"Ignatz, you rascal!" called Bob. "I ought to give you a good thumping. You don't deserve to be let off with a scolding. How would you like to have me tell your mother you have not been at work to-day?"
"She know when she git my wages."
"No she won't," interjected Steve, "for I am going to pay your wages for just this one day. You come with us. We are going on a picnic."
Three happy boys started off for a place they knew of up the river, where they were going to spend the afternoon. Steve bought some cakes and sandwiches at a baker shop, and a few bottles of mineral water, then off they went for their holiday.
CHAPTER XIV
BY THE ROARING FURNACES
IN the daytime a row of tall black, cone-shaped chimneys might be seen across the river from the mills themselves. At night these chimneys were pyramids of yellow and red fire.
These were the blast furnaces. In them, the ore, as it came from the mines far away on the Minnesota iron ranges, was reduced to pig or pig iron, by smelting at a temperature of fifteen hundred degrees centigrade—about twenty-seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit. This great temperature boils the slag or impurities out of the metal, and after it has been drawn off into ladles it becomes "pig."