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.