He watched the huge steel lips of the scoop as it felt about like the lips of a horse gathering the oats from its manger, quickly grabbing up its fifty tons of ore then leaping for the trestle some fifty feet above, where it dropped its burden into cars waiting to transfer the ore to the furnaces.
Load after load was scooped up. The rattle and the bang of the unloader was deafening. It made the Iron Boy's ears ache.
"According to the speed at which we are unloading, now, we should be finished in about four hours," he said. "This is the most wonderful mechanism I ever saw!"
There came a lull, during which the ship was moved further astern, in order that the unloader might pick up ore from the forward part of the hold. By the time this had been done, and the huge crane shifted to its new position, nearly an hour had been lost.
The boy pondered over this for some time. It seemed to him like an unnecessary loss of time.
"Why, so long as they have one crane at an unloading point, should they not have more?" he reflected. "This is worth looking into."
He thought he saw where a great improvement could be made, and he decided to think it over when he had more time. Perhaps he could suggest something to the officials that would be of use to them after all.
Steve and his companion, while working as ordinary seamen, were drawing the same fine salaries that they had received in the mines. Therefore the boys felt it was their duty to earn the money being paid to them by doing something worth while. They were getting three times as much as was paid to the other men doing similar work.
As Rush was thinking all these things over the lights in the hold suddenly went out, leaving the place in absolute darkness.
"Lights out!" he shouted.