I looked at him. He had a big frame, but his limbs were hung on it, like clothes on hooks. His face was a gray pallor, sharply caving in under the cheek-bones. His eyes were very dull, and steady. I'd noticed those eyes of his before, and never could decide whether they showed a kind of sullen defiance, or resignation, or were just extraordinarily tired. "Two month more," he said. "Two month more what?" "Two month more this work every Sunday--goddam work all day like hell, all night like hell. Pretty soon go back to good job." I knew what he meant now. He had told me weeks before, when we had hewed cinders together in the pit, how he was a rougher in a Pittsburgh mill. Worked only twelve hours a day and no Sundays. "No more goddam long turn," he concluded; "work of rougher slack now, all right October." He moved off slowly, with no spring in his step, and no energy expended beyond what was absolutely necessary to move him. I walked out on the floor to look at the clock. The night gang on every furnace was washing up, very cheerfully and with an extraordinary thoroughness. They were slicking up for the once a fortnight twenty-four-hour party. Nearly everyone drank through his day off, or raised hell in some extraordinary manner. It was too precious and rare to spend in less violent reaction to the two weeks' fatigue. I looked at them and tried not to be envious. The first-helper on Seven was taking a last look through the peepholes as he put on his collar. A great Slavic hulk on Number 5 was brushing his clothes with unheard of violence. Dick Reber passed by. He saw me leaning against a girder buttoning my shirt. "Front-wall, Number 5, you!" he bawled. I was sore at myself for having been seen standing about doing nothing. But I was sore at Dick also, unreasonably. I went back to my locker, got my gloves, and went to Number 5. I began filling the spoon, with the help of "Marty," the Wop. He glared at me, and interfered with my shovel twice when we went together to the dolomite pile. Marty had made enemies widely on the furnaces because of a loud mouth, and an officiousness that sat ridiculously on his stature and his ignorance of steel-making. I was glad when the front-wall was done. I took the hook down, and went over to the fountain in back of Five, cooled my head, neck, and arms, and went over to Seven, without taking a swallow. I had decided to have only two drinks of water in the half-day. Dick Reber saw me coming up and, I think in punishment for loafing, said: "Clean up under there. I want you to clean all that filth out, all of it, from behind that girder." It was near the locker and under the flooring, in a sort of shelf, where lime, dolomite, dirt, old gloves, shoes, filth of all sorts had accumulated. I cleaned it out with a broom and a stick. It took me half an hour. "All right," said the first-helper; "now get me ten thousand."