Part 19

"Fine!" I said as loudly as I could; and went and sat down at once. My chin hit my chest. I stopped thinking, but didn't go to sleep.

"Test!" yelled Fred.

We tested three times, and then tapped. There were two ladles, with four piles of manganese, to shovel in. A third-helper from Number 4, a short stocky Italian, shoveled with me. The ladle swung slightly closer to the gallery than usual, and sent up a bit more gas and sparks. We put out little fires on our clothes six or seven times. After the first ladle, the Italian put back the sheet iron over the red-hot spout, and after the second ladle, I put it on. We rested between ladles, in a little breeze that came through between furnaces.

"What you think of this job?" he asked.

"Pretty bad," I said, "but pretty good money."

He looked up, and the veins swelled on his forehead. His cheeks were inflamed, and his eyes showed the effects of the twenty hours of continuous labor.

"To hell with the money!" he said, with quiet passion; "no can live."

The words sank into my memory for all time.

The back-wall was, I think, no hotter than usual, but men's nerves made them mind things they would have smirked at the previous morning. The third-helper on Eight and Nick quarreled over a shovel, and Nick sulked till Fred went over and spoke to him. Once the third-helper got in Nick's way. "Get out, or I'll break your goddam neck!" And so on--

I felt outrageously sore at everyone present--not least, myself. After that back-wall all except Fred threw their shovels with violence on the floor, and went to the edge of the mill. They stood about in the little breeze that had come up there, in a state of fatigue and jangled nerves, looking out on a pale streak of morning just visible over freight cars and piles of scrap.

We made front-wall, and when it was over, I went to the bench by the locker and sat down, to try to forget about the spout. I had been forgetting about it for twenty minutes when Nick came up, and shook me, thinking I had fallen asleep.

"Mud," he said.

I got him mud.

Nick fixed up the spout amid an inclination to cursing in Serbian, and gave me commands in loud tones in the same language. I felt exceedingly indifferent to Nick and to the spout, and finished up in a state of enormous indifference to all things save the chance of sleep. Jack, the second-helper of Eight, was making tea, having dipped out some hot steel with a test-spoon, and set a tea-pot on it.

"Want some?" he said.

I nodded.

Watching him make it, and drinking the tea woke me up.

"What time is it?" I asked.

"Four-thirty," said he.

"Thanks for the tea."

Then the summoning signal for a third-helper rang out--a sledge-hammer pounding on sheet iron. They were "spooning up," that is, making front-wall, on Number 6. All through that stunt I was wide awake, quite refreshed, though with the sense, the conviction, that I had been in the mill, doing this sort of thing, for a week at the inside.

Coming back to Seven from that, I found Fred flat on his back, looking "all in." Jock came up for a drink of water, and looked over at me.

"You look to me," he remarked, "like the breaking up of a bad winter." He laughed.

5 A.M. Monday

The sun came into the mill, looking very pallid and sick beside the bright light from the metal. I watched the men on Eight make back-wall, and heard the sounds; I sat on the bench, my legs as loose as I could make them, my head forward, eyes just raised.

"Lower, lower, goddam you, lower!" came a desperate command to the "pull-up" man to close the furnace doors.

"Get out--"

"One more--"