Jack and I got our flat manganese shovels, and went on the run to the gallery. We were tapping at last. This furnaceful had cooked twenty-two hours. Nick was kneeling on water-soaked bagging, on the edge of the hot spout. He dug out the mud in the tap-hole with a pointed rod and sputtered oaths at the heat. Every few minutes the spout would burn through the bagging to his knees. He would get up, refold the bagging, and kneel again to the job.
Finally the metal gurgled out, a small stream the size of two fingers. Nick dodged back, and it swelled to a six-inch torrent.
Pete Grayson had come out, and was bawling something very urgently at the pit crane. The ladle swung closer; we could feel the increased wave of heat.
He looked over at us and held up two fingers. That meant both piles of manganese that lay on the gallery next the crane were to be shoveled in--double time for us, in the heat.
Jack and I leaped forward to the manganese, and our shovels scraped on the iron gallery. I saw Jack slapping his head to put out a little fire that had started on the handkerchief wound round his neck. I slapped a few sparks that stung my right leg. We finished half the pile.
There was something queer about this heat. The soles of my feet--why in hell should the gallery burn so! There was a blazing gas in the air--my nostrils seemed to flame as they took it in. This was different from most manganese shoveling. My face glowed all over in single concentrated pain. What was it? I saw Jack shoveling wildly in the middle of that second pile. We finished it in a panic.
"What was the matter with that damn ladle?" I asked as we got our breath in the opening between the furnaces.
"Spout had a goddam hole in the middle," he said; "ladle underneath, see?"
I did. The fire-clay of the spout had given way, and a hole forming in the middle let the metal through. That made it necessary, in order to catch the steel, to bring the ladle close, till part of it was under the platform on which we worked. The heat and gas from the hot steel in the ladle had been warming the soles of our feet, and rising into our faces.
"Here's a funny thing," I said, looking down. One of the sparks which had struck my pants burned around, very neatly taking off the cuff and an inch or two of the pant-leg. The thing might have been done with a pair of shears.