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.