When the light from the melting scrap-iron inside the furnace shot back, it lit up the hills and valleys in Nick's face. I noticed how sharp the slope was from his cheek-bones to the pit of his cheeks, and the round holes in which his eyes were a pool at the bottom. His lips moved off his white teeth, and twisted themselves, as a man's do with effort. He looked as if he were smiling. I picked up my shovel, and shoved it into the dolomite pile, with a slight pressure of knee against right forearm that eases your back. The thermometer in the shade outside was 95°. I wondered vaguely how much it was where Nick stood, with the doors open in his face. We walked back together after the front-wall to the trough of water. "Not bad when you get good furnace, good first-helper," he said. "Fred good boy, but furnace no good. A man got to watch himself on this job," he went on bitterly; "he pull himself to pieces." "I can't manage quite enough sleep," I said, wondering if that was the remark of a tenderfoot. "Sometime--maybe one day a month--I feel all right, good, no sleepy," he went on. "Daytime work, ten hour, all right, feel good; fourteen hour always too much tired. Sometime, goddam, I go home, I go to bed, throw myself down this way." He threw both arms backward and to the side in a gesture of desperate exhaustion, allowing his head to fall back at the same time. "Goddam, think I no work no more. No day nuff sleep for work," he concluded. Later on in the day, I saw Jimmy let the charge-up man, George, take the spoon and make front-wall. The heat "got his goat." "I lose about ten or fifteen pounds every summer," he said, "but I get it back in the winter. My wife is after me the whole time to leave this game. I tell her every year I will. Better quit this business, buddy, while you're young, before you get stuck like me." I walked home with Stanley, the Pole. He always called me Joe, the generic name for non-Hunky helpers. "Say, Joe," he said, as we came under the railroad bridge, "what's your name right?" "Charlie," I answered. "By the way, where have you been?" "Drunk, Charlie," he answered, smiling cheerfully. "Ever since I saw you in the pit?" "Three week," he stated, with satisfaction; "beer, whiskey, everyt'ing. What the hell, work all time goddam job, what the hell?" V WORKING THE TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR SHIFT 7 A.M. _Sunday_ I tried to get a lot of sleep last night for handling the long turn; managed about nine hours. When I came to the locker, Stanley was there, dressed, cleaning his smoked glasses. "How much sleep last night?" I asked. "Oh, six, seven hour," said Stanley. "You're a damned fool," I said; "this is the long turn." "I know, I know," he returned, "I have t'ing to do. No have time sleep."