ADVENTURE NUMBER EIGHTEEN
AN ADVENTURE IN SAFETY
Betty told Sure Pop what Bob had said about getting a job in one of the big mills by and by, and the little Colonel remembered it a few weeks later when he was showing several of the Safety Scouts through the steel mills.
"Do you think it will be one of these mills you'll pick out for your first job?"
"Well, I don't know, now. It's a pretty big, lonesome sort of place for a fellow like me, Sure Pop, and there don't seem to be so many fellows of my own age here as in some of the other factories."
Betty and Joe and Chance followed Bob's eyes around the big steel mill yards. They knew how he felt. It was a lonesome looking place till you got used to it, in spite of the thousands of men who swarmed around them. The queer, raw smell of the reddish iron ore added to the feeling, too.
Away down in the big ore boats along the docks, gangs of big, brawny workmen strained and sweated, filling the iron buckets that traveled up the wire cables to the ore dumps. Others were trucking the ore to the furnaces, while a swarm of little switch engines panted and puffed back and forth over the network of steel rails.
The steel works covered many acres of ground, and, shut off as they were by high fences, seemed almost like another world. The roar of the furnaces and the din of steel on steel made Betty and the boys feel rather confused at first. "I should think all these men just over from the old country would get mixed up, so many of them not understanding a single word of English," said Betty to their guide.
"Yes, we have to be mighty careful," said the man, who was one of the Safety men who gave all his time to making the steel mills safer for the thousands of workmen. "We print this little book of Safety Rules in all the different languages, so that each new man can study it and find out how to do his day's work without getting into danger."