After supper, I wanted badly to take a look at furnace fires against a night sky, and stepped out alone to do it. Close to the railroad station I set foot on the hill, and climbed past a Greek hotel and staggering tenements to a ridge. From there I could look over multitudinous roofs to the flat spaces by the river, where the mills roared and shone.
I heard heavy things dropped here and there over acres of plate flooring; they melted into a roar. The even whirr of the power house increased it, and the shrieks of machinery gave it a streaky quality. There were staccato punctuations, of course, by the whistles, and when a distant "blaw" came to me, I thought how loudly it drove into the ears of the hot-blast man, turning his wheel by a stove. But it was mostly the summed-up roar that occupied your head--an insistent thing, that made you excited and weary at the same time. The mills had been running for ten years; they always had a night-shift in Bouton.
It is easy to get excited about a steel-mill sky at night. I like to look at them. There weren't many lights at the nail mill but just enough to show broken outlines of a sheet-iron village there. The rolling-mills gave some of the brightness of hot billets through the windows, and over the stacks of the open-hearth were sparks. By closing my eyes, I could see curdling flame in the belly of Number 7. The open-hearth fires showed themselves, a confused glow under a tin roof.
Some little light came on the mills out of the night itself, though thin clouds kept washing the face of the moon, and now and then a blast-furnace got into the moonlight and looked perfectly confused with its pipe labyrinth and its stoves.
From where I stood, I could see the Bessemer converter pouring a fluid rope of white light; I knew it for a stream the thickness of a hydrant. A rusty, glowing cloud rose over the converter, changing always, and turning that patch of sky into gold. The pattern of smoke the blower knows like a textbook, and follows the progress of his steel by the color of the cloud.
My mind swept over many memories as I looked at the yellow fire of the Bessemers. There was no order or arrangement in them. They were a stream, thick in some passages, shallow in others, with scraps of all sorts riding over the top. One scrap was the price the Wop cobbler charged for soling, and another, Dick's words when he damned me for forgetting a bag of coal. Then there were things that wrung me and made the palms of my hands wet, as if thoughts went over nerves and not brain.