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Show 12 end of a red-hot billet. Karl leaped back from the shower of sparks as Big John flung down the billet so it slid across the steel floor to Jame. Jame picked up the glowing billet with his own tongs, and jammed one end of it against a groove in a pair of rolls that looked like the wringer on Karl's mother's washing machine. With a scream of steel against steel, the roll bit the red-hot billet and forced it along a groove narrower than the billet's thickness. When it came out the other side of the roll, the billet was oval-shaped and a foot longer then it had been on the way in. The instant the billet cleared the roll, Jame picked up another one, fresh from the furnace, and started that one through. A fat man with the longest handlebar mustache Karl had ever seen caught the first billet with tongs and passed it back over the top of the roll to Jame, who rammed it into an adjoining roll. Immediately Jame bent to pick up still another billet from the floor. So much was happening so fast that Karl had trouble following it all. His senses were jolted by the blinding glare from superheated billets, by the scorching spray of sparks as Big John flung the billets across the floor with such force that they came to a stop only inches from Jame's feet, by the harsh shriek of steel being devoured by rolls. With each pass down the row of rolls, each billet became narrower and longer, until it snaked out of the sixth and final roll as a fiery round rod half an inch in diameter and thirty feet long. Bending, twisting, thrusting, Jame was in constant motion. His work shirt darkened with perspiration, under the arms and in spreading |