Steel Part 8

"How big is Bouton? how many people has it?" I asked.

He grinned slowly, and put his elbows on the table. He was a Pennsylvania Dutchman, with worry settling over good nature in a square face.

"Twenty thousand," he said.

"It seems small for twenty thousand," I returned; "like a little village. There's really only one store, isn't there,--the company store,--where they keep anything? Only one empty newspaper, no theatre, unless you count that one-story movie place, no enterprise--"

"A one-man town," he said, quickly. "Nearly every house in town is owned by Mr. Burnham. Now look here, suppose a man works like h.e.l.l to fix things up, to work around and get a pretty d.a.m.n good garden, puts a lot of money into making his house right. Suppose he does, and then gets into a sc.r.a.p with his boss. What can he do? The company owns his house, the company owns every other d.a.m.n thing in town. He's got to beat it--all his work shot to h.e.l.l. That's why n.o.body does anything.--Hey, ham and--Where you workin' now? Ain't seen yer in the pit."

"I'm on the floor, helpin' on Number 7."

"Att-a-boy!"

At last, Sat.u.r.day night. Everyone felt Sunday coming, with twenty-four hours of drunkenness or sleep alluringly ahead. The other shift had tapped the furnace at three o'clock. We might not tap again, and that was nice to think about. A front-wall and a hot back-wall we went through as if it were better fun than billiards.

"Look out for me, I've got the de'il in me," from Jock, Scotch First on Number 8. I looked up, and the crazy fool had a spoon--they weigh over a hundred--between his legs, dragging it like a kid with a broomstick. As it bounced on the broken brick floor, he yelled like a man after a Hun.

"Who's the maun amang ye, can lick a Scotchman?" he cried, dropping the spoon to the floor.

"Is this the best stuff you can show on Number 8?" said Fred slowly. He dived for Jock's waist, and drew it to him, though the Scotchman tried to break his grip with one of his hands and with the other thrust off his opponent's face. When Fred had him tight, he caught one of Jock's straying arms, bent it slowly behind his back, and contrived a hammerlock.

"You're no gentlemen,"--in pain; "you're interruptin' my work."

Fred relaxed, and Jock jumped away.

"Come over to a good furnace, G.o.ddam it, and fight it out!" he yelled, from a distance that protected his words.

The charging-machine, in its perpetual machine-tremolo, shook past and stopped. George slid down from his seat, and came over to Number 8's gang.

"Well, Fred, how in h.e.l.l's the world usin' yer?"

"Ask me that to-morrow."

"Well, guys, good night; I'm dead for forty minutes."

He picked up a board some six feet long and about six inches in width.

He laid himself carefully on it, and was sleeping inside of a minute.

I looked at him enviously for a few minutes. Suddenly it occurred to me that the board lay over a slit in the floor. It was the opening through which the pipes that attach to the gas-valve rise and fall. When gas is shifted from one end of the furnace to the other, the pipes emerge through the slit to a height several feet from the floor. Finally Fred made the same discovery, and a broad smile spread over his face. He continued to watch George, his grin deepening. At last he turned to the second-helper.

"Throw her over," he said.

Nick threw the switch. Slowly and easily the valve-pipes rose, lifting George and the head of his bed into the air, perilously. An immense and ill-controlled shout swelled up and got ready to burst inside the witnesses. George slept on, and the bed pa.s.sed forty-five degrees. In another second it rolled off the side of the pipes, and George, scared, half-asleep, and much crumpled, rolled over on the furnace floor. It was several seconds before he recovered profanity.

The pure joy of that event spread itself over the entire shift.

When the light from the melting sc.r.a.p-iron inside the furnace shot back, it lit up the hills and valleys in Nick's face. I noticed how sharp the slope was from his cheek-bones to the pit of his cheeks, and the round holes in which his eyes were a pool at the bottom. His lips moved off his white teeth, and twisted themselves, as a man's do with effort. He looked as if he were smiling. I picked up my shovel, and shoved it into the dolomite pile, with a slight pressure of knee against right forearm that eases your back. The thermometer in the shade outside was 95. I wondered vaguely how much it was where Nick stood, with the doors open in his face.

We walked back together after the front-wall to the trough of water.

"Not bad when you get good furnace, good first-helper," he said. "Fred good boy, but furnace no good. A man got to watch himself on this job,"

he went on bitterly; "he pull himself to pieces."

"I can't manage quite enough sleep," I said, wondering if that was the remark of a tenderfoot.

"Sometime--maybe one day a month--I feel all right, good, no sleepy," he went on. "Daytime work, ten hour, all right, feel good; fourteen hour always too much tired. Sometime, G.o.ddam, I go home, I go to bed, throw myself down this way." He threw both arms backward and to the side in a gesture of desperate exhaustion, allowing his head to fall back at the same time. "G.o.ddam, think I no work no more. No day nuff sleep for work," he concluded.

Later on in the day, I saw Jimmy let the charge-up man, George, take the spoon and make front-wall. The heat "got his goat." "I lose about ten or fifteen pounds every summer," he said, "but I get it back in the winter.

My wife is after me the whole time to leave this game. I tell her every year I will. Better quit this business, buddy, while you're young, before you get stuck like me."

I walked home with Stanley, the Pole. He always called me Joe, the generic name for non-Hunky helpers.

"Say, Joe," he said, as we came under the railroad bridge, "what's your name right?"

"Charlie," I answered. "By the way, where have you been?"

"Drunk, Charlie," he answered, smiling cheerfully.

"Ever since I saw you in the pit?"

"Three week," he stated, with satisfaction; "beer, whiskey, everyt'ing.

What the h.e.l.l, work all time G.o.ddam job, what the h.e.l.l?"

V

WORKING THE TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR SHIFT

7 A.M. _Sunday_

I tried to get a lot of sleep last night for handling the long turn; managed about nine hours. When I came to the locker, Stanley was there, dressed, cleaning his smoked gla.s.ses.

"How much sleep last night?" I asked.

"Oh, six, seven hour," said Stanley.

"You're a d.a.m.ned fool," I said; "this is the long turn."

"I know, I know," he returned, "I have t'ing to do. No have time sleep."

I looked at him. He had a big frame, but his limbs were hung on it, like clothes on hooks. His face was a gray pallor, sharply caving in under the cheek-bones. His eyes were very dull, and steady. I'd noticed those eyes of his before, and never could decide whether they showed a kind of sullen defiance, or resignation, or were just extraordinarily tired.

"Two month more," he said.