Steve, seeing three of them flattened on the platform, dashed in at the risk of his own life, dragging the men to positions of safety.
"Get under cover!" bellowed Pig-Iron. "Don't you know there's a hang-over?"
"What's a hang-over—what am I to look out for?" shouted Steve.
"That's an explosion at the top caused by a stoppage of the vents in the charge," explained Peel, as the two hurriedly crawled in under one of the huge heating stoves. "It'll be raining coke here, in a minute, till you can't see ten feet ahead of you."
"An—an explosion at the top of the furnace, do you say?" gasped Rush.
"Yes. The whole business is blowing out of the top. Don't you hear it coming?"
The fiery rain of coke and ore had begun. It sounded like the roar of an approaching storm as it beat on the metal sides of the big stoves.
"But Jarvis is up there!" cried the Iron Boy, beginning to crawl from under the protecting stove.
"No, he ain't. Come back! You'll be killed. Why, you wouldn't stand any more show in that coke shower than you would to stand up under hot fire in battle, and perhaps not so much. Fellers do git through a battle without being hit. Nobody ever was in a coke shower who didn't git more or less hit, principally more."
"I tell you, Bob is up there. I must go——"