"Then I fought with Towers. He gave me a week. After I came back I had another run-in.... When I carried my bucket out o' that place, I was off work entirely. Didn't go to work for three months, thought I never would work again.
"But after a hell of a spell, gotta job, pipe mill New Naples—eight hours—a good job, but the mill's shut down now. Then the suckers drafted me. Balloon comp'ny a bloody year and a half."
There followed a very vast series of parties in the army, and explicit views on all the officers he'd had. There was usually a new army story whenever I met him. He was extraordinarily clever in getting away with A. W. O. L.'s.
"When I got my discharge, father wanted me to come to work here, so I did. Worked on those stoves where you are, for a while—stove-tender helper, then stove-tender. Then I got this job.... Don't you chew?... I'll lose it too if I take many more days off for sickness. Last time I was 'sick'"—he grinned—"Bert Cahill and the bunch and I took three skirts in Bill's car to Monaca. Had six quarts of damn good whiskey. I was out a week. Ralph says, when I come back: 'Pretty damn sick, you!' But to hell with 'em! I'm not afraid of my job."
That little blower called Dippy, I found, knew the furnace game in all its phases with great practical thoroughness. I used to try to get chances of talking with him on questions of technique.
"What about those jobs in the cast-house?" I said one day, "the helper's jobs? Isn't it a good thing to know about those if you're learning the iron game?"
"You don't want to work there," he said quickly, "only Hunkies work on those jobs, they're too damn dirty and too damn hot for a 'white' man."
So I got thinking over the "Hunky" business, and several other conversations came into my mind. Dick Reber, senior melter on the open-hearth, had once said, "There are a few of these Hunkies that are all right, and damn few. If I had my way, I'd ship the whole lot back to where they came from."
Then I thought of the incident of my getting chosen from the pit for floor work on the furnaces. Several times Pete, who was a Russian, discriminated against me in favor of Russians. Until Dick came along and began discriminating in my favor against the Hunkies.
How many Hunkies have risen to foremen's jobs, I thought, in the two departments where I have worked? One in the open-hearth—a fellow who "stuck with the company" in the Homestead Strike—and none on the blast-furnaces except Adolph, the stove-gang boss.