My heart leaped a bit at "the night-shift." I thought over the hours-schedule the employment manager had rehearsed: "Five to seven, fourteen hours, on the night-week."
We had just about concluded this verbal contract, when a chorus of "Heows" hit our eardrums. Men make such a sound in a queer, startling, warning way, difficult to describe. I looked around for the charging machine, or locomotive, but neither was in range.
"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.