I understood Pete's gentle hint, and I took care of his clerical work, writing what few letters he had to send out, making up his statements, doing his calculating, and so forth. Six months passed. Pete had "made good." The manage5 ment was highly pleased with him as a melter. Success had come to me, too, in a modest way-I had been given a furnace-I was now a "first helper." It was about the time I took the furnace that I began to notice a falling off in the number of requests from Pete for assistance. I thought little of it, supposing that he 10 was getting his work done by one of the weighers. But one night when there was a lull in operations and I went down to his office to have a chat with him, I found him seated at his little desk poring over an arithmetic. Scattered about in front of him were a number of sheets of paper covered with figures. He looked 15 up at me and grinned in a rather shamefaced manner. 20 "Oh, that's it, is it?" I said. "Now I understand why I am no longer of any use to the boss!" "Well, I just had to do somethin'," he laughed. "Couldn't afford to go right on bein' an ignoramus all the time." "Are you studying it out alone?" "You bet I ain't! I'd never get there if I was! I've got a teacher, a private teacher. Swell, eh? He comes every other night, when I'm workin' days, and every other afternoon, when I'm workin' nights. Gee, but I'm a bonehead! He's told me 25 so a dozen times, but the other day he said he thought I was softenin' up a bit." Good old Pete! I left him that night with my admiration for the man increased a hundred times. Another six months passed, six months of hard, grinding, 30 wearing toil, and yet a six months I look back upon with genuine pleasure. I now had the swing of the work and it came easy; conditions about the plant under Pete's supervision were ideal; I was making progress in the work I had adopted; we were making good money. Then came the black day. 35 How quickly it happened! I had tapped my furnace, and the last of the heat had run into the ladle. "Hoist away!" I heard Pete shout to the crane-man. The humming sound of the crane motors getting into action came to my ears. I took a look at my roof, threw in a shovelful of spar, turned on the gas, and walked toward the rear of the furnace. The giant crane was groaning and whining as it slowly lifted its eighty-ton burden from the pit where the ladle stood. It was then five or six feet above the pit's bottom. Pete was leaning over the railing of the platform directly in front of the rising ladle. Suddenly something snapped up there among the shafts and cables. I saw two men in the crane cab go swarming up the 10 escape-ladder. I saw the ladle drop as a broken cable went flying out of a sheave. A great white wave of steel washed over the ladle's rim, and another, and another. Down upon a shallow pool of water that a leaking hose had formed, the steel was splashed, and as it struck, the explosion came. 15 I was blown from my feet and rolled along the floor. The air was filled with bits of fiery steel, slag, brick, and débris of all kinds. I crawled to shelter behind a column and there beat out the flames that were burning my clothing in a half-dozen places. Then, groping through the pall of dust and smoke that choked the 20 building, I went to look for Pete. Near the place where I had seen him standing when the ladle fell I found him. Two workmen who had been crouching behind a wall when the explosion came, and were unhurt, were tearing his burning clothes from his seared and blackened body. Some25 body brought a blanket, and we wrapped it about him. We doubted if he lived, but as we carried him back I noted he was trying to speak, and, stooping, I caught the words: "Ought never to have left the farm, ought we? Hey, buddy?" That was the last time I ever heard Pete speak. That was 30 the last time I ever saw him alive. Two o'clock in the morning. Sitting at the little desk where I found Pete that night poring over his arithmetic, I have been writing down my early experiences in the open hearth. Here comes Yakabowski with a test. I know exactly what he will 35 say: "Had I better give her a dose of ore?" Two o'clock in the morning! The small man at the gate was right: Night-work is no good! I was mistaken; Yakabowski doesn't ask his customary question. He looks at me curiously. "You don't look good, boss," he says. "You sick, maybe?" Yes, I'm sick-I always am at two o'clock in the morning, when I'm on the night shift. I stretch, I yawn, I shudder. "Ought never to have left the farm, ought we? Hey, Yakabowski?" I say to the big Pole. NOTES AND QUESTIONS Biography. Herschel S. Hall (1874-1921) was a modern writer whose home was in Ashland, Ohio. His keen imagination and his first-hand knowledge of the condition of workers in the steel mills make his descriptions not only true to fact but vivid with imagery. Mr. Hall is the author of Steel Preferred, and was a frequent contributor to The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines. This story appeared in Scribner's, April, 1919. Discussion. 1. Read the story silently and test your reading ability by the use of the following outline: (a) outside the steel-mills; (b) the open hearth with its long line of furnaces; (c) the "small man"; Pete; Mike, his advice; (d) at work, the second morning, night-work; (e) Pete and the boss; (f) Pete as foreman; (g) Pete's education; (h) the accident; (i) Pete's favorite jest. 2. Notice how the author makes the story seem real by vivid pictures; by the conversation of the men; by expressive words; by giving an idea of the difficulty of the work, of the heat and the noise, through describing the effect they produce; find examples of these devices. 3. Tell the substance of the story, first making an outline. (See the outline plan for testing silent reading, p. 35.) 4. Library reading: Steel Preferred, Hall. 5. Find in the Glossary the meaning of: open-hearth; manganese; alloys; refractories; ductility; malleability; elucidation; magnesite; dolomite; fused; bonus. 6. Pronounce: orthographic; laboratory; harass; admirable; ignoramus; genuine; débris; column. J.H.L. 2-20 10 CALIBAN IN THE COAL MINES LOUIS UNTERMEYER God, we don't like to complain- God, You don't know what it is You, in Your well-lighted sky, Warm, with the sun always by. God, if You had but the moon Down in the dark and the damp. Nothing but blackness above, And nothing that moves but the cars 15 God, if You wish for our love, Fling us a handful of stars! NOTES AND QUESTIONS Biographical and Historical Note. Louis Untermeyer (1885-), a native of New York, is a student of social conditions, and one of America's younger poets. He has come to believe that "poetry has returned to democracy-democracy of spirit and democracy of speech." This belief he expresses in his book, The New Era in American Poetry. You will find Mr. Untermeyer's portrait in The Mentor, April 1, 1919. Caliban is the name of the savage, deformed slave of Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest. He was more monster than man when Prospero found him and taught him to speak. It was his duty to bring in the wood for Prospero's fires—a task which he disliked very much. Discussion. 1. Of what hardships does the Caliban of the poem complain? 2. Are these things of which he speaks a necessary accompaniment of coal mining? 3. How have the hardships of the miner's life been lessened in recent years? 4. What more do you think can be done to help them? 5. What purpose do you think the author had in writing this poem? Library reading: A Year in a Coal-Mine, Husband. THE RIVERMAN STEWART EDWARD WHITE I first met him one Fourth of July afternoon in the middle eighties. The sawdust streets and high board sidewalks of the lumber town were filled to the brim with people. The permanent population, dressed in the stiffness of its Sunday best, escorted 5 gingham wives or sweethearts; a dozen outsiders like myself tried not to be too conspicuous in a city smartness; but the great multitude was composed of the men of the woods. I sat, chair-tilted by the hotel, watching them pass. Their heavy woolen shirts crossed by the broad suspenders, the red of their sashes or leather 10 shine of their belts, their short kersey trousers "stagged" off to leave a gap between the knee and the heavily spiked "cork boots" -all these were distinctive enough of their class, but most interesting to me were the eyes that peered from beneath their little round hats tilted rakishly askew. They were all subtly 15 alike, those eyes. Some were black, some were brown, or gray, or blue, but all were steady and unabashed, all looked straight at you with a strange humorous blending of aggression and respect for your own business, and all without exception wrinkled at the corners with a suggestion of dry humor. In my half-con20 scious scrutiny I probably stared harder than I knew, for all at once a laughing pair of the blue eyes suddenly met mine full, and an ironical voice drawled, 25 "Say, bub, you look as interested as a man killing snakes. Am I your long lost friend?" The tone of the voice matched accurately the attitude of the man, and that was quite non-committal. He stood cheerfully ready to meet the emergency. If I sought trouble, it was here to my hand; or if I needed help, he was willing to offer it. "I guess you are," I replied, "if you can tell me what all this 30 outfit's headed for." He thrust back his hat and ran his hand through a mop of closely cropped light curis. |