"One day I took my bucket and joined the line of women and girls that filed in through the gates. I was twelve then, but stunted with smoke and thin from poverty. I'll never forget that day; the sole of one of my shoes was worn through, and cinders kept working in. I took my stand just outside the Bessemer plant. It was a big shell of steel girders and corrugated iron, and the side where we were was open. Away up above were the roaring crucibles where the metal was fluxed; beneath ran the little flat-cars waiting for the ingots to be poured. Father saw me and waved his hand--he always waved at me--then I saw the superintendent coming through--a big, square-faced man whom everybody feared. We kids used to think he was an ogre and ate little people. He was raging and swearing and spurring the men on to more haste--I heard later that he had sworn to win the broom back if he wrecked the plant. Wherever he went, the hunkies danced; he could put life into a dead man's limbs, that man. It was because of their great fear of him and his furious urging that--something happened." Lilas had begun her recital slowly, without apparent object, but once into it she seemed unable to stop; and now, although her words came haltingly, it was plain that she had worked herself into a sort of hysteria in which she gave little heed to her hearer. It was characteristic of her that she could so excite herself by the power of visualization as to be completely transported. "Something went wrong overhead; the operator got rattled or somebody was late in his duties and fouled the machinery; anyhow, the converter dumped too soon. Men were working directly underneath, father among the rest. Being so young, I had no idea of what it all meant at the time--but the memory stuck. I saw him go down under a stream of liquid steel--" Lorelei's horrified exclamation went unnoticed; Lilas's voice was shrill. "Yes. He was blotted out, right there before my eyes, in an instant. In the time it takes to snap your finger, he--and the others--were gone, changed into smoke, into absolute nothingness. One moment he was whole, alive, flesh and bone, the next he didn't exist; tons of boiling metal ran over the spot. Nothing in the world was ever so horrible. You've never seen liquid steel nor felt the awful breath of it, have you? There wasn't even a funeral. Twelve men, twelve pinches of ashes, were lost somewhere, swallowed up in that mass--nothing more. There was no insurance, and nobody took the blame. Another Jew family, a few more widowed and fatherless foreigners, among that army, meant nothing. Scarcely a month went by without accidents of some sort.