A little later, we did a three-hour job on those dregs. We loosened the slag with picks first, and then lifted forkfuls and shovelfuls into the crane-carried boxes. A good deal of scrap was in the lot, probably the makings of half a ton of steel. This, of course, went into a separate box. I hooked up a couple of big scrap-hunks, weighing perhaps 500 pounds each, and took some sport out of it. That is one small matter, at least, where a grain of judgment and ingenuity has place. A badly hooked scrap-hunk may fall and break a neck, or simply tumble and waste everybody's time. Loosening up with the pick, too, demands a slight knack and smacks faintly of the miner's skill. We had to go down into a pit, where there was heated slag on all sides, using boards to save scorching our shoe leather. In turning up fractures eight or ten inches thick, there would be an inner four inches still red-hot. At eleven o'clock, I was working at a fair pace, flinging moderately husky forkfuls over a ten-foot space into the box, when Marco looked up. "Hey," he called. I glanced at him for a moment. He was smiling. "Rest yourself," he said; "we work hard when de big bosses come." During the next fifty shovelfuls, the remark went the rounds of my head, trying to get condemned. My memory threw up articles in the "Quarterly Journal of Economics," with "inefficiency and the labor-slackers," and "moral irresponsibility of the worker on the job," and so forth, in them. A couple of sermons and a vista of editorial denunciations of the laboring man who is no longer willing to do "an honest day's work for an honest day's pay," seemed to bring additional pressure for righteous indignation. I asked the following questions of myself, one for every two forkfuls:-- "Isn't it morally a bad thing to soldier, anyway? "Is Marco a moral enormity? "Do business men soldier? "Isn't 'Get to hell out of here if you don't want to work' the answer? Or has the twelve-hour day something to do with it? "Can these five or six thousand unskilled workmen take any interest in their work, or must they go at it with a consciousness similar to that of the slaves who put up the Pyramids?" I had to use the pick at this point, which broke up the inquiry, and I left the questions unanswered. I saw wheelbarrowing ahead for the afternoon, and corralled the only one properly balanced, when I started work at 1.00 P.M., keeping it near me during a scrap-picking hour, until the job should break. At 2.15, it did. Al said: "Get over and clean out under Seven. If we can ever get this goddam stuff cleaned out--" That was an optimism of Al's.