Page:Stanwood Pier--The ancient grudge.djvu/64

Rh had charge of six furnaces. Under him at each furnace were three helpers, who fired and fed and stirred and tapped the "heats." One of them, having closed the iron door after the last scoop of steel had been emptied, seated himself on a bench near where Floyd was standing and lighted a pipe. He looked like a communicative soul,—the first of the workmen who had seemed to have that character,—and after two or three puffs on his pipe, he said to Floyd,—

"The fire in that furnace ain't been out in fourteen months."

"Pretty steady going," Floyd said. "I suppose it's better, though, for the furnaces to be kept burning than to lie idle."

"Better for the furnaces, better for the men." He seemed a sententious as well as cheerful person; there was a good-humored twinkle in his eyes that Floyd liked. He wore a blue cloth cap; he was a man of thirty-five, perhaps, short, thick-set, with a flat nose and a square, clean-shaven jaw; his undershirt, thrown open at the breast, showed a skin whiter than that of most of the other men.

"We use natural gas in the furnaces," he said to Floyd. "No coal, no coke—except over at the blast furnace."

Floyd caught the man winking to another, who drew near, and he suspected that this urbane volunteering of information was prompted by a desire to have amusement with an uneducated visitor. He was not unwilling to furnish this, and he displayed interest at the idea of natural gas.

"I suppose you have frightful explosions sometimes," he said.

"Yes; fierce. You see them masons down there—working on that eighth furnace? Well, that was because the gas got turned on when nobody was looking, blowed the front of the furnace, and took off a Dago's head. But worse than the explosions is the fumes."