What Steve was curious about, however, was who his roommate was to be. When he asked the boarding house boss about this the boy was told to wait until night, when he would see for himself. After that Steve asked no more questions. After dinner young Rush went out to wander about and get acquainted with his surroundings. Iron Mountain, the town in which was located the mine where he was to work, was a village of about seventeen hundred inhabitants, nestling between two high ranges of mountains. The timber had been cut off, and wherever the eye chanced to rest it was met by a forest of black stumps, with here and there the shaft of an iron mine rising dark and gloomy. It was the most cheerless scene that Steve Rush had ever gazed upon. The buildings in the village proper were mostly mere shacks, the public school being the only building worthy of a name in the entire community. The streets of the town were deserted, but beneath them, far down in the earth, men toiled and burrowed by day and by night, penetrating deeper and deeper into the earth in their quest for Nature's riches. The lad was lonely. He would have been homesick had he not been possessed of the grit to keep his emotions in check. But as he strolled over toward the towering, gloomy mine shafts he began to realize that he was at the very fountain head of the greatest steel industry in the world. From the quiet of the little mining village he had come upon a scene of work the like of which he had never seen before. As he gazed, the great ore cars shot up from the mines with a roar. Leaping to the top of the high shaft, they hurled their cargoes of red ore into waiting dump cars, then dropped back below ground with a speed almost too great for the human eye to follow. Men red with the metal they were handling were laboring on the surface, their faces streaked with perspiration, their rolled-up sleeves and open-necked shirts displaying the brawn and muscle without which the great steel company would quickly lose its greatness. Shrieking railroad engines were dashing into the yards, dragging from them loads of ore that would be rushed to waiting ore boats on the Great Lakes, to be conveyed thence to the great steel mills in the east. The cars were being loaded by machinery and with such speed as to cause the watcher to gasp with amazement. "This is wonderful," Steve cried, carried away by his enthusiasm. "This is the life for me! I never dreamed it was so splendid." It was, indeed, a world pulsating with opportunities for him who possessed the pluck to fight his way to the front. In a vague sort of way, Steve Rush seemed to realize this. "Some day I shall be at the head of one of these great industries!" he breathed. "I, too, will be a captain of industry! I'll never give up until I am--until I have learned all that can be learned about this wonderful industry."