"Well, if he was overcome by the fumes, as we all thought, he probably did n't suffer none. Of course, we never strained out so much as a toe-nail. And there was a funny thing about that heat,—it qualified as first-class steel. Likely he's now helping to hold up some skyscraper in New York."
Floyd expressed his horror and his hope that the men were generally more cautious.
"Oh, we take care. But the fumes is something you can't exactly guard against." He was evidently on the verge of another story, when the melter spied round the corner of the furnace and summoned him.
Floyd strolled the length of the mill and passed out at the farther end. The afternoon was waning; the sun stood above the hill across the river, red through the smoke; except for a few open patches here and there, the mill-yards were in shadow. But within the works there was no slackening of energy, and for the first time it struck Floyd with a sense of awfulness that night might fall and that still the hammers would ring and the forges glow and the blast shriek—that here was a town which might never be all at rest.
Through an opening in one of the buildings he noticed a red, weaving thread; he entered and found himself in the rod-mill. Here, instead of the ingots, billets of steel, a little larger than an ordinary brick, were rolled. A man took the white-hot billet out of the furnace in tongs hung by a chain, and pushed it, suspended in the air, to the first roller. He in turn received it in his tongs, thrust it through the rolls to his partner, who caught it and returned it; back and forth they passed it, drawing it out each time; then it was put through a second set of rolls, and then through a third, each time a different pair of men handling it with tongs in the manner required by its constantly increasing length. At last the little white-hot block came out a squirming red serpent twenty feet long, and lay curved and still.
