“Well, old precious one,” he smiled, patting the bar of metal, “it’s one more night in my company for you, whether you like it or not.”
It was that same night, in the long, silent hours just following midnight, that something happened that was destined to change the entire course of Johnny Thompson’s life. He was sleepy—sleepier than usual, for his sleep had been broken into that day.
“If only I had another shaving off that steel bar,” he thought to himself, “I’d do that experiment again, and try for a different result.”
As if expecting the miracle to repeat itself, he walked to the forge-room and placed the bar of steel on the little heap of coals at the center of the same forge that had burned so mysteriously the previous night.
Then with a laugh, which told plainer than words that he thought he was kidding himself, he turned and strolled away down the aisle among the forges.
No room held such an endless fascination for him as this forge-room. In the day, especially toward evening when the outer light was failing, when the forge fires burned brightly, and the white hot metal on the dies glowed at each stroke of the massive hammers, when the whang-whang-whang of steel on steel raised a mighty clamor, then it was a place to conjure about. But even now, in the dead still of the night, the powerful hammers resting from their labor, the long line of forges with fires burned out spoke to him of solemn grandeur and dormant power.
He had just made the length of the room and had turned about when from his lips there escaped a muffled cry.
Instantly he broke into a run. Once more, as on the previous night, the forge on which the steel bar lay was a mass of white and red fire.
By the time he had reached the spot, the bar of metal was a glowing white mass from end to end.
His first thought was to seize the tongs and drag the bar from the forge to the floor; his second was a bolder one. It caused his heart to thump loudly, his breath to come quickly.