For several days it was impossible to break into Adam's circle of friends; he would talk and work only with veteran clean-ups, and showed immense pomposity in a knowing way of hooking up slag and scrap to the crane. One day, however, I found him working alone with a wheelbarrow, cleaning cinder from around a buggy car under furnace No. 8. He looked over at me as I passed, and yelled: "Hey, you!"
He wanted my assistance on the wheelbarrow. We worked together for an hour or so, and I felt that perhaps the ice was broken.
"Did you ever work on the floor?" I asked.
A little later I talked to Marco about him.
"Hell," he said, "he got fired from furnace, for too goddam lazy." I felt less hurt at his snobbishness after that.
Marco and I became good chums. We sat on a wheelbarrow one day, after finishing a job on the track under Six.
"You teach me American," he said; "I teach you Croatian."
"Damn right," I said; and we began on the parts of our body, and the clothing we wore, drawing out some of the words in the dirt with a stick, or marking them with charcoal on a board.
"Did you ever go to school in America?" I asked.
"Three month, night school, Pittsburgh. Too much, work all day, twelve hour, go to school night," he said.
"Do you save any money? Got any in the bank?" I asked, feeling a little fatherly, and wondering on the state of his economic virtues.
"Hell, no," he said; "I don' want money in bank, jes nuff get along on."
I talked to a good many on the savings question, and found the young men very often didn't save, but "bummed round," while practically all the "Hunkies" of twenty-eight or thirty and over saved very successfully. A German who put scrap in the charge-boxes, after the magnet had dropped it, had saved $4000 and invested it. One man said to me: "A good job, save money, work all time, go home, sleep, no spend." Speaking of the German, "He no drink, no spend." The savers, I think, are apt to be the single men who return to their own country in ten or fifteen years.
I came out of the mill one morning after a night-shift, with an appetite that made me run from the railroad bridge to Main Street. I went to the Hotel Bouton, where the second-helper on Eight usually eats, and started at the beginning, with pears. I ate the cereal, eggs, potatoes, toast, coffee, and griddle-cakes, taking seconds and thirds when I could negotiate them--the Bouton is stingy under a new management, probably finding that steel-workers eat up the profit. I got up from the table feeling as hungry as when I sat down, and went to the restaurant just two doors below--unpalatable, but serving fairly large portions. There I had another breakfast: coffee, oatmeal, eggs. I felt decidedly better after that, and started home in good humor. But by the time I reached the window of Tom, the Wiener man, I felt that there was room for improvement, and looked in my pocketbook to see if I had any breakfast money left. I hadn't a cent, but there were quantities of two-cent stamps. I went in and sat down at Tom's counter, where I ate a bowl of cereal and a glass of milk. Then I opened my purse. In a moment or two I convinced Tom that two-cent stamps were good legal tender, and went home.