“You may not know it, William, but you are living in the age of steel. Industry depends on iron, for almost all the tools in the world are made of steel.
“Cast iron, like ours, is more brittle than steel, because it has much more carbon in it; but it is useful for many things. I shall stand right by cast iron.”
Then he said, half to himself:
“Sometimes I wish the other fellows hadn’t discovered quite so much. I should have liked to have a hand in it myself.”
Then Billy put the question that he had been trying to find a chance to ask.
“Mr. Prescott,” he began, but stopped a moment, as though he were having some difficulty in getting his question into shape. “Do volcanoes ever throw up mountains of iron?”
“Trying to get back to the beginning, are you?” asked Mr. Prescott. “Planning to be a geologist?”
But seeing that Billy was too serious, just then, to be put off lightly, Mr. Prescott went on:
“That’s a good question. The geologists tell us, and I suppose that they are right, that there was once a chain of active volcanoes up in the Lake Superior region, and that is why there is so much iron up there now.
“There are some volcanoes in the world now, but the volcanoes that the geologists talk about became extinct—dead, you know—long before the earth was ready for man. Nobody knows how many thousands of years ago.