We walked back together after the front-wall to the trough of water.
"Not bad when you get good furnace, good first-helper," he said. "Fred good boy, but furnace no good. A man got to watch himself on this job," he went on bitterly; "he pull himself to pieces."
"I can't manage quite enough sleep," I said, wondering if that was the remark of a tenderfoot.
"Sometime—maybe one day a month—I feel all right, good, no sleepy," he went on. "Daytime work, ten hour, all right, feel good; fourteen hour always too much tired. Sometime, goddam, I go home, I go to bed, throw myself down this way." He threw both arms backward and to the side in a gesture of desperate exhaustion, allowing his head to fall back at the same time. "Goddam, think I no work no more. No day nuff sleep for work," he concluded.
Later on in the day, I saw Jimmy let the charge-up man, George, take the spoon and make front-wall. The heat "got his goat." "I lose about ten or fifteen pounds every summer," he said, "but I get it back in the winter. My wife is after me the whole time to leave this game. I tell her every year I will. Better quit this business, buddy, while you're young, before you get stuck like me."
I walked home with Stanley, the Pole. He always called me Joe, the generic name for non-Hunky helpers.
"Say, Joe," he said, as we came under the railroad bridge, "what's your name right?"
"Charlie," I answered. "By the way, where have you been?"
"Drunk, Charlie," he answered, smiling cheerfully.
"Ever since I saw you in the pit?"