I followed him with a broad jump, and a prayer about the falling slag.
We came out into the pit, which had so many bright centres of molten steel that it was lighter than outdoors. I watched Pete's back chiefly, and my own feet. We kept stepping between little chunks of dark slag, which made your feet hot, and close to a bucket, ten feet high, which gave forth smoke. Wheelbarrows we met, with and without men, and metal boxes, as large as wagons, dropped about a dirt floor. We avoided a hole with a fire at its centre.
At last, at the edge of the pit, near more tracks, we ran into the pit gang: eight or ten men, leaning on shovels and forks and blinking at the molten metal falling into a huge bucket-like ladle.
"Y' work _here_," said Pete, and moved on.
I remember feeling a half-pleasurable glow as I looked about the strenuous environment, of which I was to become a part--a glow mixed with a touch of anxiety as to what I was up against for the next fourteen hours.
Two of the eight men looked at me, and grinned. I grinned back and put on my gloves.
"No. 6 furnace?" I asked, nodding toward the stream.
He was a cleanly built person, in loose corduroy pants, blue shirt open at his neck. Italian.
He grinned with extraordinary friendliness, and said, "First night, this place?"
"Goddam hell of a ---- job," he said, very genially.
We both turned to look at the stream again.
For ten minutes we stood and stared. Two men lit cigarettes, and sat on a wheelbarrow; four of the others had nodded to me; the other three stared.
I was eager to organize into reasonableness a little of this strenuous process that was going forward with a hiss and a roar about me.
"That's the ladle?" I said, to start things.
"Ye-ah, w'ere yer see metal come, dat's spout, crane tak' him over pour platform, see; pour man mak li'l hole in ladle, fill up moul'--see de moul' on de flat cars?"
The Italian was a professor to me. I got the place named and charted in good shape before the night was out. The pit was an area of perhaps half an acre, with open sides and a roof. Two cranes traversed its entire extent, and a railway passed through its outer edge, bearing mammoth moulds, seven feet high above their flat cars. Every furnace protruded a spout, and, when the molten steel inside was "cooked," tilted backward slightly and poured into a ladle. A bunch of things happened before that pouring. Men appeared on a narrow platform with a very twisted railing, near the spout, and worked for a time with rods. They prodded up inside, till a tiny stream of fire broke through. Then you could see them start back in the nick of time to escape the deluge of molten steel. The stream in the spout would swell to the circumference of a man's body, and fall into the ladle, that oversized bucket thing, hung conveniently for it by the electric crane. A dizzy tide of sparks accompanied the stream, and shot out quite far into the pit, at times causing men to slap themselves to keep their clothing from breaking out into a blaze. There were always staccato human voices against the mechanical noise, and you distinguished by inflection, whether you heard command, or assent, or warning, or simply the lubrications of profanity.