We finished the job in half an hour, and pushed the truck till it came under jurisdiction of a crane. Marco fixed the hooks rather officiously, pushing Fritz and me aside. There is, I suppose, more snobbishness induced by the manner of crane-hooking than in any other pit function. The crane swung the pipes on holders and dropped them in front of the blacksmith shop. We carried them into the shop, Marco and I working together. Inside there were half a dozen small forges, some benches, and a drop hammer. It was the place where ladles and spoons were repaired. The blacksmiths and helpers gave us friendly, but condescending glances.
As we walked back, we saw the crane swing a ladle from the moulds into which it had been pouring toward the dumping pit in front of Five. When the giant bucket approached, the chain hooked to the bottom lifted slowly, and dregs half-steel, half-ash, rolled out into the dump. After a little cooling, we would clean up there. With the chain released, the bucket righted itself with a shuddering clank, and swayed in the air scattering bits of slag and burnt fire clay.
A little later, we did a three-hour job on those dregs. We loosened the slag with picks first, and then lifted forkfuls and shovelfuls into the crane-carried boxes. A good deal of scrap was in the lot, probably the makings of half a ton of steel. This, of course, went into a separate box. I hooked up a couple of big scrap-hunks, weighing perhaps 500 pounds each, and took some sport out of it. That is one small matter, at least, where a grain of judgment and ingenuity has place. A badly hooked scrap-hunk may fall and break a neck, or simply tumble and waste everybody's time. Loosening up with the pick, too, demands a slight knack and smacks faintly of the miner's skill. We had to go down into a pit, where there was heated slag on all sides, using boards to save scorching our shoe leather. In turning up fractures eight or ten inches thick, there would be an inner four inches still red-hot.
At eleven o'clock, I was working at a fair pace, flinging moderately husky forkfuls over a ten-foot space into the box, when Marco looked up.
"Hey," he called.
I glanced at him for a moment. He was smiling. "Rest yourself," he said; "we work hard when de big bosses come."
During the next fifty shovelfuls, the remark went the rounds of my head, trying to get condemned. My memory threw up articles in the "Quarterly Journal of Economics," with "inefficiency and the labor-slackers," and "moral irresponsibility of the worker on the job," and so forth, in them. A couple of sermons and a vista of editorial denunciations of the laboring man who is no longer willing to do "an honest day's work for an honest day's pay," seemed to bring additional pressure for righteous indignation. I asked the following questions of myself, one for every two forkfuls:—
"Isn't it morally a bad thing to soldier, anyway?
"Is Marco a moral enormity?
"Do business men soldier?