My recollections were broken into by a call for violent action.
"Cooler," yelled McLanahan, his voice going up into a husky shriek.
That meant molten iron inside, melting the cone-shaped water-chamber around the blast pipe. If let alone, the cooling at that place would cease, and in a short time there would follow an escape of molten metal.
"Cooler!" yelled on a blast-furnace means "Hurry like hell."
I grabbed a wrench to take the nut off the "bridle"—the first step in taking out a sort of outside cooler, the tuyère.
"Bar," said the Serbian stove-tender very quietly, picking up a specially curved one, and McLanahan took the other end.
Somebody knocked out some keys with a sledge, and the blowpipe fell on the curved bar, making the holders of it grunt. They took it off fast, for the instant the thing loosens, a flame shoots through the hole and licks its edges.
Then the tuyère comes loose with a few strokes of a pull bar. All of these moves are fast; a tuyère goes bad every other day and men work fast like soldiers at a gun drill.
But coolers don't break a lead but once in three months or so; and the cone's heavier, the gang bigger, there's less efficiency and more holler and sweat.
When the pull bar gets into action it looks a little like a mediæval mob with a battering ram. A "pull bar" is a tool designed to translate the muscle of many men into pull, on a small gripping edge against which sledging is impossible. At one end a thick hook grips the edge of the cooler, at the other a weight is brought against a flange that runs around the bar. Everybody on the gang has a piece of a rope attaching to that weight.