By and by they came to the place where steel rails were made; and Jurgis heard a toot behind him, and jumped out of the way of a car with a white-hot ingot upon it, the size of a man’s body.  There was a sudden crash and the car came to a halt, and the ingot toppled out upon a moving platform, where steel fingers and arms seized hold of it, punching it and prodding it into place, and hurrying it into the grip of huge rollers.  Then it came out upon the other side, and there were more crashings and clatterings, and over it was flopped, like a pancake on a gridiron, and seized again and rushed back at you through another squeezer.  So amid deafening uproar it clattered to and fro, growing thinner and flatter and longer.  The ingot seemed almost a living thing; it did not want to run this mad course, but it was in the grip of fate, it was tumbled on, screeching and clanking and shivering in protest.  By and by it was long and thin, a great red snake escaped from purgatory; and then, as it slid through the rollers, you would have sworn that it was alive—­it writhed and squirmed, and wriggles and shudders passed out through its tail, all but flinging it off by their violence.  There was no rest for it until it was cold and black—­and then it needed only to be cut and straightened to be ready for a railroad.

It was at the end of this rail’s progress that Jurgis got his chance.  They had to be moved by men with crowbars, and the boss here could use another man.  So he took off his coat and set to work on the spot.

It took him two hours to get to this place every day and cost him a dollar and twenty cents a week.  As this was out of the question, he wrapped his bedding in a bundle and took it with him, and one of his fellow workingmen introduced him to a Polish lodginghouse, where he might have the privilege of sleeping upon the floor for ten cents a night.  He got his meals at free-lunch counters, and every Saturday night he went home—­bedding and all—­and took the greater part of his money to the family.  Elzbieta was sorry for this arrangement, for she feared that it would get him into the habit of living without them, and once a week was not very often for him to see his baby; but there was no other way of arranging it.  There was no chance for a woman at the steelworks, and Marija was now ready for work again, and lured on from day to day by the hope of finding it at the yards.

In a week Jurgis got over his sense of helplessness and bewilderment in the rail mill.  He learned to find his way about and to take all the miracles and terrors for granted, to work without hearing the rumbling and crashing.  From blind fear he went to the other extreme; he became reckless and indifferent, like all the rest of the men, who took but little thought of themselves in the ardor of their work.  It was wonderful, when one came to think of it, that these men should have taken an interest in the work they did—­they had no share in it—­they