I fought myself out of bed and shut it off; stood up and tried to think. Pretty soon a thought came over me like an ache: it was "Fourteen hours!" That was beginning in fifty-five minutes--fourteen hours of back-walls, and hot ladles, and--Oh, hell!--I sat down again on the bed, and prepared to lift my feet back in. Then I got up, and washed fiercely, threw on my clothes, and went downstairs, and out into the afternoon sun. Down by the restaurant, I met the third-helper on Eight. "Long turn wouldn't be so bad, if there weren't no next day," he said, with a sort of smile. In the mill was a gang of malignant men; things all went wrong; everybody was angry and tired; their nerves made mistakes for them. "I only wish it were next Sunday!" I said to someone. "There aren't any goddam Sundays in this place," he returned. "Twenty-four hours off between two working days ain't Sunday." I thought that over. The company says they give you one day off every two weeks. But it's not like a day off anywhere else. It's twenty-four hours sandwiched between two work-days. You finish your night-week at 7.00 Sunday morning, having just done a week of one twenty-four hour shift, and six fourteens. You've got all the time from then till the next morning! Hurrah! How will you use it? If you do the normal thing,--eat breakfast, and go to bed for eight hours,--that brings you to 5.00 o'clock. Will you stay up all night? you've had your sleep. Yes, but there's a ten-hour turn coming at 7.00. You go to bed at 11.00, to sleep up for your turn. There's an evening-out of it! Hurrah again! But who in hell does the normal thing? Either you go on a tear for twenty-four hours,--you only have it twice a month,--or you sleep the twenty-four, if the week's been a bad one. Or--and this is common in Bouton--you get sore at the system and stay away a week--if you can afford it. "Hey, you, get me a jigger, quick. Ten thou'." "All right," I said, and shut off my mind for the day. I usually had bad words and bad looks from "Shorty." Jack calls him "that dirty Wop." Late one afternoon he produced a knife and fingered it suggestively while he talked. So I always watched him with all the eyes I had. One day we had shoveled in manganese together over a hot ladle, and I noticed that he was in a bad mood. We finished and leaned against the rail. "Six days more," he said very quietly. I looked up, surprised at his voice. "What do you mean?" "Six days more, this week, me quit this goddam job." "What's the matter?" "Oh, ---- me lose thirteen pound this job, what the hell!" "What job will you get now?" "I don't know, I don't know; any damn job better than this," he said very bitterly. Having adopted the quitting idea, these six days were too much to endure. A little later, Jock was ready to make front-wall. He saw Shorty and said, "Get me that hook and spoon."