The Old Home Week Carnival had been called off through the influence of the mill authorities. They were afraid of a strike committee coming from the next town, and having a parade to lead the men out.
A special train went through Bouton that day at about five o'clock. Everyone watched it from the furnaces, and speculated what it meant. It was a double-header and passed through at top speed.
"Troops going to quell strike riots," the Assistant Superintendent, Lonergan, suggested. "A lot of those fellers are overseas men of the National Guard. They're havin' trouble with 'em. I don't blame the boys a damn bit for not wantin' 'to preserve order in the steel towns,' as the papers call it," he concluded, with a grin.
Haverly, an American blower, came up. "Fight for democracy overseas and against it over here," he said.
It is difficult to say what the men here would have done if they had had leadership. They had none, since no organizers whatever appeared, and no speechmaking occurred in town. There was pretty good feeling toward the company itself, which is, I believe, one of the best. A deep-seated hatred, however, existed against the whole system of steel. There was anger and resentment that ran straight through, from the cinder-snapper to the high-paid blowers, melters, and, in some cases, to the superintendents.
I was quite amazed—because of what the newspapers were continually saying—at the absence of any sociological ideas whatever. I remember one day I met my first and only Socialist. He was a stove-tender of great skill and long experience; he told me how bad he thought war was, and how he couldn't understand why people didn't live in peace and be sociable with one another. But, though there were few doctrines, except in rare instances, there was a mighty stream of complaint against certain things such as the company-owned town, the twelve-hour day, the twenty-four-hour shift, the seven-day week, and certain remediable dangers. It pervaded all ranks.
There were certain days in my summer in the mills that burned among the others like a hot ingot of steel on the night-shift. One of them was the cleaning out of No. 15 stove early in my gang apprenticeship. Ordinarily, the duties of the stove gang were to move leisurely from stove to stove while they were alight, and remove cinder from the combustion chambers. It was pried up with a crowbar, and hoed out on to a wheelbarrow. But when a stove was cooled for thorough cleaning, we did our real work.
The gas was turned off in the combustion chamber on the night-shift, and the stove allowed to cool for several hours. We prepared to go inside her, the next morning, to cut away the hardened cinder. John, the Slav, went in first, with pick and shovel, and worked an hour. Then Tony turned to me.
"You go in with me, I show you," he said.
We put on wooden sandals, foot-shaped blocks an inch thick, with lacing straps, donned jackets that buttoned very tight in the neck, and pulled down the ear-flaps of our kersey caps. Over our eyes we wore close-fitting goggles. We looked like Dutch peasants dressed for motoring. The combustion chamber is a space eight or ten feet long by three or four wide. It was partly filled with cooling cinder, some of it yielding to the pick, some only to the bar and sledge. Someone shoved an electric light through the hot-blast valve, and the appearance of the place was like a mine gallery. The chamber was hot and gaseous, but it was quite possible to work inside over an hour. After Tony had loosened several shovelfuls, I could see that the pick failed against a great shelf of the stuff that glowed red along its base.