The stream swelled steadily till it reached the circumference of a man's body, and fell in a thudding shaft of metallic flame to the pit's floor. Spatterings went out in a moderately symmetrical circle forty feet across. The smaller gobs of molten stuff made minor centres of spatter of their own. It was a spectacle that burned easily into memory. The gang of men at the edge of the pit watched the thing with apparent enjoyment. I wondered slowly two things: one, whether anyone ever got caught under such a molten Niagara, and two, whether the pit was going to have a steel floor before it could be stopped. How could it be stopped, anyway? The craneman had been busy for some minutes picking up a ladle from Number 4, and at that instant he swung it under, and the process of steel-flooring ceased.[2] What the devil had happened? I talked with everybody I could as they broke up at the pit's edge. It was a rare thing I learned: the mud and dolomite (a limestone substance) in the tap-hole had not been properly packed, and broke through. My companions told me about another occasion, some years before, when molten steel got loose. It happened on the Bessemer furnaces, and the workers hadn't either the luck or agility of ourselves. It caught twenty-four men in the flow--killed and buried them. The company, with a sense of the proprieties, waited until the families of the men moved before putting the scrap, which contained them, back into the furnace for remelting. As I ate three bowls of oatmeal at the Greek's, at 7.15, I thought, "Those fellows do these shifts, year after year. What does the heat, and the danger, and the work do to them? Maybe they 'get used to' the whole business. Will I?" I went to bed at 8.05, and all impressions faded from consciousness, except weariness, and lame arms, and a burn on each ankle. After two or three days in the pit, I began to know the gang a little by name and character. There was Marco, a young Croat of twenty-four, who had started to teach me Croatian in return for some necessary American; Fritz, a German with the Wanderlust; Adam, an aristocratic person, very mature, and with branching moustachios; Peter, a Russian of infinite good-nature; and a quiet-eyed Pole, who was saving up two hundred dollars to go to the old country. For several days it was impossible to break into Adam's circle of friends; he would talk and work only with veteran clean-ups, and showed immense pomposity in a knowing way of hooking up slag and scrap to the crane. One day, however, I found him working alone with a wheelbarrow, cleaning cinder from around a buggy car under furnace No. 8. He looked over at me as I passed, and yelled: "Hey, you!" He wanted my assistance on the wheelbarrow. We worked together for an hour or so, and I felt that perhaps the ice was broken. "Did you ever work on the floor?" I asked. "Two years," he said; "no good." A little later I talked to Marco about him.