We came out into the pit, which had so many bright centres of molten
steel that it was lighter than outdoors. I watched Pete's back chiefly,
and my own feet. We kept stepping between little chunks of dark slag,
which made your feet hot, and close to a bucket, ten feet high, which
gave forth smoke. Wheelbarrows we met, with and without men, and metal
boxes, as large as wagons, dropped about a dirt floor. We avoided a hole
with a fire at its centre.
At last, at the edge of the pit, near more tracks, we ran into the pit
gang: eight or ten men, leaning on shovels and forks and blinking at the
molten metal falling into a huge bucket-like ladle.
"Y' work _here_," said Pete, and moved on.
I remember feeling a half-pleasurable glow as I looked about the
strenuous environment, of which I was to become a part--a glow mixed
with a touch of anxiety as to what I was up against for the next
fourteen hours.
Two of the eight men looked at me, and grinned. I grinned back and put
on my gloves.
"No. 6 furnace?" I asked, nodding toward the stream.
"Ye-ah," said the man next me.
He was a cleanly built person, in loose corduroy pants, blue shirt open
at his neck. Italian.
He grinned with extraordinary friendliness, and said, "First night,
this place?"
"Yes," I returned.
"Goddam hell of a ---- job," he said, very genially.
We both turned to look at the stream again.
For ten minutes we stood and stared. Two men lit cigarettes, and sat on
a wheelbarrow; four of the others had nodded to me; the other three
stared.
I was eager to organize into reasonableness a little of this strenuous
process that was going forward with a hiss and a roar about me.
"That's the ladle?" I said, to start things.
"Ye-ah, w'ere yer see metal come, dat's spout, crane tak' him over pour
platform, see; pour man mak li'l hole in ladle, fill up moul'--see de
moul' on de flat cars?"
The Italian was a professor to me. I got the place named and charted in
good shape before the night was out. The pit was an area of perhaps half
an acre, with open sides and a roof. Two cranes traversed its entire
extent, and a railway passed through its outer edge, bearing mammoth
moulds, seven feet high above their flat cars. Every furnace protruded a
spout, and, when the molten steel inside was "cooked," tilted backward
slightly and poured into a ladle. A bunch of things happened before that
pouring. Men appeared on a narrow platform with a very twisted railing,
near the spout, and worked for a time with rods. They prodded up inside,
till a tiny stream of fire broke through. Then you could see them start
back in the nick of time to escape the deluge of molten steel. The
stream in the spout would swell to the circumference of a man's body,
and fall into the ladle, that oversized bucket thing, hung conveniently
for it by the electric crane. A dizzy tide of sparks accompanied the
stream, and shot out quite far into the pit, at times causing men to
slap themselves to keep their clothing from breaking out into a blaze.
There were always staccato human voices against the mechanical noise,
and you distinguished by inflection, whether you heard command, or
assent, or warning, or simply the lubrications of profanity.
As the molten stuff rose toward the top of the ladle, curdling like a
gigantic pot of oatmeal, somebody gave a yell, and slowly, by an
entirely concealed power, the 250-ton furnace lifted itself erect, and
the steel stopped flowing down the spout.
But it splashed and slobbered enormously in the ladle at this juncture;
a few hundred pounds ran over the edge to the floor of the pit. This,
when it had cooled a little, it would be our job to clean up, separating
steel scrap from the slag, and putting it into boxes for remelting.
When a ladle was full, the crane took it gingerly in a sweep of a
hundred feet through mid-air, and, as Fritz said, the men on the pouring
platform released a stopper from a hole in the bottom, to let out the
steel. It flowed out in a spurting stream three or four inches thick,
into moulds that stood some seven feet high on flat cars.
"Clean off the track on Number 7, an' make it fast," from the pit boss,
accompanied by a neat stream of tobacco juice, which began to steam
vigorously when it struck the hot slag at his feet.
We passed through to the other side of the furnaces, by going under
Number 6, a bright fall of sparks from the slag-hole just missing the
heels of the last man.
"Isn't that dangerous and unnecessary?" I said to myself, angrily. "Why
do we have to dodge under that slag-hole?"
We moved in the dark along a track that turned in under Seven, into a
region of great heat. Before us was a small hill of partially cooled
slag, blocking the track. It was like a tiny volcano, actively fluid in
the centre, with the edges blackened and hard.
I found out very quickly the why of this mess. The furnace is made to
rock forward, and spill out a few hundred pounds of the slag that floats
on top. A short "buggy" car runs under, to catch the flow. But somebody
had blundered--no buggy was there when the slag came.
"Get him up queek, and let buggy come back for nex' time," explained an
Italian with moustachios, who carried the pick. "Huh, whatze matter
goddam first-helper, letta furnace go?" he added angrily. "Lotza work."
This job took us three hours. The Italian went in at once with the pick,
and loosened a mass of cinder near one of the rails. Fritz and I
followed up with shovels, hurling the stuff away from the tracks.
The slag is light, and you can swing a fat shovelful with ease; but
mixed with it are clumps of steel that follow the slag over the furnace
doors. It grew hotter as we worked in--three inches of red heat, to a
slag cake six inches thick.
"Hose," said someone. The Italian found it in back of the next furnace,
and screwed it to a spigot between the two. We became drowned in steam.
We had been at it about an hour and a half, and I was shoveling back
loose cinder, with a little speed to get it over with. "Rest yourself,"
commanded Moustachios. "Lotza time, lotza time."
I leaned on my shovel and found rather mixed feelings rising inside me.
I was a little resentful at being told what to do; a little pleased that
I was up, at least, to the gang standard; a little in doubt as to
whether we ought not to be working harder; but, on the whole, tired
enough to dismiss the question and lean on my shovel.
The heat was bad at times (from 120 to 130 degrees when you're right in
it, I should guess). It was like constantly sticking your head into the
fireplace. When you had a cake or two of newly turned slag, glowing on
both sides, you worked like hell to get your pick work done and come
out. I found a given amount of work in heat fatigued at three times the
rate of the same work in a cooler atmosphere. But it was exciting, at
all events, and preferable to monotony.
We used the crowbar and sledge on the harder ledges of the stuff,
putting a loose piece under the bar and prying.
When it was well cleared, a puffy switch-engine came out of the dark
from the direction of Number 4, and pushed a buggy under the furnace.
The engineer was short and jolly-looking, and asked the Italians a few
very personal questions in a loud ringing voice. Everyone laughed, and
all but Fritz and I undertook a new cheekful of "Honest Scrap." I smoked
a Camel and gave Fritz one.
Then Al, the pit boss, came through. He was an American, medium husky,
cap on one ear, and spat through his teeth. I guessed that Al somehow
wasn't as hard-boiled as he looked, and found later that he was new as a
boss. I concluded that he adopted this exterior in imitation of bosses
of greater natural gifts in those lines, and to give substance to his
authority. He used to be a workman in the tin mill.
"All done? If the son of a ---- of a first-helper on the furnace had any
brains ..." and so forth. "Now get through and clean out the goddam mess
in front."
We went through, and Fritz used the pick against some very dusty cinder
that was entirely cool, and was massed in great piles on the front side
of the slag-hole.
"Getta wheelbarrow, _you_."
I started for the wheelbarrow, just the ghost of a resentment rising at
being "ordered about" by a "Wop" and then fading out into the
difficulties I had in finding the wheelbarrow. Two or three things that
day I had been sent for--things whose whereabouts were a closed book.
"Where the devil," I muttered to myself, violently disturbed, "are
wheelbarrows?" I found one, at last, near the masons under Number 4, and
started off.
"Hey, what the hell? what the hell?"
So much for that wheelbarrow.
I found another, behind a box, near Number 8, and pushed it back over
mud, slag, scrap, and pipes and things. I never knew before what a
bother a wheelbarrow is on an open-hearth pit floor. Only four of us
stayed for work under Number 7, a German laborer and I cooperating with
shovel and wheelbarrow on the right-hand cinder pile.
We had been digging and hauling an hour, and it was necessary to reach
underneath the slag-hole to get at what was left. I always glanced
upward for sparks and slag when shoveling, and allowed only my right
hand and shovel to pass under. Just as arm and shovel went in for a new
lot Fritz yelled, "Watch out!" I pulled back with a frog's leap, and
dodged a shaft of fat sparks, spattering on the pit floor. A second
later, the sparks became a tiny stream, the size of a finger, and then a
torrent of molten slag, the size of an arm. The stuff bounded and
splashed vigorously when it struck the ground.
It didn't get us, and in a second we both laughed from a safe distance.
"Goddam slag come queek," said Fritz, grinning. "How you like job?" he
added.
Before I had any chance to discuss the nuances of a clean-up's walk in
life, Fritz was pointing out a new source of molten danger.
We were standing now in the main pit, beyond the overhanging edge of the
furnace.
"Look out now, zee!" said Fritz, pointing upward. Almost over our head
was Number 7's spout, and, dribbling off the end, another small rope of
sparks.
We fell over each other to the pit's edge, stopping when we reached
tracks. Looking back at once, we saw that the stream had thickened like
the other in the slag-hole. But here it was molten steel, and with a
long drop of thirty feet. The rebound of the thudding molten metal sent
it off twenty-five or thirty feet in all directions. Three different
groups of men were backing off toward the edge of the pit.
The stream swelled steadily till it reached the circumference of a man's
body, and fell in a thudding shaft of metallic flame to the pit's floor.
Spatterings went out in a moderately symmetrical circle forty feet
across. The smaller gobs of molten stuff made minor centres of spatter
of their own. It was a spectacle that burned easily into memory.
The gang of men at the edge of the pit watched the thing with apparent
enjoyment. I wondered slowly two things: one, whether anyone ever got
caught under such a molten Niagara, and two, whether the pit was going
to have a steel floor before it could be stopped. How could it be
stopped, anyway?
The craneman had been busy for some minutes picking up a ladle from
Number 4, and at that instant he swung it under, and the process of
steel-flooring ceased.[2]
What the devil had happened? I talked with everybody I could as they
broke up at the pit's edge. It was a rare thing I learned: the mud and
dolomite (a limestone substance) in the tap-hole had not been properly
packed, and broke through. My companions told me about another occasion,
some years before, when molten steel got loose. It happened on the
Bessemer furnaces, and the workers hadn't either the luck or agility of
ourselves. It caught twenty-four men in the flow--killed and buried
them. The company, with a sense of the proprieties, waited until the
families of the men moved before putting the scrap, which contained
them, back into the furnace for remelting.
As I ate three bowls of oatmeal at the Greek's, at 7.15, I thought,
"Those fellows do these shifts, year after year. What does the heat, and
the danger, and the work do to them? Maybe they 'get used to' the whole
business. Will I?"
I went to bed at 8.05, and all impressions faded from consciousness,
except weariness, and lame arms, and a burn on each ankle.
After two or three days in the pit, I began to know the gang a little by
name and character. There was Marco, a young Croat of twenty-four, who
had started to teach me Croatian in return for some necessary American;
Fritz, a German with the Wanderlust; Adam, an aristocratic person, very
mature, and with branching moustachios; Peter, a Russian of infinite
good-nature; and a quiet-eyed Pole, who was saving up two hundred
dollars to go to the old country.
For several days it was impossible to break into Adam's circle of
friends; he would talk and work only with veteran clean-ups, and showed
immense pomposity in a knowing way of hooking up slag and scrap to the
crane. One day, however, I found him working alone with a wheelbarrow,
cleaning cinder from around a buggy car under furnace No. 8. He looked
over at me as I passed, and yelled: "Hey, you!"
He wanted my assistance on the wheelbarrow. We worked together for an
hour or so, and I felt that perhaps the ice was broken.
"Did you ever work on the floor?" I asked.
"Two years," he said; "no good."
A little later I talked to Marco about him.
"Hell," he said, "he got fired from furnace, for too goddam lazy." I
felt less hurt at his snobbishness after that.
Marco and I became good chums. We sat on a wheelbarrow one day, after
finishing a job on the track under Six.
"You teach me American," he said; "I teach you Croatian."
"Damn right," I said; and we began on the parts of our body, and the
clothing we wore, drawing out some of the words in the dirt with a
stick, or marking them with charcoal on a board.
"Did you ever go to school in America?" I asked.
"Three month, night school, Pittsburgh. Too much, work all day, twelve
hour, go to school night," he said.
"Do you save any money? Got any in the bank?" I asked, feeling a little
fatherly, and wondering on the state of his economic virtues.
"Hell, no," he said; "I don' want money in bank, jes nuff get along on."
I talked to a good many on the savings question, and found the young men
very often didn't save, but "bummed round," while practically all the
"Hunkies" of twenty-eight or thirty and over saved very successfully. A
German who put scrap in the charge-boxes, after the magnet had dropped
it, had saved $4000 and invested it. One man said to me: "A good job,
save money, work all time, go home, sleep, no spend." Speaking of the
German, "He no drink, no spend." The savers, I think, are apt to be the
single men who return to their own country in ten or fifteen years.
I came out of the mill one morning after a night-shift, with an appetite
that made me run from the railroad bridge to Main Street. I went to the
Hotel Bouton, where the second-helper on Eight usually eats, and started
at the beginning, with pears. I ate the cereal, eggs, potatoes, toast,
coffee, and griddle-cakes, taking seconds and thirds when I could
negotiate them--the Bouton is stingy under a new management, probably
finding that steel-workers eat up the profit. I got up from the table
feeling as hungry as when I sat down, and went to the restaurant just
two doors below--unpalatable, but serving fairly large portions. There I
had another breakfast: coffee, oatmeal, eggs. I felt decidedly better
after that, and started home in good humor. But by the time I reached
the window of Tom, the Wiener man, I felt that there was room for
improvement, and looked in my pocketbook to see if I had any breakfast
money left. I hadn't a cent, but there were quantities of two-cent
stamps. I went in and sat down at Tom's counter, where I ate a bowl of
cereal and a glass of milk. Then I opened my purse. In a moment or two I
convinced Tom that two-cent stamps were good legal tender, and went
home.