I coupled it up with some talks I had had with men on the open-hearth. America, steel-America, which was all they knew, was very largely a place of long hours, gas, heat, Sunday work, dirty homes, big pay. There was a connection in that, I thought, with the gigantic turnover figures of laborers in steel, the restless moving from job to job that had been growing in recent years so fast. Too many men were treating America as a good place for taking a fortune out of. The impulse toward learning English, building a home, and becoming American, certainly wasn't strong in steel-America. But I left these questions in the back of my head, and returned to the stove gang at Adolph's command. In a few days I was well in the midst of my gang-novitiate. We got formally introduced by name one day in front of No. 12 stove. The little Italian with the black moustache said: "What's your name?" "Charlie," I said, knowing that first names were the thing. "All right," he said, "that's Jimmy, Tony, Joe. Mike not here. You know Mike? Slavish. John, that's me. That's John too wid de bar.--Hey!" with an arresting yell, that made the others look up, "_Dis is Charlie!_" I became a part of an exclusive group of seven men, who had worked together for about two years. There is a cohesiveness and a structure of tradition about a semipermanent mill-group of this sort that marks it off from the casual-labor gang. The physical surroundings remain unaltered, and methods and ways of thought grow up upon them. I was struck by the amount of character a man laid bare in twelve hours of common labor. There are habits of temper, of cunning and strength, of generosity and comradeship, of indifference, that it is capable of throwing into relief beyond any a priori reasoning. It begins by being extensively intimate in personal and physical ways; you know every man's idiosyncrasies in handling a sledge or a bar or a shovel, and the expression of his face under all phases of a week's work; you know naturally the various garments he wears on all parts of his body. You proceed to acquaint yourself, as the work throws up opportunity, with the mannerisms and qualities of his spirit. It is astonishing, with the barrier of a different language, only partly broken down by a dialect-American, how little is ultimately concealed or kept out of the common understanding. I was impressed by the precise practices established in doing the work. Every motion and every interval of the job had been selected by long trial. If you didn't think the formula best, try it out. Many considerations went into its selection--to-day's fatigue, to-morrow's, and next month's. It had an eye for gas effect, for the boss's peculiar character, and for all material obstacles, many of which were far from obvious. When the flue dust had been removed from the blast-stoves, I found wheeling and dumping it an easy and congenial set of movements, and consequently took off my loads at a great speed. At once I became a target, "Tak' it eas'--What's the matter with you; tak' it eas'." John--Slovene, and Stoic--put in an explanation: "Me work on this job two year, me know; take it easy. You have plenty work to do." "Take it easy," I said, "and no get tired, eh? feel good every day?" "You no can feel good every day," he amended quickly. "Gas bad, make your stomach bad." So I slowed up on my wheelbarrow loads, sat on the handles, and spat and talked, till I found I was going too slow. There was a work-rhythm that was neither a dawdle nor a drive; if you expected any comfort in your gang life of twelve hours daily, you had best discover and obey its laws. It might be, from several points of view, an incorrect rhythm, but, at all events, it was a part of the gang _mores_. And some of its inward reasonableness often appeared before the day was out, or the month, or the year. Everybody wore good clothes to work, and changed in the shanty to their furnace outfit. I usually came in a brown suit, which had been out in the rain a good many times and was fairly shapeless. One day I entered the mill in a gray suit, which fitted and was moderately pressed. At the dinner-bucket hour in the shanty, I was asked by John the Italian: "How much you pay for suit, Charlie?" I was embarrassed, fearing vaguely explanations that might have to follow a declaration of price. I suddenly recalled the fact that the suit had been given me by my brother, so that I didn't know the price, and said so. "My brother give me suit, I don't know how much he pay," I said. That dumped me into another quandary. "What job your brother have?" I was immediately asked. I thought a moment and answered truthfully again. "My brother, priest," I said. That arrested immediate attention, and I was looked at with respect and curiosity. Tony finally said, "Why you no be priest, Charlie?" "Oh," I answered, laughing, "I run away; I like raise hell too much be priest." This was pretty accurate, too. "O Charlie!" they bellowed. After that, the gang were friends to the death. VII DUST, HEAT, AND COMRADESHIP One day I was promoted to stove-tender or hot-blast man on Number 6. The keeper of the furnace was a negro. When he was rebuilding the runways for the tapped metal, I noticed that his movements were sure and practised. He patted and shaped the mud-clay in the runway, like a potter moulding a vessel. When it was tap time, he bored the tap hole with the electric drill easily and neatly; when the metal flowed, he knew the exact moment to lift the gates for drawing away slag. I watched him to see how he managed the four white men that worked for him. They were Austrians, and I found they joked together and showed no resentment of status. Commands were given with a nod or gesture. With the Americans on the furnace, the relation was the traditional one. The negro was light and seemed too slightly built for the job, but he performed it very efficiently, and so did his gang. The blower was Old McLanahan, a man somewhere between thirty-five and sixty. A long, successful life of inebriety had given him a certain resignation to the ills of man, and enabled him to keep the heart of a viveur throughout his life. His skin appeared thrown like a bag over an assemblage of loosely fitted bones--the only considerable part of him being a paunch which coursed forward into a moderate point. He was rather proud of being a blower on furnace No. 6. After the slag had been sampled he said: "Where d'ye eat, boy?" "I eat at Mrs. Farrell's." "How much?" "Seven a week." "Too much. Pretty goddam good is it?" "Damn good food," I said. "Is Mrs. Farrell a widder woman?" "No," I said, "she's not." "Well," he said, "if you hear of a damn fine little widder woman, let me know will yer?" "Sure," I said. "I'm lookin' for a place ter board, and most of all I'm lookin' for a little widder woman ter honor wid holy matrimony." After tapping that morning at 8.00, McLanahan took a silver dollar out of his pocket. "If it comes heads," he said, "I'm goin' out to-night, see, I'm goin' out ter find a woman." He flipped the coin and it fell tails. "Don't count," said he, "two out of three." This flip fell heads. "Hah," he said, "if this comes heads, I'm goin' out to-night ter find a woman." It fell tails. "Hell!" he said, "Don't count, flipped it with the wrong hand." He kept this up all day. Finally at 5.30 the coin came heads. He picked the coin up and put it in his pocket. "Goin' out, to-night," he said. "Boss wants to keep Number 6 lookin' right. Go down below, and clean out all that flue dust." I shoveled between the stone arches of the furnace base, that curved overhead like the culverts of a bridge. Sometimes the flue dust was wet and clotted with mud, and came up in cakes on the shovel; sometimes it was light, and flew in your nose and eyes. I made a pile of it six feet high, and shaped it into a brick-red pyramid with my shovel. I washed the arches white with a hose. "Change 'em before we tap," McLanahan ordered, nodding at the stoves. I went among the rangy hundred-foot shafts with a certain sense of control over great forces. Every set differs in its special crankiness. Number 9's have stiff-working valves, but are powerful heaters; Number 8's are cool stoves, but their valves slide genially into place. I always a little dreaded "blowing her off." Resting my arms on the edge of the wheel, and grabbing the top with my hands, I wrenched it over to the left, and the blast began. The immense volumes of compressed air escaped with a gradually accelerated blare. I gritted my teeth a little, and my ears sang. Then came "putting on the gas." I climbed to a little platform near the combustion chamber, and with a hunk of iron scrap for hammer, knocked out some wedges that held tight a door. By now I knew just the pressure for making the iron slab creep on its rollers. I braced my feet and pulled with back and arms. Through the door, the combustion chamber glowed red. I went down the steps and slowly turned the gas-pipe crank, bringing an eight-inch pipe close to the red opening. I dodged the back flare as it ignited. When the "new" stove was on, and the "old" one lit for reheating, I went to the pyrometer shanty. In a little hut among the furnaces were tell-tale discs, that let you know if you were keeping your heat right. I found my heat curve was smooth with only a tiny hump.... Two Hunkies were inside the shanty. "Nine-thirty," said one. "How do you know?" I asked. He pointed to the end of the curve on the disc, that was opposite the 9.30 mark on the circumference. "Saves me a watch," he said, with a grin. After supper that evening, I mended a sleeve of my shirt that had been torn on a piece of cinder in the cast-house. Sounds of conversation were rising from the porch. I went out and found Mr. Farrell sitting in a rocker with one leg on the railing and his face screwed into an attitude of thinking. Mrs. Farrell, having done the dishes, had come out to knit, and a lanky visitor, who leaned uncomfortably against the railing, was doing the talking. The conversation was political. "Before I came to this town, nobody had the guts to vote Democratic," said the visitor. "I'm from Democratic parts," he went on, "and when I first come here I used to go round. 'Come, come,' I said, 'you fellers is Democrats, you know you is. Sign up.' 'We know it,' they'd say, 'but we can't afford ter, there's the wife and kids--we can't afford ter, we've got a job and we're goin' to keep it.' That's how bad it was." "You mean--" "I mean you voted with the Company or pretty quick you moved out of Bouton, for you hadn't any job to work at.... I used ter work at glass blowin', that's a real business--" "Mr. Herder is always telling us how much better the glass business is than the steel business," said Mrs. Farrell. "You'll have to get used to that." She gave everybody a smoothing-out smile. It was fun when you could pick up "dope" in the course of a morning's sweat. I learned one Sunday a few pointers about judging conditions through the peepholes. If there is a lot of movement, your furnace is O.K. If the cinder begins to settle into the tuyère, your furnace is cold. If she looks reddish, cold; blue, O.K. Don't be fooled by different colored glasses in the peepholes. One day we kept the stoves on "all heat" for the furnace was cold. "All you can give her, goddam it," McLanahan said, looking through the peepholes. McLanahan was always a little ridiculous. Anxiety made him hop about and waddle from peephole to peephole, like a hen looking for grain. I heaved on the hot-blast chain, and the indicator climbed. We had a pleasant, light brown chocolaty slag, that day, which meant good iron. When the metal runs out with large white speckles, she has too much sulphur; when she smokes, you'll get good iron. The other day they had too large a load of ore for the coke and stone in her. "Sledge!" yelled the keeper. A cinder-snapper brought up two, and held the bar while the keeper and first-helper sledged. They worked well, and I watched with fascination the hammer head whirl dizzily, and land true at the bar. At last the liquid slag broke through, jet-black as if it were molten coal, flowing thickly down the clay spout. The clay notch was hammered and eaten away, and had to be remade. I watched the stove-tender on Number 7 as he opened the cold-air valve. His motions were exactly calculated--the precise blow, to an ounce, to loosen that wedge. "How long have you been stove-tender?" I asked. "Ten years," he said. "Go down to the stockroom and tell the skip-man, one more coke," said McLanahan. I was glad to get a glimpse of that part of the blast-furnace operation. Gondola cars bring up ore and the other ingredients of blast-furnace digestion, and run over tracks with gaps between the sleepers. The cars, by means of their collapsible bottoms, drop the loads down through, and the material falls into an underground "stockroom." I entered it by climbing down two ladders, and found the skip-man at the base of one of the endless chains. The chamber had the appearance of a mine gallery de luxe. I looked at the tons of ore moving upward neatly, efficiently. What an incalculable saving of labor and time, this endless chain affair with its continually moving boxes, over the old manner of hoisting painfully, in few-pound lots, by hand! I gave McLanahan's order to the skip-man and went up the ladders. You've got to tap, "when the iron's right," and when a little later the keeper held the steam drill in front of the mud wall of the tap hole, the steam stayed at home. There was no time for a steam-fitter. Young Lonergan and I beat it for the electric drill. It was heavy enough to make us waddle as we carried it on the run. "That's bludy funny," said McLanahan. The electric drill wouldn't electrify. A hurry call followed for the electrician. He smiled benignly while twelve sweaty men looked on. And in thirty seconds he fixed the connection, and we tapped in time to save the iron. When the drill had almost bored through the hard mud in the tap hole, the keeper shoved in a crowbar, and a couple of helpers sledged rhythmically for one minute. Then the molten iron broke the mud into bits, and tumbled out. Little sheets of flame from the slag skated along the top of the red river. It rose in the runway with bubbles and smoke on top. The keeper