BY THE ROARING FURNACES
In the daytime a row of tall black, cone-shaped chimneys might be seen
across the river from the mills themselves. At night these chimneys were
pyramids of yellow and red fire.
These were the blast furnaces. In them, the ore, as it came from the
mines far away on the Minnesota iron ranges, was reduced to pig or pig
iron, by smelting at a temperature of fifteen hundred degrees
centigrade--about twenty-seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit. This great
temperature boils the slag or impurities out of the metal, and after it
has been drawn off into ladles it becomes "pig."
From the blast furnaces the pig, red-hot in its molds, is conveyed to
the open-hearth furnaces, where it is subjected to a still further
boiling process at the same temperature as before, and then it is steel.
Steel is pig-iron combined with carbon and with the impurities boiled
out.
It was to the blast furnaces that the Iron Boys were assigned, and they
were to take the night trick. As they made their way that night through
the yards of the mill, where engines were shrieking their warnings, cars
were thundering here and there, long trains of red-hot metal rumbling
over the hot metal bridge from the blast furnaces to the mills, while
the flames were leaping skyward from the blast furnaces, Steve halted
for a moment to gaze on the scene. Neither boy ever had been in the
yards after dark, and the scene was one never to be forgotten.
"Which furnace do we work in?" wondered Bob.
"Number four, I believe."
"Then that must be the fourth one."
"Naturally it wouldn't be the fifth," answered Steve, with a laugh.
They hurried across the bridge, for it was already time they were
reporting to the head melter at the furnace, and being late meant being
docked, for there is no sentiment in the steel mills. Every man was
expected to do his full duty and a little more. Most of them did the
latter.
A scene of activity and apparent confusion met their gaze as they neared
the towering blast furnaces with their heating stoves sixty feet high on
either side of them.
Men with barrows were rushing about, bells clanged as the charge was
ready to hoist on the top of the furnace to be dumped into its
never-satisfied mouth. The ore was carried up by another skip. Through
the stoves roared a gas flame, leaping, licking, here and there reaching
out a forked tongue as though in search of fresh prey. The odor of gas
was well-nigh overpowering to the Iron Boys, for they were not used to
it.
The head melter, standing close up against the furnace, clad in a rubber
coat and wearing green goggles, was peering into the furnace through a
peep hole, while a stream of water from a hose was constantly played
over his body. His face seemed to rest almost against the plates, and
the bosh on which he was standing was so hot that the steam rose in a
cloud about him.
Two men were inserting the prodding rod against the dolmite that plugged
the ore hole near the bottom of the furnace. The perspiration was
running in rivers down their half-naked bodies.
"The drill! The drill!" shouted a choking voice.
A compressed air drill was brought, a dolly-rod inserted, and then the
dolmite was drilled to a thin shell.
"Stand back!" warned the head melter in a hoarse voice.
"I reckon something is going to happen," cried Jarvis in his companion's
ear. The roar of the furnaces and the gas in the huge stoves made his
voice sound weak and far away.
Steve moved back a little, pulling Jarvis after him. Flush with the edge
of a raised platform of fire-brick and steel, over which extended little
gutters packed with sand, stood a string of flat cars each holding an
immense ladle. The gutters led directly into these ladles.
"That is where the iron goes, through those gutters and into the
ladles," explained Rush. "It runs like water, though I have never seen
them make a cast."
Just then a warning cry sounded as the dolly broke through the clay dam
that holds the metal in the furnace.
Fire, scorching, burning fire leaped from the opening made with the
dolly. The air was filled with brilliant, hissing stars as large as the
palm of a man's hand. Some whirled like pin-wheels; others, holding
their perfect shape, described graceful curves in the air, or exploded.
Men shaded their eyes, drew themselves together, and tried to shrink
away from the terrific heat. But there was no avoiding it. The
monkey-man who had broken through the clay dam staggered away from the
opening thus made, shouting hoarsely for water.
Following the explosive stars, a river, almost blood-red, burst from the
furnace with a roar, quickly changing into a river of saffron. Hissing
and snapping the molten metal burned its way along through the
sand-packed gutters, and shot from the ends of the gutters and into the
waiting ladles on the flat cars at the foot of the platform. Everywhere
the air seemed filled with fiery shapes reaching for human prey. Under
foot there was danger on every hand, for a single misstep would plunge
one into this all-consuming flood. The slag, or as much of it as
possible, ground its way much more slowly, along another channel, to be
gathered up and used over for other purposes at some later day.
As one ladle was filled the waiting train would move up, bringing a new
set of cars under the ends of the gutters, and when at last all the cars
had been loaded the train moved off, the ladles glowing in the darkness
of the night, until in the distance they became mere eyes of fire.
The Iron Boys drew a deep sigh as the operation was concluded. Four
hours would elapse before another cast would be made from number four
furnace, but here and there along the row of huge cones stars were
bursting, streams of hot, yellow lava flowing and men shouting, snarling
or begging for water.
"It is terrible, yet grand!" exclaimed Steve Rush, wiping the
perspiration from his brow. Even where they stood, at one side of the
furnace, the heat was well-nigh unbearable.
"It strikes me as being grandly hot," answered Jarvis. "Whew, a fellow
doesn't need his winter underclothing on in this job, does he?"
"The furnace men don't seem to wear any at all," laughed Rush. "I should
think they would burn their skin off. I don't know whether I can stand
this game or not, but I'll try it. I wonder what we are going to do?"
"I will find out from the foreman."
The foreman was not on hand at the moment, but the head melter, known
under the name of Pig-Iron Peel, had received orders regarding the Iron
Boys.
He motioned them to approach, when a furnace hand told him who they
were. He asked the name of each boy in a hoarse, gruff voice.
"Who are you?" demanded Jarvis.
"I'm the Pig," answered the melter, his red face wrinkling into a grin,
which was quickly smoothed out as if the effort hurt him.
"Pig-Iron Peel," he added.
"Ho, ho!" roared Bob immoderately.
Steve nudged him to be quiet.
"We are ready to work if you will tell us what to do," said Rush.
"You can pack the sand gutters after the charge is loaded into the
ladles. Either of you ever worked on a furnace before?"
"No, sir," answered the boys.
"You, what's your name----?"
"Jarvis."
"Well, Jarvis, I'll put you up on the charging platform. You won't have
much to do there----"
"Where is the charging platform?" interrupted Bob.
"At the top of the furnace, fifty feet up there in the air. How do you
like it?"
"Fine!" answered Jarvis, though without his usual enthusiasm. "What am I
do when I get there?"
"Dump the charges into the furnace. The skips you have nothing to do
with, except to ring a bell when you are ready for them. They will dump
four loads of red ore into the furnace; then you throw in a layer of
coke and limestone, the latter being called 'flux.' This makes what we
call the charge. Is that clear?"
"Yes. What do I do then?"
"You do it all over again and you keep doing it until another man comes
to take the job off your hands."
"How do I get up there?"
"Climb the ladder."
"Huh! Lucky for me I'm on the night trick, so I can't see, or I'd surely
fall off."
"Rush, the sand man will show you about the troughs. Jarvis, you hike
upstairs. Tell the man I have up there that you are to relieve him. He
will show you about operating the levers. Have him put in a charge while
you look on."
"Is there any light up there, so I can see what I am doing?"
"You will have light enough," grinned Pig-Iron Peel. "You won't have any
reason to complain about either light or heat. This charging business is
a continuous performance day and night, until the furnaces have to be
shut down for cleaning. For your information I will tell you that the
iron, being the heaviest, sinks to the bottom of the furnace as it is
melted. The cinders trickle down after it, forming what is called the
heart. The latter are tapped off every two hours, the iron every four
hours. If you are going to be furnace men you will want to know all
these things at the start."
"Thank you for the information. It is all very interesting," answered
Steve.
"And very hot," added Jarvis. "With your permission I'll go aloft now,
sir."
"Go on, and look sharp that you don't fall off," warned the head melter.
"I'll cling to the sheets, sir."
Bob, after the ladder bad been pointed out to him, began to climb. He
had not gone far before he discovered that the rungs of the iron ladder
were hot. They were so much so that he yelled, "ouch!" removing first
one hand and then the other to rub it on his trousers. He was unable to
keep both hands on the ladder for any great length of time.
Bob began to growl, and he kept up his growling all the way up the
fifty-foot ladder. Finally he decided he must have gone about a hundred
feet, instead of fifty and halting he shouted, "Hello!"
"Hello, yourself," answered a gruff voice from the cloud above. "What do
you want?"
"It isn't a question of what I want, but rather what I am going to get.
Are you the feeder?"
"I'm charging, if that's what you mean."
"Well, if you don't charge too much I'll come up and be shown," laughed
the irrepressible Bob.
"Quit that fooling or I'll throw a bag of coke down on you."
Bob ran nimbly up the rest of the ladder, and a moment later stood
facing a soot-covered fellow of about his own age.
"Say, did you mean that about the coke?"
"You'll find out whether I did or not, if----"
"Look here, pard, if you get funny I'll put you in with the coke and
the--the limestone. I'll bet they'd never get the impurities out of the
iron after you once got in it. It would be pig forever afterwards. Ha,
ha! How's that?"
"You're too fresh, that's what's the matter with you," growled the
charging boy. "Git busy here; I'm going down. I don't belong up here
anyway, and I'm glad of it."
"Don't say that," protested Jarvis, with mock seriousness. "It is a
matter of sincere regret to me that this isn't your regular job. I'd
just as lief be down on the ground carrying water, as up here feeding
the mouth of the furnace. The boss monkey down below said you were to
show me what to do."
With a grunt of disapproval the charging boy instructed Jarvis in his
duties, then with a "so-long," hurried down the ladder, leaving the Iron
Boy alone in his glory.
Bob glanced about him curiously. Directly over his head, it seemed,
flared the flames from the huge stove. Every now and then the great
flame would swoop down a fiery tongue as if bent upon lapping him up.
Bob instinctively ducked as the breeze carried the flame down toward
him. He believed that a gust of wind would surely bring the flame on
him, which he was certain would be the end of Bob Jarvis.
Off to the right and to the left of him were other swaying pillars of
fire from the stoves of the other furnaces, and over on the opposite
side of the river black smoke and red fire poured from the funnels of
the open-hearth furnaces there. Bob himself was enveloped in a dense
cloud of suffocating smoke, which, breathed into his lungs, set him
coughing and choking.
"I wish I had stayed fired!" he muttered. "This is worse than the cinder
pits."
Time passed quickly, however, and between watching the skiploads of ore
as they shot up to him with disconcerting suddenness, and dodging the
flames from the number four stove, Jarvis was kept reasonably busy.
Down below Steve, on hands and knees, was patting the sand in the
gutters into place, smoothing it off so that there should be no
projections to catch and retard the flow of the hot metal when the next
cast was made. He found Pig-Iron Peel, despite his rough appearance, to
be a kind-hearted man. This was a distinct relief after the experience
of the lads in the cinder pits under two bosses who had lost no
opportunity to do them harm. Now and then the head melter would step
over to instruct the Iron Boy in his duties, and even at the distance
from the furnace that Steve was working the heat was well-nigh
unbearable. He was obliged to make frequent trips to the water barrel,
and now and then he showered himself from head to foot with the ready
hose. The skin was peeling from his face and his work clothes were
burned through in many places.
"Stand by for the tap!" commanded Peel.
Rush was so busy that he did not hear the command. He did hear the tap,
tap of the mall as it drove against the prodding rod, but this held no
special significance for him. In the darkness preceding the cast the
others did not observe him.
Suddenly, with a roar, the saffron flood burst through the clay dam.
Millions of hissing stars leaped into the air and a river of molten
metal swooped down on Steve Rush in its all-consuming flight.