Strong followed me over to the end and watched me with interest when I took the twelve-foot poker—a one-inch steel bar with a big eye bent on one end and spatula shaped at the other—for the purpose of freeing the clinkers from the grates before shaking them down into the ash pan.
"I will clean your fire for you this time and you can see how it's done," I suggested, and proceeded to do so. "You know, the first thing you do when going on watch is to clean the fire, but it must be done quickly to keep the steam from going down too much." He listened attentively and good-naturedly, but still silent, as one about to be initiated into a college fraternity and was waiting for something to happen.
I handed him a scoop and told him to put in a half dozen scoop-loads at a time and to be sure and get it well back on the grates. I then proceeded to clean my own grate.
Taking up the scoop, he filled it brimful, and started for the furnace door like a girl shoveling snow. He missed the narrow opening and the coal fell off into the ashes. He did not swear as I had expected but glanced sheepishly at me, then about him, to see if others noticed it, but we were all too busy with our own back-breaking jobs to pay heed to his worries.
Determined to be successful, he walked close to the furnace door, exposing his face and hands to the glaring fire, and succeeded in getting the next shovelful pretty well back on the grates. After repeating this a half dozen times his face took on a "Turkey red" and he puffed like a lizard.
After a few more trials and a little more instruction the novelty of doing it well seemed to interest him, and two hours wore away. He soon learned to watch the steam gauge above him and kept it pointing at the requisite two hundred and eighty.
At the end of the shift he leaned heavily against the bulkhead next to his furnace, panting like a race-horse. The perspiration rolled off of him until even his well-tailored trousers were wet and his pink silk undershirt a sight to behold. His face was the shade of pickled beets mixed with coal dust, and his hands the color of the lobsters he was accustomed to eat after midnight, his palms blistered and sore, from the friction of the shovel handle.
His neat black shoes, now grimy and rough, were full of water and pinched his feet. I did not give him the extra pair of soft cotton flannel gloves I had brought along for him until he asked me where I had got mine. Then I showed him how to cool off by standing under the ventilator, for which he seemed very grateful. He looked curiously at me, evidently discovering that he and I were the only ones down in the furnace room not of a hardened class. He seemed inclined to stay under the refreshing ventilator, and I noted the hands of his steam gauge drop back to two hundred and seventy, so I opened the door, cleaned the grates and spread over a fresh bed of coal.
He came over while I was doing this, and I gave him some little tricks on how to spread the fuel and not expose his hands and face to the heat.
He seemed to appreciate this and surprised me by his cleverness in making use of my tips. For a time he revived and I thought he was going to pull through his first watch all right, but at the end of another hour he became shaky on his legs, and his arms scarcely supported the empty shovel. The intense heat and effort had a telling effect on him and it did not surprise me when he toppled over on the coal pile in a dead faint.