wall of the great cone-shaped furnace was covered with cooling water-conduits. Without these the furnace would melt away.
We ranged from furnace to furnace, climbing up to a platform that ran around the fattest part and spending long quarter-hours on our bellies unscrewing valves. There was always something leaking. Ralph could come and take a look at the furnace, and send us after tools.
"Ralph's all right," said Lonergan, "has new names though for everything. Doesn't call a goddam wrench a wrench, calls it a 'jigger.' Have to learn all your tools over again by his goddam Hunky names."
Young Lonergan was very "white" to me, as they say. "I'll show you how to clean that peephole." And he grabs a cleaning rod, and imparts the knack of knocking cinder out of that important little observation post.
"I used to work stove-tender," he explained.
"If you want to know anything ask Dippy, he'll talk, don't McLanahan, he don't know he's livin'.... Have a chew?"
"No, I'll smoke."
One day we had been discussing the bosses, and how they had got their start, till the talk drifted to young Lonergan and his own very typical career of youth.
"Used to work on the open-hearth," he began. "I used to test the metal—you know in the little shanty where 'Whiskers' is now. Chemist!" he grinned.
"Then, by God, I went to work in the blooming-mill, chasing steel—you know; keepin' track of all the ingots comin' in. A hell of a job—by God you didn't stop a second—you knew you'd been workin', boy, when you pulled out in the mornin'. I worked my head off at that job.
"Then I fought with Towers. He gave me a week. After I came back I had another run-in.... When I carried my bucket out o' that place, I was off work entirely. Didn't go to work for three months, thought I never would work again.
"But after a hell of a spell, gotta job, pipe mill New Naples—eight hours—a good job, but the mill's shut down now. Then the suckers drafted me. Balloon comp'ny a bloody year and a half."
There followed a very vast series of parties in the army, and explicit views on all the officers he'd had. There was usually a new army story whenever I met him. He was extraordinarily clever in getting away with A. W. O. L.'s.
"When I got my discharge, father wanted me to come to work here, so I did. Worked on those stoves where you are, for a while—stove-tender helper, then stove-tender. Then I got this job.... Don't you chew?... I'll lose it too if I take many more days off for sickness. Last time I was 'sick'"—he grinned—"Bert Cahill and the bunch and I took three skirts in Bill's car to Monaca. Had six quarts of damn good whiskey. I was out a week. Ralph says, when I come back: 'Pretty damn sick, you!' But to hell with 'em! I'm not afraid of my job."
That little blower called Dippy, I found, knew the furnace game in all its phases with great practical thoroughness. I used to try to get chances of talking with him on questions of technique.
"What about those jobs in the cast-house?" I said one day, "the helper's jobs? Isn't it a good thing to know about those if you're learning the iron game?"
"You don't want to work there," he said quickly, "only Hunkies work on those jobs, they're too damn dirty and too damn hot for a 'white' man."
So I got thinking over the "Hunky" business, and several other conversations came into my mind. Dick Reber, senior melter on the open-hearth, had once said, "There are a few of these Hunkies that are all right, and damn few. If I had my way, I'd ship the whole lot back to where they came from."
Then I thought of the incident of my getting chosen from the pit for floor work on the furnaces. Several times Pete, who was a Russian, discriminated against me in favor of Russians. Until Dick came along and began discriminating in my favor against the Hunkies.
How many Hunkies have risen to foremen's jobs, I thought, in the two departments where I have worked? One in the open-hearth—a fellow who "stuck with the company" in the Homestead Strike—and none on the blast-furnaces except Adolph, the stove-gang boss.
My recollections were broken into by a call for violent action.
"Cooler," yelled McLanahan, his voice going up into a husky shriek.
That meant molten iron inside, melting the cone-shaped water-chamber around the blast pipe. If let alone, the cooling at that place would cease, and in a short time there would follow an escape of molten metal.
"Cooler!" yelled on a blast-furnace means "Hurry like hell."
I grabbed a wrench to take the nut off the "bridle"—the first step in taking out a sort of outside cooler, the tuyère.
"Bar," said the Serbian stove-tender very quietly, picking up a specially curved one, and McLanahan took the other end.
Somebody knocked out some keys with a sledge, and the blowpipe fell on the curved bar, making the holders of it grunt. They took it off fast, for the instant the thing loosens, a flame shoots through the hole and licks its edges.
Then the tuyère comes loose with a few strokes of a pull bar. All of these moves are fast; a tuyère goes bad every other day and men work fast like soldiers at a gun drill.
But coolers don't break a lead but once in three months or so; and the cone's heavier, the gang bigger, there's less efficiency and more holler and sweat.
When the pull bar gets into action it looks a little like a mediæval mob with a battering ram. A "pull bar" is a tool designed to translate the muscle of many men into pull, on a small gripping edge against which sledging is impossible. At one end a thick hook grips the edge of the cooler, at the other a weight is brought against a flange that runs around the bar. Everybody on the gang has a piece of a rope attaching to that weight.
The stove gang moving between stoves Thirteen and Fourteen were caught and brought into this for muscle, and a couple of passing millwrights drafted.
"Hold up the goddam end," from Steve, boss by common consent.
"A little beef this time!" from a blower. "What the hell's the matter, sick?"
We all swear between breaths, and take a grip higher on the rope—the weight cracks the flange again, and makes the bar shiver.
When the new cooler, which resembles more nearly a gigantic flower pot, without any bottom, than anything else, is in place, there's a cry of: "Big Dolly!"
That involves four or five men, lifting a kind of ramrod with a square hammer-end, from the rack, and lugging it to the cooler.
I get near the ramming end this time; Tony is near me on the other side. Together we hold the hammer against the cooler. As the end strikes, the jar goes back through the men's hands.
"Now top."
Arms raise the bar painfully, and hold it poised a little unsteadily, sway back, tense, and drive.
"Hold it, hold it on the cooler, goddam you."
Tony and I had let our arms shake a fraction, and the hammer fell glancing on the cooler's edge.
"Now!"
Seated this time. Arms relax and stretch.
When things are ready, Adolph makes the water connections.
"Hold de goddam shovel, what you t'ink, I burn up."
A cinder-snapper holds a shovel in front of the hole to keep the flame from his hands.
"All right, all right."
The job's done; the millwrights pick up their tools, and the stove gang moves off leisurely to their cleaning. I hear the superintendent talking with a blower near the sample box.
"They did that in pretty good time," he says.
I used to eat my lunch and kept my clothes in a little brick shanty near Number 4, sharing it with the Italians of the stove gang. Although by the bosses' arrangement it was a mixed gang, Italian and Slav, the mixture did not extend to shanty arrangements, and race lines prevailed. I felt that I should learn low Italian in a few weeks if I continued with this group; the flow of it against my ear drums was incessant and some of it had already forced an entrance. Besides I was learning a great deal about: how to live, what to wear on your head, on your feet, and next your skin; where to get it—good material to resist the blast-furnace, and cheap as well; wisdom in eating and drinking, and saving money, in resting, in working, in getting a job and keeping it.
There was a whole store of industrial mores. In some respects the ways of living of these workmen seemed as rooted and traditional as the manners of monarchs, and as wise. I won considerable merit, when I brought in a kersey cap that I got for seventy-five cents, and lost much when I reluctantly admitted the price of my brown suit.
Everyone on the gang performed the washing up after work with the greatest thoroughness and success. They devoted minute attention to the appearance of clothes worn home. Rips and holes got a neat patch at once, and shoes were tapped at the proper period—before holes appeared. I have seen only one or two men in the mill who were not clean in their going-home clothes.
I talked to John one day on the subject of neatness. He asked, "You have to clean up good in the army?"
I dilated on the necessity of policing when wearing khaki.
He said: "Man that no look neat, no good. I no like him, girls no look at him. Bah!"
I was almost always offered some food from the bursting dinner buckets of my friends: a tomato, some sausage, a green pepper, some lettuce and cucumbers. I accepted gladly for it was always superior to my restaurant provender.
Tony told me one day that Jimmy had come over "too late from old country, to learn speak English and be American." He was thirty-one years old. He was going back this Christmas. And Tony was going too, but just for a visit. They were going to Rome. We had talked it over a good many times, all Italy in fact, people, women, farms. Tony turned to me: "You come Italy with Jimmy and me this Christmas? We go see Rome."
I assented quickly, wishing I somehow could, and was extraordinarily proud of that invitation.
I must not forget the occasion of the green pepper. One noon I sat beside Jimmy during the lunch hour. The whole Italian wing were together, sitting on benches in the brick shanty. Jimmy reached among the loaves of bread in his bucket, and hauled out a green pepper as big as an orange. He offered it to me and I accepted.
Treating it like my old friends the stuffed peppers, I bit deep. The whole shanty watched eagerly for results. I hadn't reckoned its raw strength and instantly felt like a blast-furnace on all heat. Despite all efforts I couldn't keep my face in shape, or resist putting out the fire with the water jug. The pleasure I furnished the Roman mob was enormous.
After that I learned to eat green peppers rationally and agree with my friends that they are beneficial. Beyond their health qualities they have an economic justification. With their help you can make a meal of cheap dry bread. Plain and unbuttered it costs you but six cents a half loaf which is a full meal, and hot green peppers will compel you to stow it away in self-defense. As Tony phrases it:—
"Pepper, make you eat bread like hell!"
Tony thinks that Americans eat too much that is sweet; it makes them logy and sleepy. I think he is right. Joe claims that the people in America do not know how to make bread; the wheat he says is cut when it is too green. The gang, of course, bring Italian bread in their buckets. It is certain that the American lunch of a soggy sandwich and piece of pie leaves a man heavy for the afternoon. The average dinner bucket in the shanty contains: a loaf of bread, a piece of meat,—lamb, beef, chicken, or sausage,—three or four green peppers, a couple of tomatoes, a bunch of grapes, and some vegetable mixture like tomatoes chopped with cucumbers and lettuce.
One day the gang got absorbed in stunts, climbing a ladder with the hands, giving a complete twist to a hammer with grip the same, the usual turning trick of a broomstick held to the floor, etc. My contribution was squatting slowly on the right leg with the left stiff and parallel with the floor. John complained of a lame thigh for three days after, I am gratified to say.
With Tony I occasionally picked a wrestling quarrel; he has a terrific grip and one day very nearly squeezed the life out of me in a fit of playfulness. I called him "Orso" afterward for his squeezing attribute. Tony's make-up includes a sense of humor. One day when he had rolled about on the floor in front of Number 3, he said: "Ain't you 'shamed, Charlie, you young man, fight old man like me. You twenty-two, twenty-three, me thirty-seven!"
Tony could put me beyond this vale of tears with his left hand.