Steel Part 3

"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 pa.s.sed 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 circ.u.mference 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 a.s.sent, 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 s...o...b..red 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 sc.r.a.p 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.ddam 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 ma.s.s 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 h.e.l.l 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 Sc.r.a.p." 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 G.o.ddam mess in front."

We went through, and Fritz used the pick against some very dusty cinder that was entirely cool, and was ma.s.sed 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 h.e.l.l? what the h.e.l.l?"

So much for that wheelbarrow.

I found another, behind a box, near Number 8, and pushed it back over mud, slag, sc.r.a.p, 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 pa.s.s 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.

"G.o.ddam 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 circ.u.mference 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 sc.r.a.p, 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 Wanderl.u.s.t; 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 sc.r.a.p 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 pa.s.sed, and yelled: "Hey, you!"

He wanted my a.s.sistance 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.