He looked over at us and held up two fingers. That meant both piles of manganese that lay on the gallery next the crane were to be shoveled in—double time for us, in the heat.
"Heow!" yelled the melter.
Jack and I leaped forward to the manganese, and our shovels scraped on the iron gallery. I saw Jack slapping his head to put out a little fire that had started on the handkerchief wound round his neck. I slapped a few sparks that stung my right leg. We finished half the pile.
There was something queer about this heat. The soles of my feet—why in hell should the gallery burn so! There was a blazing gas in the air—my nostrils seemed to flame as they took it in. This was different from most manganese shoveling. My face glowed all over in single concentrated pain. What was it? I saw Jack shoveling wildly in the middle of that second pile. We finished it in a panic.
"What was the matter with that damn ladle?" I asked as we got our breath in the opening between the furnaces.
"Spout had a goddam hole in the middle," he said; "ladle underneath, see?"
I did. The fire-clay of the spout had given way, and a hole forming in the middle let the metal through. That made it necessary, in order to catch the steel, to bring the ladle close, till part of it was under the platform on which we worked. The heat and gas from the hot steel in the ladle had been warming the soles of our feet, and rising into our faces.
"Here's a funny thing," I said, looking down. One of the sparks which had struck my pants burned around, very neatly taking off the cuff and an inch or two of the pant-leg. The thing might have been done with a pair of shears.
I came out of the mill whistling and feeling pretty much "on the crest." I'd worked their damn "long turn," and stood it. It wasn't so bad, all except that ladle that got under the manganese. I ate a huge breakfast, with a calm sense of virtue rewarded, and climbed into bed with a smile on my lips.
The alarm clock had been ringing several minutes before I realized what it was up to. I turned over to shut it off, and found needles running into all the muscles of my back. I struggled up on an elbow. I had a "hell of a head." The alarm was still going.