The Iron Boys in the Steel Mills Part 24

Bowing their thanks the boys left the office, Brodsky having already sneaked out ahead of them. They espied him lurking around the turn in the hall, watching for their coming.

"Ignatz, you rascal!" called Bob. "I ought to give you a good thumping.

You don't deserve to be let off with a scolding. How would you like to have me tell your mother you have not been at work to-day?"

"She know when she git my wages."

"No she won't," interjected Steve, "for I am going to pay your wages for just this one day. You come with us. We are going on a picnic."

Three happy boys started off for a place they knew of up the river, where they were going to spend the afternoon. Steve bought some cakes and sandwiches at a baker shop, and a few bottles of mineral water, then off they went for their holiday.

CHAPTER XIV

BY THE ROARING FURNACES

In the daytime a row of tall black, cone-shaped chimneys might be seen across the river from the mills themselves. At night these chimneys were pyramids of yellow and red fire.

These were the blast furnaces. In them, the ore, as it came from the mines far away on the Minnesota iron ranges, was reduced to pig or pig iron, by smelting at a temperature of fifteen hundred degrees centigrade--about twenty-seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit. This great temperature boils the slag or impurities out of the metal, and after it has been drawn off into ladles it becomes "pig."

From the blast furnaces the pig, red-hot in its molds, is conveyed to the open-hearth furnaces, where it is subjected to a still further boiling process at the same temperature as before, and then it is steel.

Steel is pig-iron combined with carbon and with the impurities boiled out.

It was to the blast furnaces that the Iron Boys were a.s.signed, and they were to take the night trick. As they made their way that night through the yards of the mill, where engines were shrieking their warnings, cars were thundering here and there, long trains of red-hot metal rumbling over the hot metal bridge from the blast furnaces to the mills, while the flames were leaping skyward from the blast furnaces, Steve halted for a moment to gaze on the scene. Neither boy ever had been in the yards after dark, and the scene was one never to be forgotten.

"Which furnace do we work in?" wondered Bob.

"Number four, I believe."

"Then that must be the fourth one."

"Naturally it wouldn't be the fifth," answered Steve, with a laugh.

They hurried across the bridge, for it was already time they were reporting to the head melter at the furnace, and being late meant being docked, for there is no sentiment in the steel mills. Every man was expected to do his full duty and a little more. Most of them did the latter.

A scene of activity and apparent confusion met their gaze as they neared the towering blast furnaces with their heating stoves sixty feet high on either side of them.

Men with barrows were rus.h.i.+ng about, bells clanged as the charge was ready to hoist on the top of the furnace to be dumped into its never-satisfied mouth. The ore was carried up by another skip. Through the stoves roared a gas flame, leaping, licking, here and there reaching out a forked tongue as though in search of fresh prey. The odor of gas was well-nigh overpowering to the Iron Boys, for they were not used to it.

The head melter, standing close up against the furnace, clad in a rubber coat and wearing green goggles, was peering into the furnace through a peep hole, while a stream of water from a hose was constantly played over his body. His face seemed to rest almost against the plates, and the bosh on which he was standing was so hot that the steam rose in a cloud about him.

Two men were inserting the prodding rod against the dolmite that plugged the ore hole near the bottom of the furnace. The perspiration was running in rivers down their half-naked bodies.

"The drill! The drill!" shouted a choking voice.

A compressed air drill was brought, a dolly-rod inserted, and then the dolmite was drilled to a thin sh.e.l.l.

"Stand back!" warned the head melter in a hoa.r.s.e voice.

"I reckon something is going to happen," cried Jarvis in his companion's ear. The roar of the furnaces and the gas in the huge stoves made his voice sound weak and far away.

Steve moved back a little, pulling Jarvis after him. Flush with the edge of a raised platform of fire-brick and steel, over which extended little gutters packed with sand, stood a string of flat cars each holding an immense ladle. The gutters led directly into these ladles.

"That is where the iron goes, through those gutters and into the ladles," explained Rush. "It runs like water, though I have never seen them make a cast."

Just then a warning cry sounded as the dolly broke through the clay dam that holds the metal in the furnace.

Fire, scorching, burning fire leaped from the opening made with the dolly. The air was filled with brilliant, hissing stars as large as the palm of a man's hand. Some whirled like pin-wheels; others, holding their perfect shape, described graceful curves in the air, or exploded.

Men shaded their eyes, drew themselves together, and tried to shrink away from the terrific heat. But there was no avoiding it. The monkey-man who had broken through the clay dam staggered away from the opening thus made, shouting hoa.r.s.ely for water.

Following the explosive stars, a river, almost blood-red, burst from the furnace with a roar, quickly changing into a river of saffron. Hissing and snapping the molten metal burned its way along through the sand-packed gutters, and shot from the ends of the gutters and into the waiting ladles on the flat cars at the foot of the platform. Everywhere the air seemed filled with fiery shapes reaching for human prey. Under foot there was danger on every hand, for a single misstep would plunge one into this all-consuming flood. The slag, or as much of it as possible, ground its way much more slowly, along another channel, to be gathered up and used over for other purposes at some later day.

As one ladle was filled the waiting train would move up, bringing a new set of cars under the ends of the gutters, and when at last all the cars had been loaded the train moved off, the ladles glowing in the darkness of the night, until in the distance they became mere eyes of fire.

The Iron Boys drew a deep sigh as the operation was concluded. Four hours would elapse before another cast would be made from number four furnace, but here and there along the row of huge cones stars were bursting, streams of hot, yellow lava flowing and men shouting, snarling or begging for water.

"It is terrible, yet grand!" exclaimed Steve Rush, wiping the perspiration from his brow. Even where they stood, at one side of the furnace, the heat was well-nigh unbearable.

"It strikes me as being grandly hot," answered Jarvis. "Whew, a fellow doesn't need his winter underclothing on in this job, does he?"

"The furnace men don't seem to wear any at all," laughed Rush. "I should think they would burn their skin off. I don't know whether I can stand this game or not, but I'll try it. I wonder what we are going to do?"

"I will find out from the foreman."

The foreman was not on hand at the moment, but the head melter, known under the name of Pig-Iron Peel, had received orders regarding the Iron Boys.

He motioned them to approach, when a furnace hand told him who they were. He asked the name of each boy in a hoa.r.s.e, gruff voice.

"Who are you?" demanded Jarvis.

"I'm the Pig," answered the melter, his red face wrinkling into a grin, which was quickly smoothed out as if the effort hurt him.

"Pig-Iron Peel," he added.

"Ho, ho!" roared Bob immoderately.

Steve nudged him to be quiet.

"We are ready to work if you will tell us what to do," said Rush.

"You can pack the sand gutters after the charge is loaded into the ladles. Either of you ever worked on a furnace before?"

"No, sir," answered the boys.

"You, what's your name----?"