Steve nudged him to be quiet. "We are ready to work if you will tell us what to do," said Rush. "You can pack the sand gutters after the charge is loaded into the ladles. Either of you ever worked on a furnace before?" "No, sir," answered the boys. "You, what's your name----?" "Jarvis." "Well, Jarvis, I'll put you up on the charging platform. You won't have much to do there----" "Where is the charging platform?" interrupted Bob. "At the top of the furnace, fifty feet up there in the air. How do you like it?" "Fine!" answered Jarvis, though without his usual enthusiasm. "What am I do when I get there?" "Dump the charges into the furnace. The skips you have nothing to do with, except to ring a bell when you are ready for them. They will dump four loads of red ore into the furnace; then you throw in a layer of coke and limestone, the latter being called 'flux.' This makes what we call the charge. Is that clear?" "Yes. What do I do then?" "You do it all over again and you keep doing it until another man comes to take the job off your hands." "How do I get up there?" "Climb the ladder." "Huh! Lucky for me I'm on the night trick, so I can't see, or I'd surely fall off." "Rush, the sand man will show you about the troughs. Jarvis, you hike upstairs. Tell the man I have up there that you are to relieve him. He will show you about operating the levers. Have him put in a charge while you look on." "Is there any light up there, so I can see what I am doing?" "You will have light enough," grinned Pig-Iron Peel. "You won't have any reason to complain about either light or heat. This charging business is a continuous performance day and night, until the furnaces have to be shut down for cleaning. For your information I will tell you that the iron, being the heaviest, sinks to the bottom of the furnace as it is melted. The cinders trickle down after it, forming what is called the heart. The latter are tapped off every two hours, the iron every four hours. If you are going to be furnace men you will want to know all these things at the start." "Thank you for the information. It is all very interesting," answered Steve. "And very hot," added Jarvis. "With your permission I'll go aloft now, sir." "Go on, and look sharp that you don't fall off," warned the head melter. "I'll cling to the sheets, sir." Bob, after the ladder bad been pointed out to him, began to climb. He had not gone far before he discovered that the rungs of the iron ladder were hot. They were so much so that he yelled, "ouch!" removing first one hand and then the other to rub it on his trousers. He was unable to keep both hands on the ladder for any great length of time. Bob began to growl, and he kept up his growling all the way up the fifty-foot ladder. Finally he decided he must have gone about a hundred feet, instead of fifty and halting he shouted, "Hello!" "Hello, yourself," answered a gruff voice from the cloud above. "What do you want?"