"All done? If the son of a ---- of a first-helper on the furnace had any brains ..." and so forth. "Now get through and clean out the goddam mess in front."
We went through, and Fritz used the pick against some very dusty cinder that was entirely cool, and was massed in great piles on the front side of the slag-hole.
I started for the wheelbarrow, just the ghost of a resentment rising at being "ordered about" by a "Wop" and then fading out into the difficulties I had in finding the wheelbarrow. Two or three things that day I had been sent for--things whose whereabouts were a closed book. "Where the devil," I muttered to myself, violently disturbed, "are wheelbarrows?" I found one, at last, near the masons under Number 4, and started off.
I found another, behind a box, near Number 8, and pushed it back over mud, slag, scrap, and pipes and things. I never knew before what a bother a wheelbarrow is on an open-hearth pit floor. Only four of us stayed for work under Number 7, a German laborer and I coöperating with shovel and wheelbarrow on the right-hand cinder pile.
We had been digging and hauling an hour, and it was necessary to reach underneath the slag-hole to get at what was left. I always glanced upward for sparks and slag when shoveling, and allowed only my right hand and shovel to pass under. Just as arm and shovel went in for a new lot Fritz yelled, "Watch out!" I pulled back with a frog's leap, and dodged a shaft of fat sparks, spattering on the pit floor. A second later, the sparks became a tiny stream, the size of a finger, and then a torrent of molten slag, the size of an arm. The stuff bounded and splashed vigorously when it struck the ground.
It didn't get us, and in a second we both laughed from a safe distance.
"Goddam slag come queek," said Fritz, grinning. "How you like job?" he added.
Before I had any chance to discuss the nuances of a clean-up's walk in life, Fritz was pointing out a new source of molten danger.
We were standing now in the main pit, beyond the overhanging edge of the furnace.
"Look out now, zee!" said Fritz, pointing upward. Almost over our head was Number 7's spout, and, dribbling off the end, another small rope of sparks.
We fell over each other to the pit's edge, stopping when we reached tracks. Looking back at once, we saw that the stream had thickened like the other in the slag-hole. But here it was molten steel, and with a long drop of thirty feet. The rebound of the thudding molten metal sent it off twenty-five or thirty feet in all directions. Three different groups of men were backing off toward the edge of the pit.