Adolph came in from behind one of the stoves as I was concluding a "long point."
"Come on," he said, looking at me with a grin; and when I had followed him, "I show you furnace, li'l bit."
He took me to a stair-ladder near the skip that ascended to the top of Number 5. For every furnace, a skip carries up the ore and other ingredients for melting inside. It is a funicular-like thing, a continuous belt, with boxes attached, running from the "hopper" at the top of the furnace to the "stockroom" underground.
We started to climb the steps at the left of the belt. There was a little rail between us and the moving boxes of ore.
"See dat," said Adolph, pointing through at the boxes. "Keep head inside," he said, "keep hand inside, cut 'em off quick." He illustrated the amputation, with great vivacity, on his throat and wrists.
It was a climb of five minutes to the furnace-top. We paused to look at the mounting boxes.
Pretty soon the iron ceased coming, and a white stone took its place in the boxes.
"Limestone," he said. "Next come coke. Look."
We were near enough to the top to see the boxes tilt, and the hopper open and swallow the dumping of stone. In a minute or two, we stepped out on the platform on top of the furnace.
Adolph looked at me and grinned. "You smell dat gas?" he asked.
I nodded. He referred to the carbon monoxide that I knew issued from the top of all blast-furnaces.
"You stay li'l bit, pretty soon you drunk," he said.
"You stay li'l bit more," he continued, his grin broadening, "pretty soon you dead."
I learned in later days that this was perfectly accurate.
We stood on a little round platform fifteen or twenty feet across, with the hopper in the centre gobbling iron ore and limestone. A layer of ore dust, an inch thick, covered the flooring, and a faint odor of gas was in the air. Each of the other five furnaces had a similar lookout, and a narrow passageway connected them with the tops of the stoves. The top of these gigantic shafts likewise had a diameter of some fifteen feet; there were little railings about them, and in the centre a trapdoor.
"Go inside to clean 'em out," he returned.
I wondered, with a few flights of imagination, what that job would be like, and remembered that the Italian with the blond moustache had spoken of the duty in uncomplimentary terms.