It is easy to get excited about a steel-mill sky at night. I like to look at them. There weren't many lights at the nail mill but just enough to show broken outlines of a sheet-iron village there. The rolling-mills gave some of the brightness of hot billets through the windows, and over the stacks of the open-hearth were sparks. By closing my eyes, I could see curdling flame in the belly of Number 7. The open-hearth fires showed themselves, a confused glow under a tin roof.
Some little light came on the mills out of the night itself, though thin clouds kept washing the face of the moon, and now and then a blast-furnace got into the moonlight and looked perfectly confused with its pipe labyrinth and its stoves.
From where I stood, I could see the Bessemer converter pouring a fluid rope of white light; I knew it for a stream the thickness of a hydrant. A rusty, glowing cloud rose over the converter, changing always, and turning that patch of sky into gold. The pattern of smoke the blower knows like a textbook, and follows the progress of his steel by the color of the cloud.
My mind swept over many memories as I looked at the yellow fire of the Bessemers. There was no order or arrangement in them. They were a stream, thick in some passages, shallow in others, with scraps of all sorts riding over the top. One scrap was the price the Wop cobbler charged for soling, and another, Dick's words when he damned me for forgetting a bag of coal. Then there were things that wrung me and made the palms of my hands wet, as if thoughts went over nerves and not brain.
I looked over at the eight stacks of the open-hearth, closed my eyes, and saw Seven tapping. The second-helper broke the mud stoppage with his "picker," and liquid steel belched. Pete held up two fingers. Stanley the Pole was third-helper with me. We shoveled in the two piles. I could feel heat in my nose and throat and sparks light on the blue handkerchief I had tied around my neck. We cooled off in a breeze between the two furnaces, and as we caught our breath, watched Herb swing the ladleful, over the moulds for pouring.
I lived through the dragged hours in the morning of a long turn. Between two and four is worst—I remembered "fixing the spout" with Nick at three—wheelbarrow loads of mud and dolomite—a pitched battle with sleep—
At intervals in my memories, I grew conscious of the steady roar the mills sent me from the river; then forgot it, quite.
Finished ladles of iron came into mind, and I tried to follow in the dark the path they would take along tracks to the Bessemer. Thick red ingots of steel, big as gravestones, I knew, were coming from "soaking pits" to rolls, and getting flattened into blooms and billets. I could see trainloads of even steel shapes moving out of the freight yard to become the steel framework of the world.
"It is perfectly certain that civilization is kept from slipping, by a battle," I said to myself, beginning a line of thought.
An express train shot into view in the black valley at my feet, and passed the Bouton station, with that quickly accelerating screech that motion gives. I thought of the steel in the locomotive, and thought it back quickly into sheets, bars, blooms, back then into the monumental ingots as they stood, fiery from the open-hearth pouring, against a night sky. Then the glow left, and went out of my thinking. Each ingot became a number of wheelbarrow loads of mud, pushed over a rough floor, Fred's judgment of the carbon content, and his watching through furnace peepholes. The ladlefuls ceased as steel, becoming thirty minutes' sledging through stoppage for four men, the weight of manganese in my shovel, and the clatter of the pieces that hit the rail, sparks on my neck burning through a blue handkerchief, and the cup of tea I had with Jock, cooked over hot slag at 4.00 A.M.