clutches of these men. They’re a bullying, swearing, drinking set of infernal ruffians. Foremen are just as bad as hands. I never felt safe of my life with ’em.”
“A bad lot, are they?” mused Wade, as he returned to the office. “I must give them a little sharp talk by way of Inaugural.”
He had the bell tapped and the men called together in the main building.
Much work was still going on in an inefficient, unsystematic way.
While hot fires were roaring in the great furnaces, smoke rose from the dusty beds where Titanic castings were cooling. Great cranes, manacled with heavy chains, stood over the furnace-doors, ready to lift steaming jorums of melted metal, and pour out, hot and hot, for the moulds to swallow.
Raw material in big heaps lay about, waiting for the fire to ripen it. Here was a stack of long, rough, rusty pigs, clumsy as the shillelahs of the Anakim. There was a pile of short, thick masses, lying higgledy-piggledy, stuff from the neighboring mines, which needed to be crossed with foreign stock before it could be of much use in civilization.
Here, too, was raw material organized: a fly-wheel, large enough to keep the knobbiest of asteroids revolving without a wabble; a cross-head, cross-tail, and piston-rod, to help a great sea-going steamer breast the waves; a light walking-beam, to whirl the paddles of a fast boat on the
