ahead for the afternoon, and corralled the only one properly balanced, when I started work at 1.00 P.M., keeping it near me during a scrap-picking hour, until the job should break. At 2.15, it did. Al said: "Get over and clean out under Seven. If we can ever get this goddam stuff cleaned out--" That was an optimism of Al's. One of the new men and I worked together all afternoon: pick at the slag, shovel, wheelbarrow, dump in the box, hook up to crane. Start over. There was a lot of dolomite and old fine cinder, very dusty, but not hot. This change in discomfort furnished a sensation almost pleasurable. I found out that everyone hid his shovel at the end of the shift, beside piles of brick in the cellar of the mill, under dark stairways, and so forth. I hadn't yet acquired one, but used mostly a fork, which isn't so personal an instrument, and of which there seemed to be a common supply. I felt keen to "acquire" though. 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." "Sure," I said. 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. "Beat it," yelled the melter. 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. "Heow, crane!" 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. "Heow!" yelled the melter. 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. I came out of the mill whistling and feeling pretty much "on the crest." I'd worked their damn "long turn," and stood it. It wasn't so bad, all except that ladle that got under the manganese. I ate a huge breakfast, with a calm sense of virtue rewarded, and climbed into bed with a smile on my lips. The alarm clock had been ringing several minutes before I realized what it was up to. I turned over to shut it off, and found needles running into all the muscles of my back. I struggled up on an elbow. I had a "hell of a head." The alarm was still going. I fought myself out of bed and shut it off; stood up and tried to think. Pretty soon a thought came over me like an ache: it was "Fourteen hours!" That was beginning in fifty-five minutes--fourteen hours of back-walls, and hot ladles, and--Oh, hell!--I sat down again on the bed, and prepared to lift my feet back in. Then I got up, and washed fiercely, threw on my clothes, and went downstairs, and out into the afternoon sun. Down by the restaurant, I met the third-helper on Eight. "Long turn wouldn't be so bad, if there weren't no next day," he said, with a sort of smile. In the mill was a gang of malignant men; things all went wrong; everybody was angry and tired; their nerves made mistakes for them. "I only wish it were next Sunday!" I said to someone. "There aren't any goddam Sundays in this place," he returned. "Twenty-four hours off between two working days ain't Sunday." I thought that over. The company says they give you one day off every two weeks. But it's not like a day off anywhere else. It's twenty-four hours sandwiched between two work-days. You finish your night-week at 7.00 Sunday morning, having just done a week of one twenty-four hour shift, and six fourteens. You've got all the time from then till the next morning! Hurrah! How will you use it? If you do the normal thing,--eat breakfast, and go to bed for eight hours,--that brings you to 5.00 o'clock. Will you stay up all night? you've had your sleep. Yes, but there's a ten-hour turn coming at 7.00. You go to bed at 11.00, to sleep up for your turn. There's an evening-out of it! Hurrah again! But who in hell does the normal thing? Either you go on a tear for twenty-four hours,--you only have it twice a month,--or you sleep the twenty-four, if the week's been a bad one. Or--and this is common in Bouton--you get sore at the system and stay away a week--if you can afford it. "Hey, you, get me a jigger, quick. Ten thou'." "All right," I said, and shut off my mind for the day. I usually had bad words and bad looks from "Shorty." Jack calls him "that dirty Wop." Late one afternoon he produced a knife and fingered it suggestively while he talked. So I always watched him with all the eyes I had. One day we had shoveled in manganese together over a hot ladle, and I noticed that he was in a bad mood. We finished and leaned against the rail. "Six days more," he said very quietly. I looked up, surprised at his voice. "What do you mean?" "Six days more, this week, me quit this goddam job." "What's the matter?" "Oh, ---- me lose thirteen pound this job, what the hell!" "What job will you get now?" "I don't know, I don't know; any damn job better than this," he said very bitterly. Having adopted the quitting idea, these six days were too much to endure. A little later, Jock was ready to make front-wall. He saw Shorty and said, "Get me that hook and spoon." Shorty stood and looked at Jock, with the utmost malignity in his face, and said finally, "Get your goddam hook and spoon yourself." Jock was greatly surprised, and returned, "Who the hell are you?" Shorty snapped instantly, "Who the hell are you?" And then he was fired. This is the second "quitting mad" I've seen. The feeling seems to be something like the irrepressible desire that gets piled up sometimes in the ranks of the army to "tell 'em to go to hell" and take the consequences. It's the result of accumulated poisons of overfatigue, long hours, overwrought nerves, "the military discipline of the mills." The practical advantage of being "given the hook" is that you can draw your pay immediately; whereas, if you simply leave, you have to wait for the end of the two weeks' period. I ate my dinner at the Greek's. "Make me some tea that's hot, George. This wasn't. Oh, and a double bowl of shredded; I've got a hole to fill up." George kept the best of the four Greek restaurants. It had a certain variety. It splurged into potato salad, and a few other kinds, and went into omelets that were very acceptable. The others confined themselves to fried things, with a few cereals and skimmed milk. I looked up from my shredded wheat. George was wiping up a rill of gravy and milk from the porcelain table, and a man was getting ready to sit down opposite. It was Herb, the pit craneman. "Always feed here?" he asked. "Yes," I said, "best place in town, isn't it?" He nodded. "How big is Bouton? how many people has it?" I asked. He grinned slowly, and put his elbows on the table. He was a Pennsylvania Dutchman, with worry settling over good nature in a square face. "Twenty thousand," he said. "It seems small for twenty thousand," I returned; "like a little village. There's really only one store, isn't there,--the company store,--where they keep anything? Only one empty newspaper, no theatre, unless you count that one-story movie place, no enterprise--" "A one-man town," he said, quickly. "Nearly every house in town is owned by Mr. Burnham. Now look here, suppose a man works like hell to fix things up, to work around and get a pretty damn good garden, puts a lot of money into making his house right. Suppose he does, and then gets into a scrap with his boss. What can he do? The company owns his house, the company owns every other damn thing in town. He's got to beat it--all his work shot to hell. That's why nobody does anything.--Hey, ham and--Where you workin' now? Ain't seen yer in the pit." "I'm on the floor, helpin' on Number 7." "Att-a-boy!" At last, Saturday night. Everyone felt Sunday coming, with twenty-four hours of drunkenness or sleep alluringly ahead. The other shift had tapped the furnace at three o'clock. We might not tap again, and that was nice to think about. A front-wall and a hot back-wall we went through as if it were better fun than billiards. "Look out for me, I've got the de'il in me," from Jock, Scotch First on Number 8. I looked up, and the crazy fool had a spoon--they weigh over a hundred--between his legs, dragging it like a kid with a broomstick. As it bounced on the broken brick floor, he yelled like a man after a Hun. "Who's the maun amang ye, can lick a Scotchman?" he cried, dropping the spoon to the floor. "Is this the best stuff you can show on Number 8?" said Fred slowly. He dived for Jock's waist, and drew it to him, though the Scotchman tried to break his grip with one of his hands and with the other thrust off his opponent's face. When Fred had him tight, he caught one of Jock's straying arms, bent it slowly behind his back, and contrived a hammerlock. "You're no gentlemen,"--in pain; "you're interruptin' my work." Fred relaxed, and Jock jumped away. "Come over to a good furnace, goddam it, and fight it out!" he yelled, from a distance that protected his words. The charging-machine, in its perpetual machine-tremolo, shook past and stopped. George slid down from his seat, and came over to Number 8's gang. "Well, Fred, how in hell's the world usin' yer?" "Ask me that to-morrow." "Well, guys, good night; I'm dead for forty minutes." He picked up a board some six feet long and about six inches in width. He laid himself carefully on it, and was sleeping inside of a minute. I looked at him enviously for a few minutes. Suddenly it occurred to me that the board lay over a slit in the floor. It was the opening through which the pipes that attach to the gas-valve rise and fall. When gas is shifted from one end of the furnace to the other, the pipes emerge through the slit to a height several feet from the floor. Finally Fred made the same discovery, and a broad smile spread over his face. He continued to watch George, his grin deepening. At last he turned to the second-helper. "Throw her over," he said. Nick threw the switch. Slowly and easily the valve-pipes rose, lifting George and the head of his bed into the air, perilously. An immense and ill-controlled shout swelled up and got ready to burst inside the witnesses. George slept on, and the bed passed forty-five degrees. In another second it rolled off the side of the pipes, and George, scared, half-asleep, and much crumpled, rolled over on the furnace floor. It was several seconds before he recovered profanity. The pure joy of that event spread itself over the entire shift. When the light from the melting scrap-iron inside