That meant molten iron inside, melting the cone-shaped water-chamber around the blast pipe. If let alone, the cooling at that place would cease, and in a short time there would follow an escape of molten metal. "Cooler!" yelled on a blast-furnace means "Hurry like hell." I grabbed a wrench to take the nut off the "bridle"--the first step in taking out a sort of outside cooler, the tuyère. "Bar," said the Serbian stove-tender very quietly, picking up a specially curved one, and McLanahan took the other end. Somebody knocked out some keys with a sledge, and the blowpipe fell on the curved bar, making the holders of it grunt. They took it off fast, for the instant the thing loosens, a flame shoots through the hole and licks its edges. Then the tuyère comes loose with a few strokes of a pull bar. All of these moves are fast; a tuyère goes bad every other day and men work fast like soldiers at a gun drill. But coolers don't break a lead but once in three months or so; and the cone's heavier, the gang bigger, there's less efficiency and more holler and sweat. When the pull bar gets into action it looks a little like a mediæval mob with a battering ram. A "pull bar" is a tool designed to translate the muscle of many men into pull, on a small gripping edge against which sledging is impossible. At one end a thick hook grips the edge of the cooler, at the other a weight is brought against a flange that runs around the bar. Everybody on the gang has a piece of a rope attaching to that weight. The stove gang moving between stoves Thirteen and Fourteen were caught and brought into this for muscle, and a couple of passing millwrights drafted. "Hold up the goddam end," from Steve, boss by common consent. "A little beef this time!" from a blower. "What the hell's the matter, _sick_?" We all swear between breaths, and take a grip higher on the rope--the weight cracks the flange again, and makes the bar shiver. When the new cooler, which resembles more nearly a gigantic flower pot, without any bottom, than anything else, is in place, there's a cry of: "Big Dolly!" That involves four or five men, lifting a kind of ramrod with a square hammer-end, from the rack, and lugging it to the cooler. I get near the ramming end this time; Tony is near me on the other side. Together we hold the hammer against the cooler. As the end strikes, the jar goes back through the men's hands. "Now top." Arms raise the bar painfully, and hold it poised a little unsteadily, sway back, tense, and drive. "Hold it, hold it on the cooler, goddam you." Tony and I had let our arms shake a fraction, and the hammer fell glancing on the cooler's edge. "Now!" Seated this time. Arms relax and stretch. When things are ready, Adolph makes the water connections. "Hold de goddam shovel, what you t'ink, I burn up." A cinder-snapper holds a shovel in front of the hole to keep the flame from his hands. "All right, all right."