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.