and after that there were men wanted in the fertilizer-
mill.

The boss of the grinding room had come to know Jurgis
by this time, and had marked him for a likely man; and
so when he came to the door about two o'clock this breath~
less hot day, he felt a sudden spasm of pain shoot through
him -- the boss beckoned to him! In ten minutes more
Jurgis had pulled off his coat and overshirt, and set his
teeth together and gone to work. Here was one more
difficulty for him to meet and conquer!

His labor took him about one minute to learn. Before
him was one of the vents of the mill in which the fertilizer
was being ground -- rushing forth in a great brown river,
with a spray of the finest dust flung forth in clouds. Jurgis
was given a shovel, and along with half a dozen others it
was his task to shovel this fertilizer into carts. That
others were at work he knew by the sound, and by the
fact that he sometimes collided with them; otherwise
they might as well not have been there, for in the blind~
ing dust-storm a man could not see six feet in front of his
face. When he had filled one cart he had to grope around
him until another came, and if there was none on hand he
continued to grope till one arrived. In five minutes he
was, of course, a mass of fertilizer from head to feet; they
gave him a sponge to tie over his mouth, so that he could
breathe, but the sponge did not prevent his lips and eye~
lids from caking up with it and his ears from filling solid.
He looked like a brown ghost at twilight -- from hair to
shoes he became the color of the building and of every~
thing in it, and for that matter a hundred yards outside
it. The building had to be left open, and when the
wind blew Durham and Company lost a great deal of
fertilizer.

Working in his shirt-sleeves, and with the thermometer
at over a hundred, the phosphates soaked in through every
pore of Jurgis's skin, and in five minutes he had a head~
ache, and in fifteen was almost dazed. The blood was
pounding in his brain like an engine's throbbing; there
was a frightful pain in the top of his skull, and he could

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