Part 4

"What are they 'Heowing' about?" I thought violently to myself.

But Pete had already grabbed my arm with a hand like a crane-hook. "Want to watch y'self," he said; "get hurt."

I saw what it was, now: the overhead crane, about to carry over our heads a couple of tons of coal in a huge swaying box.

I looked around a little more before I left, trying to organize some meaning into the operations I observed; trying to wonder how it would be to take a shovel and hurl that white gravel into those red throats. I said to myself: "Hell! I guess I can handle it," and thought strongly on the worst things I had known in the army.

As I stood, a locomotive entered the mill from the other end, and went down the track before the furnaces. It was dragging flat-cars, with iron boxes laid crosswise on them, as big as coffins. I went over and looked carefully at the train load, and at one or two of the boxes. They were filled with irregular shapes of iron, wire coils, bars, weights, sheets, fragments of machines, in short--scrap.

"This is what they eat," I thought, glancing at the glowing doors; "I wonder how many tons a day." I waited till the locomotive came to a shaken stop in front of the middle furnace, then left the mill by the tracks along which it had entered.

I followed them out and along a short bridge. A little way to my right was solid ground--the yards, where I had been. Back of Mr. Towers's little office were more mills. I picked out the power house--half a city block. Behind them all were five cone-shaped towers, against the sky, and a little smoke curling over the top--the blast-furnaces. Behind me the Bessemer furnace threw off a cloud of fire that had changed while I was in the mill from brown to brownish gold. In front, and to my left, the tracks ran on the edge of a sloping embankment that fell away quickly to a lower level. Fifty yards from the base was the blooming-mill, where the metal was being rolled into great oblong shapes called "blooms." A vague red glow came out of its interior twilights.

Down through the railroad ties on which I walked was open space, twenty feet below. Two workmen were coming out with dinner-buckets. It must be nearly twelve. I had a curiosity to know the arrangement and workings of the dark mill-cellar from which they came.

Turning back on the open-hearth mill, when I had crossed the bridge, I could see that it extended itself, in a sort of gigantic lean-to shelter, over what the melter had called the "pit." There was a crane moving about there, and more centres of light, which I took to be molten steel. I wondered about that area, too, and what sort of work the men did.

When I reached the end of the track, I thought to myself: "I go to work at five o'clock. How about clothes?"

No one in the mill wore overalls, except carpenters and millwrights, and so on. The helpers on the furnaces were clad in shapeless, baggy, gray affairs for trousers, and shirts were blue or gray, with a rare khaki. Hats were either degraded felts, or those black-visor effects--like locomotive engineers.

The twelve-o'clock whistle blew. A few men had been moving toward the gate slowly for minutes. The whistle sent them at top walking-speed. I stared at them to assure myself as to the correct dress for steel makers.

Main Street began at the tracks, and ran straight through the town, mounting the hills as it went. At the railroad end was the Hotel Bouton, where I had breakfasted. Beside it was an Italian fruit store sprawling leisurely over the sidewalk, and a Greek restaurant, one of four. The Greeks monopolized the feeding of Bouton. A block farther, on the right, I ran into a clothing-store, a barber-shop, and two rudimentary department stores. Then, on the same side, a finished city block, looking queer and haughty amid its village companions.

"What's that?" I asked a strolling, raw-boned Slav.

"Comp'ny store," he said.

I passed a one-story movie "palace," almost concealed behind chromatic advertising, and then the street twisted and I entered the "American quarter." Half a mile of neat, slightly varying brick houses, with lawns fifteen by twenty, and children in such quantity as seriously to menace automobiles.

I looked at the numbers with growing interest, to discover in which I should go to bed to-morrow morning at 7.30. The employment manager had given me the number 343 to try. Here it was, on the right, quite like the others, and, I guessed, about twenty minutes from the mill. Calculation of the rising-times for future night-shifts came into my mind.

I was shown the back room on the second floor--a very good room, with a big bed, and two windows.

"You can see our garden," said Mrs. Farrell standing at one of the windows.

I looked out and found the most intensively cultivated twenty-foot plot I had ever seen or imagined. Behind was the back road and a mud cliff. The room seemed a little extravagant for a third-helper, but I took it, in order to have a place for the night, and contracted to pay four dollars a week.

I walked through a street where the prices of clothing were moderate, but where there seemed a dearth of second-hand shops. In one store were green suits, belted, and hung on forms. They had the close-fitting waist, and were marked, "Style Plus Garments: Our Special Price, $15.00." The proprietor, who stood in the doorway, to be handy for collaring the prospective customer, rushed out at me, hands threatening. He was of the prevailing racial type.

"Fix you up wid a dandy suit," he said.

"What I am looking for," I said, "is something second-hand. Do you have any?" I shot this out partly as a check.

"Old man upstairs, fix you up. That door."

I went through that door and up two flights, to a room containing an old man, a sewing machine, and a large table covered with old clothing.

"I'm looking for something for working-clothes," I said; "second-hand coat and pants."

He lifted a number from the tangled mass of garments, and displayed them. They appeared to me too clean, too new, too dressy.

"No," I said, "not that."