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Bell grinned back but sobered quickly
“If Mr Langner did not kill himself, someone went to a lot of trouble to uard the gates of the navy yard They ht before”
3
MORE LIMESTONE!” YELLED CHAD GORDON GREEDILY watching his newest torrent of ush like liquid fire from the taphole into its ladle, the Naval Ordnance Bureau ist muttered a triumphant, “Hull 44, here we come!”
“All canvas and no hull” was a charge regularly leveled at Chad Gordon for running risks with three-thousand-degree molten metal that no sane man would
But no one denied that the brilliant star deserved his own blast furnace in a remote corner of the steel hteen hours a day to create low-carbon pig iron to process into torpedo-resistant arn him two separate crews of work like dogs could not keep up with Chad Gordon’s pace
On this snowy March night, his second shift consisted of an Aarded as the usual bunch of foreigners-four Hungarians and a glooarian As near as Bob Hall couldpal had fallen doell or been run over by a locomotive, take your pick
The German’s name was Hans He claimed to have worked at the Krupp Werke in the Ruhr Valley That was fine with fore and seelish than all four Hungarians coive a da as he worked hard
Seven hours into the shift, a “hang” of partly solidified metal formed near the top of the furnace It threatened to block the uptake that vented volatile hot waste gases Foreer Chad Gordon ordered him brusquely aside “I said, ‘More limestone’ ”
The Ger for such an opportunity Quickly, he climbed the ladders to the top of the furnace where barroere standing by with fresh stock Each contained a twelve-hundred-pound load of iron ore, or coke, or the dolonesia that the hard-driving Chad Gordon was counting on to strengthen the metal
The Gerrabbed a barrow of dolomitic limestone and rolled the theel cart to the mouth of the furnace
“Wait for the boil!” the foreman bellowed fro fro in the bottorees Fahrenheit But the ore and coke on top had barely reached seven hundred
Hans didn’t seem to hear him as he dumped the limestone into the furnace and hurriedly descended the ladders “You lunatic,” yelled the foreh You blocked the uptake”
Hans shouldered past the foreman
“Don’t worry about the hang,” Chad Gordon shouted without bothering to look up “It’ll drop”