Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/293

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"How long has this been drawn off?" he demanded.

"About twenty minutes," growled the "cinder-snapper."

Ottenhausen gave the man a quick glance, and looked again at the cinder. "You're lying," he said.

He seized the whistle-rope, and there followed three sharp blasts, the signal for casting. From the cast-house and the filling-floor thirty men shambled towards the hearth of the furnace. There was a look of evil in their eyes. Some of them held their hands behind their backs.

Ottenhausen went nearer the furnace, and made a quick examination. A thin cloud of steam was rising. It came from behind an iron jacket, seeping through a joint. The water pipes of one of the tuyeres had been cut. To Ottenhausen that meant that the water which cooled the nozzle of the tuyere through which the hot air of the blast was forced, was escaping into the furnace. Ottenhausen knew a furnace as a child knows its alphabet. He saw that the end of the tuyere was being clogged with metal, and that it would only be a question of half an hour before the hearth would be filled with a solid mass of chilled iron, unless the contents of the great crucible were run out and the leaking of the water was stopped.

Ottenhausen saw the men move closer together. He stood there in scorching heat. His brain was in a whirl. He felt the thumping of his heart. His thumbs were in the armholes of his waistcoat. His face gave no sign of the riot of thoughts in his brain. He backed against a pile of iron, and with a quick movement drew the revolvers from his coat pockets and leveled them at the group of men. Then he said, and his words were quick and sharp as the blows of a trip-hammer: "I'll kill the first man who disobeys orders. Drop those clubs and that iron ore."

The men looked along the shining barrels of two revolvers held with steady hands. Some of them started to take a step forward. Jim Johnson made a movement with his arm. Ottenhausen glanced along the sight of one of the revolvers, and clutched the hard rubber handle with a firmer grasp. Johnson's eye met the look of a man who was only biding his time that he might press a trigger. He of the Red-Ox group let the club fall from his nerveless grasp. Sticks, pieces of iron ore, and a revolver or two fell in the sand. The men of Laird's Furnace had met their match. They held up their hands in mute acknowledgment of the fact.

"Cut off the water from that No. 3 tuyere," commanded Ottenhausen.

The "cinder-snapper" sullenly obeyed.

"Open the cinder notch, and be quick about it," was the next order.

The keeper stood stock still. "Cowards," he muttered, "it's only a bluff; he wouldn't shoot."