II MOLTEN STEEL—AN INITIATION
At four o'clock I put on my paint-spattered pants, the coat with a conspicuous hole near one of the buttons, and my green hat. I climbed the little hill before the gate, among leisurely first arrivals, and found myself attracting no attention whatsoever. I felt for the brass check in my shirt pocket, found it, and rebuttoned the pocket. The guard peered into my face, as if he were going to ask for a pass, but didn't.
I walked the four hundred yards to the open-hearth, and noticed clearly for the first time the yard of the blooming-mill. Here varied shapes of steel, looking as if they weighed several thousand pounds each, were issuing from the mill on continuous treads, and moving about the yard in a most orderly, but complex manner. Electric cranes were sweeping over the quarter-acre of yard-space, and lifting and piling the steel swiftly and precisely on flat cars.
I entered the open-hearth mill by the tracks that ran close to the furnaces. The mill noises broke on me: a moan and rattle of cranes overhead, fifty-ton ones; the jarring of the train-loads of charge-boxes stopping suddenly in front of Number 4; and minor sounds like chains jangling on being dropped, or gravel swishing out of a box. I was conscious of muscles growing tense, in the face of this violent environment, a somewhat artificial and eager calm. I walked with excessive firmness, and felt my personality contracting itself into the mere sense of sight and sound.
I looked for Pete.
"He's in his shanty—over there," said an American furnace-helper, who was getting into his mill clothes.
I went after Pete's shanty. It was a sheet-iron box, 12 by 12, midway down the floor, near a steel beam. Pete was coming out, buttoning the lower buttons of a blue shirt. He looked through my head and passed me, much as he had passed the steel beam. With two or three steps I moved out and blocked his way. He looked at me, loosened his face, and said very cheerfully: "Hello."
"I've come to work," I said.
"Here," he said, "you'll work th' pit t' night. Few days, y' know, get used ter things."
He led the way to some iron stairs, and we went down together into that darkened region under the furnaces, about whose function I had speculated.
To the left I could make out tracks. Railroads seem to run through a steel mill from cellar to attic. And at intervals, from above the tracks, torrents of sparks swept into the dark, with now and then a small stream of yellow fire.
We stumbled over bricks, mud, clay, a shovel, and the railroad track. In front of a narrow curtain of molten slag, falling on the floor, we waited for some moments. We were under the middle furnaces, I calculated. Gradually the curtain ceased, and Pete leaped under the hole from which it had come.
"Watch yourself," he said.
I followed him with a broad jump, and a prayer about the falling slag.
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 coöperating 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.