3.

A ROMANCE OF THE STEEL-MILLS

HERSCHEL S. HALL

How would this story serve for a motion-picture play? As you read, select one passage on which to prepare a description of the action as it would appear if thrown on the screen. Read this passage a second time.

It was a black and dirty street down which I made my way that November morning at half-past five. There was no paving, no sidewalk, no lights. Rain had been falling for days, and I waded through seas of mud and sloshed through lakes of water. There were men in front of me and men behind me, all plodding along through the mire, just as I was plodding along, their tin lunch-pails rattling as mine was rattling. Some of us were going to work, some of us were going to look for work mills lay somewhere in the darkness ahead of us.

the steel

We who were not so fortunate as to possess a magical piece of brass, the showing of which would cause the steel-mills' gate to swing open, waited outside in the street. It was cold out there. A north wind, blowing straight in from the lake, whipped our faces and hands and penetrated our none-too-heavy clothing.

"I wish I had a job in there!" said a shivering man at my side. "You got a job?" he asked, glancing at my pail. I told him I had been promised work and had been ordered to report.

"You're lucky to get a job." He began to kick his muddy shoes against the fence and to blow upon his hands. "Winter's comin'," he sighed.

A whistle blew, a gate swung open, and a mob of men poured out into the street — the night shift going off duty. Their faces looked haggard and deathly pale in the sickly glare of the pale blue arcs above us.

"Night-work's no good," said the small man at my side. "But you got to do it if you're goin' to work in the mills."

A man with a Turkish towel thrown about his neck came out of the gate and looked critically at the job hunters. He came up to me. "What's your name?" he demanded. I told him. Come on!" he grunted.

We stopped before the uniformed guard, who wrote my name

on a card, punched the card, and gave it to me. "Come on!" again grunted the man with the towel. I followed my guide into the yard, over railroad tracks, past great piles of scrap-iron and pig metal, through clouds of steam and smoke, and into a long, black building where engines whistled, bells clanged, and electric cranes rumbled and rattled overhead.

Through a long, hot tunnel down which I saw red arms of flame reaching, we made our way. We came to an iron stairway, climbed it, and stepped out upon a steel floor into the open hearth. Scattered here and there, I saw groups of men at work in front of big, house-like furnaces out of whose mouths white tongues of flame were leaping. The men worked naked to the waist, or stripped to overalls and undershirt, and, watching them, I began to wonder if I had chosen wisely in seeking and accepting employment in this inferno.

"Put yer pail there. Hang yer coat there. Sit down there. I'll tell the boss ye're here." And the man with the towel went away.

I watched a man who worked at one of the doors of the furnace nearest me. He had thrust a bar of iron through the peep-hole and was jabbing and prying at some object inside. Every ounce of his strength he was putting into his efforts. I could hear him grunt as he pulled and pushed, and I saw the perspiration dripping from his face and naked arms. He withdrew the bar - the end that had been inside the door came out as white and as pliable as a hank of taffy · - and dropped it to the floor. He shouted some command to an invisible person, and the door rose slowly and quietly, disclosing a great, snow-white cavern in whose depths bubbled and boiled a lake of steel.

With a quick movement of his hand the workman dropped a pair of dark-colored spectacles before his eyes, and his arms went up before his face to shield it from the blast that poured out through the open door. There he stood, silhouetted against that piercing light, stooping and peering, tiptoeing and bending, cringing and twisting, as he tried to examine something back in the furnace. Then with another shout he caused the door to slip down into its place.

He came walking across the floor to the place where I sat, and stopped in front of me. The sweat fell from his blistered face, ran in tiny rivulets from his arms and hands, and splashed on the iron floor. He trembled, gasped for breath, and I thought he was going to sink down from exhaustion, when, to my surprise, he deliberately winked at me.

"Ought never to have left the farm, ought we? Eh, buddy?" he said with a chuckle. And that was my introduction to Pete, the best open-hearth man I ever knew, a good fellow, clean and honest.

"Mike, put this guy to wheeling in manganese," said a voice behind me, and I turned and saw the boss.

"Get that wheelbarrer over yender and foller me," instructed Mike, a little, old, white-haired Irishman, called the "maid of all work" about the plant. I picked up the heavy iron wheelbarrow and trundled it after him, out to a building where the alloys used in steel-making were kept.

"Now, then, you load your wheelbarrer up with this maʼganese and weigh it over on the scales yender, and then wheel it in and put it behind Number Four," Mike told me.

"Why is manganese put into steel?" I asked Pete on one of my trips past his furnace.

"It settles it, toughens it up, and makes it so it'll roll," he answered.

All day I trundled the iron wheelbarrow along the iron floor, wheeling in manganese. I watched the powerful electric cranes picking up the heavy boxes of material and dumping their contents into the furnaces. I watched the tapping of the "heats," when the dams holding in the boiling lakes would be broken down and the fiery floods would go rushing and roaring into the ladles, these to be whisked away to the ingot moulds. As I watched the men at work, saw the strain they were under, saw the risks they took, I wondered if, after a few days, I could be doing what they were doing.

"It is all very interesting," I said to Pete, as I stood near him, waiting for a crane to pass by.

He grinned. "Uh-huh! But you'll get over it.

'Bout to

morrow mornin', when your clock goes rattlety-bang and you look to see what's up and find it's five o'clock, you'll not be thinkin' it so interestin', oh, no! Let's see your hands." He laughed when he saw the blisters the handles of the wheelbarrow had developed.

Pete was right. When my alarm clock awakened me next morning and I started to get out of bed, I groaned in agony. Every muscle of my body ached. I fancied my joints creaked as I sat on the edge of the couch vainly endeavoring to get them to working freely and easily. The breakfast bell rang twice, but hurry I could not.

"You'll be late to work! The others have gone!" called the landlady. I managed to creak downstairs. My pail was packed and she had tied up an extra lunch in a newspaper. "You can't stop to eat, if you want to get to work on time," she said. "Your breakfast is in this paper eat it when you get to the mills."

I stumbled away in the darkness, groaning and gasping, and found my way to the black and dirty street. The mud was frozen hard now, the pools of water were ice-covered, and my heavy working shoes thumped and bumped along the dismal road in a remarkably noisy manner.

The number of job hunters was larger this morning. Among them I saw the small man who could not "get took," and again he was peeking wishfully through the knothole in the fence.

"You're on, eh?" he said, when he spied me. “I wish I was. Say, you haven't got a dime you could spare a feller, have you?” I discovered a dime.

I showed my brass check a timekeeper had given me one the day before, Number 1266 to the uniformed watchman. He waved me on, and I entered the gate just as the whistle blew. A minute later and I would have been docked a half-hour.

Mike took me in hand as soon as I came on the floor and proceeded to give me a few pointers. "I kept me eye on ye all day yestiddy, and ye fair disgoosted me with the way ye cavorted round with the Irish buggy. As though ye wanted to do it all the first day! Now, ye're on a twelve-hour turn here, and ye're not

expected to work like a fool. Ye'll get in bad with the boss if he sees ye chinnin' with Pete. He doesn't like Pete, and Pete doesn't like him, and I don't blame Pete. The boss has brainstorms. Watch out for 'em."

I followed much of Mike's advice. All that day I trundled the wheelbarrow, but I made an easier day of it, and no one objected to my work. As the days ran by I found my muscles toughening, and I could hear the alarm-bell at five in the morning without feeling compelled to squander several valuable minutes in wishing I had been born rich.

For two weeks I worked every day at wheeling in materials for the furnaces. Then one day, when a workman dropped a piece of pig-iron on his foot and was sent to the hospital, I was put on "second helping."

By good luck I was sent to Pete's furnace. Pete and I by this time were great cronies. Many a chat we had had, back behind his furnace, hidden from the prying eyes of the boss. I found Mike was right — it was just as well to keep out of the sight of the boss. I soon discovered that he did not like Pete. In numberless mean and petty ways he harassed the man, trying to make him do something that would give an excuse for discharging him. But Pete was slow to anger, and with admirable strength he kept his feelings under control.

I was working nights now, every other week. The small man at the gate he had finally "got took" and was laboring in the. yard gang - who had told me that "night-work is no good" knew what he was talking about. I found night-work absolutely "no good." The small hours of the night are the terror of the night-worker.

When the "heat" was ready to tap I would dig out the “taphole." Another "second helper" would assist me in this work. The tap-hole, an opening in the center and lower part of the back wall of the furnace, is about a foot in diameter and three in length. It is. closed with magnesite and dolomite when the furnace is charged. Digging this filling out is dangerous work

the steel is liable to break out and burn the men who work there. When we had removed the dolomite from the hole I would notify the boss. A long, heavy bar would then be thrust