THE TORRENTS OF SPRING 29
"Your foreman's the first Australian I've ever met," Scripps said.
"Oh, he's not an Australian," Yogi said. "He was just with the Australians once during the war, and it made a big impression on him."
"Were you in the war?" Scripps asked.
"Yes," Yogi Johnson said. "I was the first man to go from Cadillac."
"It must have been quite an experience."
"It's meant a lot to me," Yogi answered. "Come on and I'll show you around the works."
Scripps followed this man, who showed him through the pump-factory. It was dark but warm inside the pump-factory. Men naked to the waist took the pumps in huge tongs as they came trundling by on an endless chain, culling out the misfits and placing the perfect pumps on another endless chain that carried them up into the cooling room. Other men, Indians for the most part, wearing only breech-clouts, broke up the misfit pumps with huge hammers and adzes and rapidly recast them into axe heads, wagon springs, trombone slides, bullet moulds, all the by-products of a big pump-factory. There was nothing wasted, Yogi pointed out. A group of Indian boys, humming to themselves one of the old tribal chanties, squatted in a corner of the big forging room shaping the little fragments that were chipped from the pumps in casting, into safety razor blades.
"They work naked," Yogi said. "They're searched as they go out. Sometimes they try and conceal the razor blades and take them out with them to bootleg."
"There must be quite a loss that way," Scripps said.
