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.