Steve left the house a couple of hours before it was time to go to work. He was still unsteady on his feet, but the color was returning to his face and his wonderful vitality was asserting itself. He would be himself again, in a few hours, if he were out in the open away from the killing heat of the blast furnaces. The boy wanted to see the furnaces by daylight so, that he might get a better idea of them than was possible in the night. He stopped to witness the work of the day shift as they made a cast. This was very interesting, though a wave of pity welled up in the heart of the Iron Boy for the suffering of the furnace men in the terrific heat to which they were subjected while tapping the furnace. The cast over, he walked to where the huge black stoves towered above him, and through which the gas flamed and circulated to heat the air that was driven in over the charge in the furnace itself. The engineer nodded to him. "Where does the waste gas go to?" asked the Iron Boy. "Out into the air. Why?" "I should think they would use it for something else." "What else?" "I don't know." "Neither do I. We don't use gas for anything else, except running the gas engines over on the other side of the yard. I guess you don't know much about this business, or you wouldn't be asking such questions." "One never learns much unless he does ask questions," answered the lad. "I have learned more from asking questions that I ever have any other way." "That's right, so long as you can find anybody who's willing to answer fool questions." Steve walked away without replying. His mind was at work, what Jarvis called working over time. The lad was thinking deeply over what he had discovered, and, though he did not realize it at the time, he had come upon an idea that was to work a great change in one department of the great steel industry. CHAPTER XVII A HANG-OVER AND A FLAREBACK "Take the monkey trick," ordered the head melter when Steve reported for duty at the usual hour. This meant standing right in front of the furnace much of the time. It was also the duty of the monkey-man to prod the clay dam with the dolly when all was ready for a cast, as well as occasionally to prod through the shell of the furnace above the metal and just below the bustle pipes, in order to liberate the gases that had formed there. If anything, it was a worse position than he had yet had. But Steve did not flinch. He was there to learn all there was to be learned, and he proposed to do so, whatever the cost to himself. "I guess I can stand it if others do," he thought when the new detail was called off. These men were just getting ready to go to work, Steve had stripped off a good portion of his clothes and donned a light rubber coat when Jarvis, who had not yet gone to the charging platform, touched him on the arm. "What is it?" "S-h-h! Look out for yourself!" whispered Jarvis. "I'm going to."