After supper, I wrote in my diary and thought a bit before going to bed. There's a genuine technique of the shovel, the pick, and especially of the wheelbarrow, I thought. That damn plank from the ground to the cinder-box! It takes all I can muster to teeter the wheelbarrow up, dump without losing the thing quite, and bring it down backward without barking my shins. There's a bit of technique, too, in pairing off properly for a job, selecting your lick of work promptly and not getting left jobless to the eyes of the boss, capturing your shovel and hiding it at the end of the turn, keeping the good will of the men you're with on team-work, distinguishing scrap from cinder and putting them into the proper boxes, not digging for slag too deeply in the pit floor, and so forth and so on.
I wonder if I shall learn Serbian, or Russian, or Hungarian? There seems to be a Slavic polyglot that any one of a half-dozen nationalities understands. That word, "Tchekai!--Watch out!"--even the Americans use it. It's a word that is crying in your ears all night. Watch out for the crane that is taking a ladle of hot metal over your head, or a load of scrap, or a bundle of pipes; watch out for the hot cinder coming down the hole from the furnace-doors; watch out for "me" while I get this wheelbarrow by; and "Heow! Tchekai!" for the trainload of hot ingots that passes your shoulder.
I set my alarm for five o'clock, and got into bed with the good-night thought of "The devil with Pete Grayson! I'll get on that furnace!"
Another day went by, hewing cinders in the pit. I tried to figure to myself persuasive or threatening things I could say to the melters, to let me work on the floor. A shrewd-looking little man with moustachios worked near me.
"Did you ever work on the floor?" I asked.
"Oh, yes," he said: "too much hot; to hell with the money!"
They pay you two cents more an hour on the floor. At twenty minutes to five I went upstairs to my locker. Dick Reber, senior melter, stopped me.
"Need a man to-night; want to work?" he said; "always short, you know, on this ---- long turn."
That was one way to get promoted, I thought, and wondered how I'd stand fourteen more hours on top of the ten I had had.