1 A time of peril on the killing beds was when a steer broke loose.
2 The room echoed with the thuds in quick succession, and the stamping and kicking of the steers.
3 He was a "floorsman" at Jones's, and a wounded steer had broken loose and mashed him against a pillar.
4 Those on the flying truck yelled a warning and the crowd scattered pell-mell, disclosing one of the steers lying in its blood.
5 It was late in the afternoon when they got back, and they dressed out the remainder of the steer, and a couple of others that had been killed, and then knocked off for the day.
6 Red cattle, black, white, and yellow cattle; old cattle and young cattle; great bellowing bulls and little calves not an hour born; meek-eyed milch cows and fierce, long-horned Texas steers.
7 Now and then, when the bosses were not looking, you would see them plunging their feet and ankles into the steaming hot carcass of the steer, or darting across the room to the hot-water jets.
8 He was provided with a stiff besom, such as is used by street sweepers, and it was his place to follow down the line the man who drew out the smoking entrails from the carcass of the steer; this mass was to be swept into a trap, which was then closed, so that no one might slip into it.
9 There was said to be two thousand dollars a week hush money from the tubercular steers alone; and as much again from the hogs which had died of cholera on the trains, and which you might see any day being loaded into boxcars and hauled away to a place called Globe, in Indiana, where they made a fancy grade of lard.