← catalogue

Poor White: A Novel

by Sherwood Anderson · English · Gutenberg #7414 · 592,766 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Poor White: A Novel
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Poor White: A Novel

Author: Sherwood Anderson


        
Release date: February 1, 2005 [eBook #7414]
                Most recently updated: March 14, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7414

Credits: Text file produced by Eric Eldred, William Flis and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team
        
        HTML file produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POOR WHITE: A NOVEL ***




Produced by Eric Eldred, William Flis and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team










                        POOR WHITE


                        A NOVEL BY

                    SHERWOOD ANDERSON

                         AUTHOR OF

                     WINESBURG, OHIO





                            TO

                TENNESSEE MITCHELL ANDERSON



[Note: The evident misprint of Book Six for Book Five in the original is
preserved here.]





BOOK I




CHAPTER I


Hugh McVey was born in a little hole of a town stuck on a mud bank on
the western shore of the Mississippi River in the State of Missouri.
It was a miserable place in which to be born. With the exception of a
narrow strip of black mud along the river, the land for ten miles back
from the town--called in derision by river men “Mudcat Landing”--was
almost entirely worthless and unproductive. The soil, yellow, shallow
and stony, was tilled, in Hugh's time, by a race of long gaunt men who
seemed as exhausted and no-account as the land on which they lived. They
were chronically discouraged, and the merchants and artisans of the
town were in the same state. The merchants, who ran their stores--poor
tumble-down ramshackle affairs--on the credit system, could not get pay
for the goods they handed out over their counters and the artisans, the
shoemakers, carpenters and harnessmakers, could not get pay for the work
they did. Only the town's two saloons prospered. The saloon keepers sold
their wares for cash and, as the men of the town and the farmers who
drove into town felt that without drink life was unbearable, cash always
could be found for the purpose of getting drunk.

Hugh McVey's father, John McVey, had been a farm hand in his youth
but before Hugh was born had moved into town to find employment in a
tannery. The tannery ran for a year or two and then failed, but John
McVey stayed in town. He also became a drunkard. It was the easy obvious
thing for him to do. During the time of his employment in the tannery he
had been married and his son had been born. Then his wife died and the
idle workman took his child and went to live in a tiny fishing shack
by the river. How the boy lived through the next few years no one ever
knew. John McVey loitered in the streets and on the river bank and
only awakened out of his habitual stupor when, driven by hunger or the
craving for drink, he went for a day's work in some farmer's field at
harvest time or joined a number of other idlers for an adventurous trip
down river on a lumber raft. The baby was left shut up in the shack by
the river or carried about wrapped in a soiled blanket. Soon after he
was old enough to walk he was compelled to find work in order that he
might eat. The boy of ten went listlessly about town at the heels of his
father. The two found work, which the boy did while the man lay sleeping
in the sun. They cleaned cisterns, swept out stores and saloons and at
night went with a wheelbarrow and a box to remove and dump in the river
the contents of out-houses. At fourteen Hugh was as tall as his father
and almost without education. He could read a little and could write his
own name, had picked up these accomplishments from other boys who came
to fish with him in the river, but he had never been to school. For days
sometimes he did nothing but lie half asleep in the shade of a bush on
the river bank. The fish he caught on his more industrious days he sold
for a few cents to some housewife, and thus got money to buy food for
his big growing indolent body. Like an animal that has come to its
maturity he turned away from his father, not because of resentment for
his hard youth, but because he thought it time to begin to go his own
way.

In his fourteenth year and when the boy was on the point of sinking into
the sort of animal-like stupor in which his father had lived, something
happened to him. A railroad pushed its way down along the river to his
town and he got a job as man of all work for the station master. He
swept out the station, put trunks on trains, mowed the grass in the
station yard and helped in a hundred odd ways the man who held the
combined jobs of ticket seller, baggage master and telegraph operator at
the little out-of-the-way place.

Hugh began a little to awaken. He lived with his employer, Henry
Shepard, and his wife, Sarah Shepard, and for the first time in his life
sat down regularly at table. His life, lying on the river bank through
long summer afternoons or sitting perfectly still for endless hours in
a boat, had bred in him a dreamy detached outlook on life. He found it
hard to be definite and to do definite things, but for all his stupidity
the boy had a great store of patience, a heritage perhaps from his
mother. In his new place the station master's wife, Sarah Shepard, a
sharp-tongued, good-natured woman, who hated the town and the people
among whom fate had thrown her, scolded at him all day long. She treated
him like a child of six, told him how to sit at table, how to hold his
fork when he ate, how to address people who came to the house or to
the station. The mother in her was aroused by Hugh's helplessness and,
having no children of her own, she began to take the tall awkward boy
to her heart. She was a small woman and when she stood in the house
scolding the great stupid boy who stared down at her with his small
perplexed eyes, the two made a picture that afforded endless amusement
to her husband, a short fat bald-headed man who went about clad in blue
overalls and a blue cotton shirt. Coming to the back door of his house,
that was within a stone's throw of the station, Henry Shepard stood with
his hand on the door-jamb and watched the woman and the boy. Above the
scolding voice of the woman his own voice arose. “Look out, Hugh,” he
called. “Be on the jump, lad! Perk yourself up. She'll be biting you if
you don't go mighty careful in there.”

Hugh got little money for his work at the railroad station but for the
first time in his life he began to fare well. Henry Shepard bought
the boy clothes, and his wife, Sarah, who was a master of the art of
cooking, loaded the table with good things to eat. Hugh ate until both
the man and woman declared he would burst if he did not stop. Then when
they were not looking he went into the station yard and crawling under
a bush went to sleep. The station master came to look for him. He cut a
switch from the bush and began to beat the boy's bare feet. Hugh awoke
and was overcome with confusion. He got to his feet and stood trembling,
half afraid he was to be driven away from his new home. The man and the
confused blushing boy confronted each other for a moment and then the
man adopted the method of his wife and began to scold. He was annoyed at
what he thought the boy's indolence and found a hundred little tasks
for him to do. He devoted himself to finding tasks for Hugh, and when he
could think of no new ones, invented them. “We will have to keep the big
lazy fellow on the jump. That's the secret of things,” he said to his
wife.

The boy learned to keep his naturally indolent body moving and his
clouded sleepy mind fixed on definite things. For hours he plodded
straight ahead, doing over and over some appointed task. He forgot the
purpose of the job he had been given to do and did it because it was
a job and would keep him awake. One morning he was told to sweep the
station platform and as his employer had gone away without giving him
additional tasks and as he was afraid that if he sat down he would fall
into the odd detached kind of stupor in which he had spent so large
a part of his life, he continued to sweep for two or three hours. The
station platform was built of rough boards and Hugh's arms were very
powerful. The broom he was using began to go to pieces. Bits of it flew
about and after an hour's work the platform looked more uncleanly than
when he began. Sarah Shepard came to the door of her house and stood
watching. She was about to call to him and to scold him again for his
stupidity when a new impulse came to her. She saw the serious determined
look on the boy's long gaunt face and a flash of understanding came to
her. Tears came into her eyes and her arms ached to take the great boy
and hold him tightly against her breast. With all her mother's soul she
wanted to protect Hugh from a world she was sure would treat him always
as a beast of burden and would take no account of what she thought of
as the handicap of his birth. Her morning's work was done and without
saying anything to Hugh, who continued to go up and down the platform
laboriously sweeping, she went out at the front door of the house and
to one of the town stores. There she bought a half dozen books, a
geography, an arithmetic, a speller and two or three readers. She
had made up her mind to become Hugh McVey's school teacher and with
characteristic energy did not put the matter off, but went about it
at once. When she got back to her house and saw the boy still going
doggedly up and down the platform, she did not scold but spoke to him
with a new gentleness in her manner. “Well, my boy, you may put the
broom away now and come to the house,” she suggested. “I've made up my
mind to take you for my own boy and I don't want to be ashamed of you.
If you're going to live with me I can't have you growing up to be a lazy
good-for-nothing like your father and the other men in this hole of a
place. You'll have to learn things and I suppose I'll have to be your
teacher.

“Come on over to the house at once,” she added sharply, making a quick
motion with her hand to the boy who with the broom in his hands stood
stupidly staring. “When a job is to be done there's no use putting it
off. It's going to be hard work to make an educated man of you, but it
has to be done. We might as well begin on your lessons at once.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Hugh McVey lived with Henry Shepard and his wife until he became a grown
man. After Sarah Shepard became his school teacher things began to go
better for him. The scolding of the New England woman, that had but
accentuated his awkwardness and stupidity, came to an end and life in
his adopted home became so quiet and peaceful that the boy thought of
himself as one who had come into a kind of paradise. For a time the two
older people talked of sending him to the town school, but the woman
objected. She had begun to feel so close to Hugh that he seemed a part
of her own flesh and blood and the thought of him, so huge and ungainly,
sitting in a school room with the children of the town, annoyed and
irritated her. In imagination she saw him being laughed at by other boys
and could not bear the thought. She did not like the people of the town
and did not want Hugh to associate with them.

Sarah Shepard had come from a people and a country quite different in
its aspect from that in which she now lived. Her own people, frugal New
Englanders, had come West in the year after the Civil War to take up
cut-over timber land in the southern end of the state of Michigan.
The daughter was a grown girl when her father and mother took up the
westward journey, and after they arrived at the new home, had worked
with her father in the fields. The land was covered with huge stumps
and was difficult to farm but the New Englanders were accustomed to
difficulties and were not discouraged. The land was deep and rich and
the people who had settled upon it were poor but hopeful. They felt
that every day of hard work done in clearing the land was like laying
up treasure against the future. In New England they had fought against
a hard climate and had managed to find a living on stony unproductive
soil. The milder climate and the rich deep soil of Michigan was, they
felt, full of promise. Sarah's father like most of his neighbors had
gone into debt for his land and for tools with which to clear and work
it and every year spent most of his earnings in paying interest on a
mortgage held by a banker in a nearby town, but that did not discourage
him. He whistled as he went about his work and spoke often of a future
of ease and plenty. “In a few years and when the land is cleared we'll
make money hand over fist,” he declared.

When Sarah grew into young womanhood and went about among the young
people in the new country, she heard much talk of mortgages and of
the difficulty of making ends meet, but every one spoke of the hard
conditions as temporary. In every mind the future was bright with
promise. Throughout the whole Mid-American country, in Ohio, Northern
Indiana and Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa a hopeful spirit prevailed.
In every breast hope fought a successful war with poverty and
discouragement. Optimism got into the blood of the children and later
led to the same kind of hopeful courageous development of the whole
western country. The sons and daughters of these hardy people no doubt
had their minds too steadily fixed on the problem of the paying off of
mortgages and getting on in the world, but there was courage in them. If
they, with the frugal and sometimes niggardly New Englanders from whom
they were sprung, have given modern American life a too material
flavor, they have at least created a land in which a less determinedly
materialistic people may in their turn live in comfort.

In the midst of the little hopeless community of beaten men and yellow
defeated women on the bank of the Mississippi River, the woman who had
become Hugh McVey's second mother and in whose veins flowed the blood
of the pioneers, felt herself undefeated and unbeatable. She and her
husband would, she felt, stay in the Missouri town for a while and then
move on to a larger town and a better position in life. They would
move on and up until the little fat man was a railroad president or a
millionaire. It was the way things were done. She had no doubt of the
future. “Do everything well,” she said to her husband, who was perfectly
satisfied with his position in life and had no exalted notions as to his
future. “Remember to make your reports out neatly and clearly. Show them
you can do perfectly the task given you to do, and you will be given
a chance at a larger task. Some day when you least expect it something
will happen. You will be called up into a position of power. We won't be
compelled to stay in this hole of a place very long.”

The ambitious energetic little woman, who had taken the son of the
indolent farm hand to her heart, constantly talked to him of her own
people. Every afternoon when her housework was done she took the boy
into the front room of the house and spent hours laboring with him over
his lessons. She worked upon the problem of rooting the stupidity and
dullness out of his mind as her father had worked at the problem of
rooting the stumps out of the Michigan land. After the lesson for the
day had been gone over and over until Hugh was in a stupor of mental
weariness, she put the books aside and talked to him. With glowing
fervor she made for him a picture of her own youth and the people and
places where she had lived. In the picture she represented the New
Englanders of the Michigan farming community as a strong god-like race,
always honest, always frugal, and always pushing ahead. His own people
she utterly condemned. She pitied him for the blood in his veins. The
boy had then and all his life certain physical difficulties she could
never understand. The blood did not flow freely through his long body.
His feet and hands were always cold and there was for him an almost
sensual satisfaction to be had from just lying perfectly still in the
station yard and letting the hot sun beat down on him.

Sarah Shepard looked upon what she called Hugh's laziness as a thing of
the spirit. “You have got to get over it,” she declared. “Look at your
own people--poor white trash--how lazy and shiftless they are. You can't
be like them. It's a sin to be so dreamy and worthless.”

Swept along by the energetic spirit of the woman, Hugh fought to
overcome his inclination to give himself up to vaporous dreams. He
became convinced that his own people were really of inferior stock, that
they were to be kept away from and not to be taken into account. During
the first year after he came to live with the Shepards, he sometimes
gave way to a desire to return to his old lazy life with his father in
the shack by the river. People got off steamboats at the town and took
the train to other towns lying back from the river. He earned a little
money by carrying trunks filled with clothes or traveling men's samples
up an incline from the steamboat landing to the railroad station. Even
at fourteen the strength in his long gaunt body was so great that he
could out-lift any man in town, and he put one of the trunks on his
shoulder and walked slowly and stolidly away with it as a farm horse
might have walked along a country road with a boy of six perched on his
back.

The money earned in this way Hugh for a time gave to his father, and
when the man had become stupid with drink he grew quarrelsome and
demanded that the boy return to live with him. Hugh had not the spirit
to refuse and sometimes did not want to refuse. When neither the station
master nor his wife was about he slipped away and went with his father
to sit for a half day with his back against the wall of the fishing
shack, his soul at peace. In the sunlight he sat and stretched forth his
long legs. His small sleepy eyes stared out over the river. A delicious
feeling crept over him and for the moment he thought of himself as
completely happy and made up his mind that he did not want to return
again to the railroad station and to the woman who was so determined to
arouse him and make of him a man of her own people.

Hugh looked at his father asleep and snoring in the long grass on the
river bank. An odd feeling of disloyalty crept over him and he became
uncomfortable. The man's mouth was open and he snored lustily. From his
greasy and threadbare clothing arose the smell of fish. Flies gathered
in swarms and alighted on his face. Disgust took possession of Hugh.
A flickering but ever recurring light came into his eyes. With all the
strength of his awakening soul he struggled against the desire to give
way to the inclination to stretch himself out beside the man and sleep.
The words of the New England woman, who was, he knew, striving to lift
him out of slothfulness and ugliness into some brighter and better way
of life, echoed dimly in his mind. When he arose and went back along the
street to the station master's house and when the woman there looked at
him reproachfully and muttered words about the poor white trash of the
town, he was ashamed and looked at the floor.

Hugh began to hate his own father and his own people. He connected
the man who had bred him with the dreaded inclination toward sloth in
himself. When the farmhand came to the station and demanded the money
he had earned by carrying trunks, he turned away and went across a
dusty road to the Shepard's house. After a year or two he paid no more
attention to the dissolute farmhand who came occasionally to the station
to mutter and swear at him; and, when he had earned a little money, gave
it to the woman to keep for him. “Well,” he said, speaking slowly and
with the hesitating drawl characteristic of his people, “if you give me
time I'll learn. I want to be what you want me to be. If you stick to me
I'll try to make a man of myself.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Hugh McVey lived in the Missouri town under the tutelage of Sarah
Shepard until he was nineteen years old. Then the station master gave up
railroading and went back to Michigan. Sarah Shepard's father had died
after having cleared one hundred and twenty acres of the cut-over timber
land and it had been left to her. The dream that had for years lurked
in the back of the little woman's mind and in which she saw bald-headed,
good-natured Henry Shepard become a power in the railroad world had
begun to fade. In newspapers and magazines she read constantly of other
men who, starting from a humble position in the railroad service, soon
became rich and powerful, but nothing of the kind seemed likely to
happen to her husband. Under her watchful eye he did his work well and
carefully but nothing came of it. Officials of the railroad sometimes
passed through the town riding in private cars hitched to the end of one
of the through trains, but the trains did not stop and the officials
did not alight and, calling Henry out of the station, reward his
faithfulness by piling new responsibilities upon him, as railroad
officials did in such cases in the stories she read. When her father
died and she saw a chance to again turn her face eastward and to live
again among her own people, she told her husband to resign his position
with the air of one accepting an undeserved defeat. The station master
managed to get Hugh appointed in his place, and the two people went
away one gray morning in October, leaving the tall ungainly young man in
charge of affairs. He had books to keep, freight waybills to make out,
messages to receive, dozens of definite things to do. Early in the
morning before the train that was to take her away, came to the station,
Sarah Shepard called the young man to her and repeated the instructions
she had so often given her husband. “Do everything neatly and
carefully,” she said. “Show yourself worthy of the trust that has been
given you.”

The New England woman wanted to assure the boy, as she had so often
assured her husband, that if he would but work hard and faithfully
promotion would inevitably come; but in the face of the fact that Henry
Shepard had for years done without criticism the work Hugh was to do and
had received neither praise nor blame from those above him, she found
it impossible to say the words that arose to her lips. The woman and
the son of the people among whom she had lived for five years and had
so often condemned, stood beside each other in embarrassed silence.
Stripped of her assurance as to the purpose of life and unable to repeat
her accustomed formula, Sarah Shepard had nothing to say. Hugh's tall
figure, leaning against the post that supported the roof of the front
porch of the little house where she had taught him his lessons day after
day, seemed to her suddenly old and she thought his long solemn face
suggested a wisdom older and more mature than her own. An odd revulsion
of feeling swept over her. For the moment she began to doubt the
advisability of trying to be smart and to get on in life. If Hugh had
been somewhat smaller of frame so that her mind could have taken hold of
the fact of his youth and immaturity, she would no doubt have taken
him into her arms and said words regarding her doubts. Instead she
also became silent and the minutes slipped away as the two people stood
before each other and stared at the floor of the porch. When the train
on which she was to leave blew a warning whistle, and Henry Shepard
called to her from the station platform, she put a hand on the lapel of
Hugh's coat and drawing his face down, for the first time kissed him on
the cheek. Tears came into her eyes and into the eyes of the young man.
When he stepped across the porch to get her bag Hugh stumbled awkwardly
against a chair. “Well, you do the best you can here,” Sarah Shepard
said quickly and then out of long habit and half unconsciously did
repeat her formula. “Do little things well and big opportunities are
bound to come,” she declared as she walked briskly along beside Hugh
across the narrow road and to the station and the train that was to bear
her away.

After the departure of Sarah and Henry Shepard Hugh continued to
struggle with his inclination to give way to dreams. It seemed to him a
struggle it was necessary to win in order that he might show his respect
and appreciation of the woman who had spent so many long hours laboring
with him. Although, under her tutelage, he had received a better
education than any other young man of the river town, he had lost none
of his physical desire to sit in the sun and do nothing. When he worked,
every task had to be consciously carried on from minute to minute.
After the woman left, there were days when he sat in the chair in the
telegraph office and fought a desperate battle with himself. A queer
determined light shone in his small gray eyes. He arose from the chair
and walked up and down the station platform. Each time as he lifted one
of his long feet and set it slowly down a special little effort had to
be made. To move about at all was a painful performance, something he
did not want to do. All physical acts were to him dull but necessary
parts of his training for a vague and glorious future that was to come
to him some day in a brighter and more beautiful land that lay in the
direction thought of rather indefinitely as the East. “If I do not move
and keep moving I'll become like father, like all of the people about
here,” Hugh said to himself. He thought of the man who had bred him
and whom he occasionally saw drifting aimlessly along Main Street or
sleeping away a drunken stupor on the river bank. He was disgusted with
him and had come to share the opinion the station master's wife had
always held concerning the people of the Missouri village. “They're a
lot of miserable lazy louts,” she had declared a thousand times, and
Hugh, agreed with her, but sometimes wondered if in the end he might not
also become a lazy lout. That possibility he knew was in him and for
the sake of the woman as well as for his own sake he was determined it
should not be so.

The truth is that the people of Mudcat Landing were totally unlike any
of the people Sarah Shepard had ever known and unlike the people Hugh
was to know during his mature life. He who had come from a people not
smart was to live among smart energetic men and women and be called
a big man by them without in the least understanding what they were
talking about.

Practically all of the people of Hugh's home town were of Southern
origin. Living originally in a land where all physical labor was
performed by slaves, they had come to have a deep aversion to physical
labor. In the South their fathers, having no money to buy slaves of
their own and being unwilling to compete with slave labor, had tried to
live without labor. For the most part they lived in the mountains
and the hill country of Kentucky and Tennessee, on land too poor and
unproductive to be thought worth cultivating by their rich slave-owning
neighbors of the valleys and plains. Their food was meager and of an
enervating sameness and their bodies degenerate. Children grew up long
and gaunt and yellow like badly nourished plants. Vague indefinite
hungers took hold of them and they gave themselves over to dreams.
The more energetic among them, sensing dimly the unfairness of their
position in life, became vicious and dangerous. Feuds started among them
and they killed each other to express their hatred of life. When, in
the years preceding the Civil War, a few of them pushed north along
the rivers and settled in Southern Indiana and Illinois and in Eastern
Missouri and Arkansas, they seemed to have exhausted their energy in
making the voyage and slipped quickly back into their old slothful way
of life. Their impulse to emigrate did not carry them far and but a few
of them ever reached the rich corn lands of central Indiana, Illinois
or Iowa or the equally rich land back from the river in Missouri or
Arkansas. In Southern Indiana and Illinois they were merged into the
life about them and with the infusion of new blood they a little awoke.
They have tempered the quality of the peoples of those regions,
made them perhaps less harshly energetic than their forefathers, the
pioneers. In many of the Missouri and Arkansas river towns they have
changed but little. A visitor to these parts may see them there to-day,
long, gaunt, and lazy, sleeping their lives away and awakening out of
their stupor only at long intervals and at the call of hunger.

As for Hugh McVey, he stayed in his home town and among his own people
for a year after the departure of the man and woman who had been father
and mother to him, and then he also departed. All through the year he
worked constantly to cure himself of the curse of indolence. When he
awoke in the morning he did not dare lie in bed for a moment for fear
indolence would overcome him and he would not be able to arise at all.
Getting out of bed at once he dressed and went to the station. During
the day there was not much work to be done and he walked for hours up
and down the station platform. When he sat down he at once took up
a book and put his mind to work. When the pages of the book became
indistinct before his eyes and he felt within him the inclination
to drift off into dreams, he again arose and walked up and down the
platform. Having accepted the New England woman's opinion of his own
people and not wanting to associate with them, his life became utterly
lonely and his loneliness also drove him to labor.

Something happened to him. Although his body would not and never did
become active, his mind began suddenly to work with feverish eagerness.
The vague thoughts and feelings that had always been a part of him but
that had been indefinite, ill-defined things, like clouds floating far
away in a hazy sky, began to grow definite. In the evening after his
work was done and he had locked the station for the night, he did not go
to the town hotel where he had taken a room and where he ate his meals,
but wandered about town and along the road that ran south beside the
great mysterious river. A hundred new and definite desires and hungers
awoke in him. He began to want to talk with people, to know men and
most of all to know women, but the disgust for his fellows in the town,
engendered in him by Sarah Shepard's words and most of all by the things
in his nature that were like their natures, made him draw back. When in
the fall at the end of the year after the Shepards had left and he
began living alone, his father was killed in a senseless quarrel with a
drunken river man over the ownership of a dog, a sudden, and what seemed
to him at the moment heroic resolution came to him. He went early one
morning to one of the town's two saloon keepers, a man who had been his
father's' nearest approach to a friend and companion, and gave him money
to bury the dead man. Then he wired to the headquarters of the railroad
company telling them to send a man to Mudcat Landing to take his place.
On the afternoon of the day on which his father was buried, he bought
himself a handbag and packed his few belongings. Then he sat down alone
on the steps of the railroad station to wait for the evening train that
would bring the man who was to replace him and that would at the same
time take him away. He did not know where he intended to go, but knew
that he wanted to push out into a new land and get among new people.
He thought he would go east and north. He remembered the long summer
evenings in the river town when the station master slept and his wife
talked. The boy who listened had wanted to sleep also, but with the eyes
of Sarah Shepard fixed on him, had not dared to do so. The woman had
talked of a land dotted with towns where the houses were all painted in
bright colors, where young girls dressed in white dresses went about in
the evening, walking under trees beside streets paved with bricks, where
there was no dust or mud, where stores were gay bright places filled
with beautiful wares that the people had money to buy in abundance and
where every one was alive and doing things worth while and none was
slothful and lazy. The boy who had now become a man wanted to go to such
a place. His work in the railroad station had given him some idea of the
geography of the country and, although he could not have told whether
the woman who had talked so enticingly had in mind her childhood in New
England or her girlhood in Michigan, he knew in a general way that to
reach the land and the people who were to show him by their lives the
better way to form his own life, he must go east. He decided that the
further east he went the more beautiful life would become, and that he
had better not try going too far in the beginning. “I'll go into the
northern part of Indiana or Ohio,” he told himself. “There must be
beautiful towns in those places.”

Hugh was boyishly eager to get on his way and to become at once a part
of the life in a new place. The gradual awakening of his mind had
given him courage, and he thought of himself as armed and ready for
association with men. He wanted to become acquainted with and be
the friend of people whose lives were beautifully lived and who were
themselves beautiful and full of significance. As he sat on the steps
of the railroad station in the poor little Missouri town with his bag
beside him, and thought of all the things he wanted to do in life, his
mind became so eager and restless that some of its restlessness was
transmitted to his body. For perhaps the first time in his life he arose
without conscious effort and walked up and down the station platform out
of an excess of energy. He thought he could not bear to wait until the
train came and brought the man who was to take his place. “Well, I'm
going away, I'm going away to be a man among men,” he said to himself
over and over. The saying became a kind of refrain and he said
it unconsciously. As he repeated the words his heart beat high in
anticipation of the future he thought lay before him.




CHAPTER II


Hugh McVey left the town of Mudcat Landing in early September of the
year eighteen eighty-six. He was then twenty years old and was six feet
and four inches tall. The whole upper part of his body was immensely
strong but his long legs were ungainly and lifeless. He secured a pass
from the railroad company that had employed him, and rode north along
the river in the night train until he came to a large town named
Burlington in the State of Iowa. There a bridge went over the river, and
the railroad tracks joined those of a trunk line and ran eastward toward
Chicago; but Hugh did not continue his journey on that night. Getting
off the train he went to a nearby hotel and took a room for the night.

It was a cool clear evening and Hugh was restless. The town of
Burlington, a prosperous place in the midst of a rich farming country,
overwhelmed him with its stir and bustle. For the first time he saw
brick-paved streets and streets lighted with lamps. Although it was
nearly ten o'clock at night when he arrived, people still walked about
in the streets and many stores were open.

The hotel where he had taken a room faced the railroad tracks and stood
at the corner of a brightly lighted street. When he had been shown to
his room Hugh sat for a half hour by an open window, and then as he
could not sleep, decided to go for a walk. For a time he walked in the
streets where the people stood about before the doors of the stores but,
as his tall figure attracted attention and he felt people staring at
him, he went presently into a side street.

In a few minutes he became utterly lost. He went through what seemed to
him miles of streets lined with frame and brick houses, and occasionally
passed people, but was too timid and embarrassed to ask his way. The
street climbed upward and after a time he got into open country and
followed a road that ran along a cliff overlooking the Mississippi
River. The night was clear and the sky brilliant with stars. In the
open, away from the multitude of houses, he no longer felt awkward and
afraid, and went cheerfully along. After a time he stopped and stood
facing the river. Standing on a high cliff and with a grove of trees
at his back, the stars seemed to have all gathered in the eastern sky.
Below him the water of the river reflected the stars. They seemed to be
making a pathway for him into the East.

The tall Missouri countryman sat down on a log near the edge of the
cliff and tried to see the water in the river below. Nothing was visible
but a bed of stars that danced and twinkled in the darkness. He had
made his way to a place far above the railroad bridge, but presently a
through passenger train from the West passed over it and the lights of
the train looked also like stars, stars that moved and beckoned and that
seemed to fly like flocks of birds out of the West into the East.

For several hours Hugh sat on the log in the darkness. He decided that
it was hopeless for him to find his way back to the hotel, and was glad
of the excuse for staying abroad. His body for the first time in his
life felt light and strong and his mind was feverishly awake. A buggy
in which sat a young man and woman went along the road at his back,
and after the voices had died away silence came, broken only at long
intervals during the hours when he sat thinking of his future by
the barking of a dog in some distant house or the churning of the
paddle-wheels of a passing river boat.

All of the early formative years of Hugh McVey's life had been spent
within sound of the lapping of the waters of the Mississippi River. He
had seen it in the hot summer when the water receded and the mud lay
baked and cracked along the edge of the water; in the spring when the
floods raged and the water went whirling past, bearing tree logs and
even parts of houses; in the winter when the water looked deathly cold
and ice floated past; and in the fall when it was quiet and still and
lovely, and seemed to have sucked an almost human quality of warmth out
of the red trees that lined its shores. Hugh had spent hours and days
sitting or lying in the grass beside the river. The fishing shack in
which he had lived with his father until he was fourteen years old was
within a half dozen long strides of the river's edge, and the boy had
often been left there alone for a week at a time. When his father had
gone for a trip on a lumber raft or to work for a few days on some farm
in the country back from the river, the boy, left often without money
and with but a few loaves of bread, went fishing when he was hungry and
when he was not did nothing but idle the days away in the grass on the
river bank. Boys from the town came sometimes to spend an hour with him,
but in their presence he was embarrassed and a little annoyed. He wanted
to be left alone with his dreams. One of the boys, a sickly, pale,
undeveloped lad of ten, often stayed with him through an entire summer
afternoon. He was the son of a merchant in the town and grew quickly
tired when he tried to follow other boys about. On the river bank he lay
beside Hugh in silence. The two got into Hugh's boat and went fishing
and the merchant's son grew animated and talked. He taught Hugh to write
his own name and to read a few words. The shyness that kept them apart
had begun to break down, when the merchant's son caught some childhood
disease and died.

In the darkness above the cliff that night in Burlington Hugh remembered
things concerning his boyhood that had not come back to his mind in
years. The very thoughts that had passed through his mind during those
long days of idling on the river bank came streaming back.

After his fourteenth year when he went to work at the railroad station
Hugh had stayed away from the river. With his work at the station, and
in the garden back of Sarah Shepard's house, and the lessons in the
afternoons, he had little idle time. On Sundays however things were
different. Sarah Shepard did not go to church after she came to
Mudcat Landing, but she would have no work done on Sundays. On Sunday
afternoons in the summer she and her husband sat in chairs beneath a
tree beside the house and went to sleep. Hugh got into the habit of
going off by himself. He wanted to sleep also, but did not dare. He went
along the river bank by the road that ran south from the town, and when
he had followed it two or three miles, turned into a grove of trees and
lay down in the shade.

The long summer Sunday afternoons had been delightful times for Hugh, so
delightful that he finally gave them up, fearing they might lead him to
take up again his old sleepy way of life. Now as he sat in the darkness
above the same river he had gazed on through the long Sunday afternoons,
a spasm of something like loneliness swept over him. For the first time
he thought about leaving the river country and going into a new land
with a keen feeling of regret.

On the Sunday afternoons in the woods south of Mudcat Landing Hugh had
lain perfectly still in the grass for hours. The smell of dead fish that
had always been present about the shack where he spent his boyhood, was
gone and there were no swarms of flies. Above his head a breeze played
through the branches of the trees, and insects sang in the grass.
Everything about him was clean. A lovely stillness pervaded the river
and the woods. He lay on his belly and gazed down over the river out of
sleep-heavy eyes into hazy distances. Half formed thoughts passed like
visions through his mind. He dreamed, but his dreams were unformed and
vaporous. For hours the half dead, half alive state into which he had
got, persisted. He did not sleep but lay in a land between sleeping and
waking. Pictures formed in his mind. The clouds that floated in the sky
above the river took on strange, grotesque shapes. They began to move.
One of the clouds separated itself from the others. It moved swiftly
away into the dim distance and then returned. It became a half human
thing and seemed to be marshaling the other clouds. Under its influence
they became agitated and moved restlessly about. Out of the body of the
most active of the clouds long vaporous arms were extended. They pulled
and hauled at the other clouds making them also restless and agitated.

Hugh's mind, as he sat in the darkness on the cliff above the river that
night in Burlington, was deeply stirred. Again he was a boy lying in
the woods above his river, and the visions that had come to him there
returned with startling clearness. He got off the log and lying in the
wet grass, closed his eyes. His body became warm.

Hugh thought his mind had gone out of his body and up into the sky
to join the clouds and the stars, to play with them. From the sky he
thought he looked down on the earth and saw rolling fields, hills and
forests. He had no part in the lives of the men and women of the earth,
but was torn away from them, left to stand by himself. From his place in
the sky above the earth he saw the great river going majestically along.
For a time it was quiet and contemplative as the sky had been when he
was a boy down below lying on his belly in the wood. He saw men pass in
boats and could hear their voices dimly. A great quiet prevailed and he
looked abroad beyond the wide expanse of the river and saw fields and
towns. They were all hushed and still. An air of waiting hung over
them. And then the river was whipped into action by some strange unknown
force, something that had come out of a distant place, out of the place
to which the cloud had gone and from which it had returned to stir and
agitate the other clouds.

The river now went tearing along. It overflowed its banks and swept
over the land, uprooting trees and forests and towns. The white faces of
drowned men and children, borne along by the flood, looked up into the
mind's eye of the man Hugh, who, in the moment of his setting out into
the definite world of struggle and defeat, had let himself slip back
into the vaporous dreams of his boyhood.

As he lay in the wet grass in the darkness on the cliff Hugh tried
to force his way back to consciousness, but for a long time was
unsuccessful. He rolled and writhed about and his lips muttered words.
It was useless. His mind also was swept away. The clouds of which he
felt himself a part flew across the face of the sky. They blotted out
the sun from the earth, and darkness descended on the land, on the
troubled towns, on the hills that were torn open, on the forests that
were destroyed, on the peace and quiet of all places. In the country
stretching away from the river where all had been peace and quiet,
all was now agitation and unrest. Houses were destroyed and instantly
rebuilt. People gathered in whirling crowds.

The dreaming man felt himself a part of something significant and
terrible that was happening to the earth and to the peoples of the
earth. Again he struggled to awake, to force himself back out of the
dream world into consciousness. When he did awake, day was breaking
and he sat on the very edge of the cliff that looked down upon the
Mississippi River, gray now in the dim morning light.

       *       *       *       *       *

The towns in which Hugh lived during the first three years after he
began his eastward journey were all small places containing a few
hundred people, and were scattered through Illinois, Indiana and western
Ohio. All of the people among whom he worked and lived during that
time were farmers and laborers. In the spring of the first year of his
wandering he passed through the city of Chicago and spent two hours
there, going in and out at the same railroad station.

He was not tempted to become a city man. The huge commercial city at the
foot of Lake Michigan, because of its commanding position in the very
center of a vast farming empire, had already become gigantic. He never
forgot the two hours he spent standing in the station in the heart of
the city and walking in the street adjoining the station. It was evening
when he came into the roaring, clanging place. On the long wide plains
west of the city he saw farmers at work with their spring plowing as the
train went flying along. Presently the farms grew small and the whole
prairie dotted with towns. In these the train did not stop but ran into
a crowded network of streets filled with multitudes of people. When he
got into the big dark station Hugh saw thousands of people rushing about
like disturbed insects. Unnumbered thousands of people were going out of
the city at the end of their day of work and trains waited to take
them to towns on the prairies. They came in droves, hurrying along like
distraught cattle, over a bridge and into the station. The in-bound
crowds that had alighted from through trains coming from cities of the
East and West climbed up a stairway to the street, and those that were
out-bound tried to descend by the same stairway and at the same time.
The result was a whirling churning mass of humanity. Every one pushed
and crowded his way along. Men swore, women grew angry, and children
cried. Near the doorway that opened into the street a long line of cab
drivers shouted and roared.

Hugh looked at the people who were whirled along past him, and shivered
with the nameless fear of multitudes, common to country boys in the
city. When the rush of people had a little subsided he went out of the
station and, walking across a narrow street, stood by a brick store
building. Presently the rush of people began again, and again men,
women, and boys came hurrying across the bridge and ran wildly in at
the doorway leading into the station. They came in waves as water washes
along a beach during a storm. Hugh had a feeling that if he were by
some chance to get caught in the crowd he would be swept away into
some unknown and terrible place. Waiting until the rush had a little
subsided, he went across the street and on to the bridge to look at the
river that flowed past the station. It was narrow and filled with ships,
and the water looked gray and dirty. A pall of black smoke covered the
sky. From all sides of him and even in the air above his head a great
clatter and roar of bells and whistles went on.

With the air of a child venturing into a dark forest Hugh went a little
way into one of the streets that led westward from the station. Again
he stopped and stood by a building. Near at hand a group of young
city roughs stood smoking and talking before a saloon. Out of a nearby
building came a young girl who approached and spoke to one of them.
The man began to swear furiously. “You tell her I'll come in there in
a minute and smash her face,” he said, and, paying no more attention to
the girl, turned to stare at Hugh. All of the young men lounging before
the saloon turned to stare at the tall countryman. They began to laugh
and one of them walked quickly toward him.

Hugh ran along the street and into the station followed by the shouts of
the young roughs. He did not venture out again, and when his train
was ready, got aboard and went gladly out of the great complex
dwelling-place of modern Americans.

Hugh went from town to town always working his way eastward, always
seeking the place where happiness was to come to him and where he was to
achieve companionship with men and women. He cut fence posts in a forest
on a large farm in Indiana, worked in the fields, and in one place was a
section hand on the railroad.

On a farm in Indiana, some forty miles east of Indianapolis, he was for
the first time powerfully touched by the presence of a woman. She was
the daughter of the farmer who was Hugh's employer, and was an alert,
handsome woman of twenty-four who had been a school teacher but had
given up the work because she was about to be married. Hugh thought the
man who was to marry her the most fortunate being in the world. He lived
in Indianapolis and came by train to spend the week-ends at the farm.
The woman prepared for his coming by putting on a white dress and
fastening a rose in her hair. The two people walked about in an orchard
beside the house or went for a ride along the country roads. The
young man, who, Hugh had been told, worked in a bank, wore stiff white
collars, a black suit and a black derby hat.

On the farm Hugh worked in the field with the farmer and ate at table
with his family, but did not get acquainted with them. On Sunday when
the young man came he took the day off and went into a nearby town. The
courtship became a matter very close to him and he lived through
the excitement of the weekly visits as though he had been one of the
principals. The daughter of the house, sensing the fact that the
silent farm hand was stirred by her presence, became interested in him.
Sometimes in the evening as he sat on a little porch before the house,
she came to join him, and sat looking at him with a peculiarly detached
and interested air. She tried to make talk, but Hugh answered all her
advances so briefly and with such a half frightened manner that she gave
up the attempt. One Saturday evening when her sweetheart had come she
took him for a ride in the family carriage, and Hugh concealed himself
in the hay loft of the barn to wait for their return.

Hugh had never seen or heard a man express in any way his affection for
a woman. It seemed to him a terrifically heroic thing to do and he
hoped by concealing himself in the barn to see it done. It was a bright
moonlight night and he waited until nearly eleven o'clock before the
lovers returned. In the hayloft there was an opening high up under the
roof. Because of his great height he could reach and pull himself up,
and when he had done so, found a footing on one of the beams that formed
the framework of the barn. The lovers stood unhitching the horse in the
barnyard below. When the city man had led the horse into the stable he
hurried quickly out again and went with the farmer's daughter along a
path toward the house. The two people laughed and pulled at each other
like children. They grew silent and when they had come near the house,
stopped by a tree to embrace. Hugh saw the man take the woman into his
arms and hold her tightly against his body. He was so excited that he
nearly fell off the beam. His imagination was inflamed and he tried
to picture himself in the position of the young city man. His fingers
gripped the boards to which he clung and his body trembled. The two
figures standing in the dim light by the tree became one. For a long
time they clung tightly to each other and then drew apart. They went
into the house and Hugh climbed down from his place on the beam and
lay in the hay. His body shook as with a chill and he was half ill of
jealousy, anger, and an overpowering sense of defeat. It did not seem to
him at the moment that it was worth while for him to go further east or
to try to find a place where he would be able to mingle freely with men
and women, or where such a wonderful thing as had happened to the man in
the barnyard below might happen to him.

Hugh spent the night in the hayloft and at daylight crept out and went
into a nearby town. He returned to the farmhouse late on Monday when
he was sure the city man had gone away. In spite of the protest of
the farmer he packed his clothes at once and declared his intention of
leaving. He did not wait for the evening meal but hurried out of the
house. When he got into the road and had started to walk away, he looked
back and saw the daughter of the house standing at an open door and
looking at him. Shame for what he had done on the night before swept
over him. For a moment he stared at the woman who, with an intense,
interested air stared back at him, and then putting down his head he
hurried away. The woman watched him out of sight and later, when her
father stormed about the house, blaming Hugh for leaving so suddenly and
declaring the tall Missourian was no doubt a drunkard who wanted to go
off on a drunk, she had nothing to say. In her own heart she knew what
was the matter with her father's farm hand and was sorry he had gone
before she had more completely exercised her power over him.

       *       *       *       *       *

None of the towns Hugh visited during his three years of wandering
approached realization of the sort of life Sarah Shepard had talked to
him about. They were all very much alike. There was a main street with
a dozen stores on each side, a blacksmith shop, and perhaps an elevator
for the storage of grain. All day the town was deserted, but in the
evening the citizens gathered on Main Street. On the sidewalks before
the stores young farm hands and clerks sat on store boxes or on the
curbing. They did not pay any attention to Hugh who, when he went to
stand near them, remained silent and kept himself in the background. The
farm hands talked of their work and boasted of the number of bushels of
corn they could pick in a day, or of their skill in plowing. The clerks
were intent upon playing practical jokes which pleased the farm hands
immensely. While one of them talked loudly of his skill in his work a
clerk crept out at the door of one of the stores and approached him. He
held a pin in his hand and with it jabbed the talker in the back. The
crowd yelled and shouted with delight. If the victim became angry a
quarrel started, but this did not often happen. Other men came to join
the party and the joke was told to them. “Well, you should have seen
the look on his face. I thought I would die,” one of the bystanders
declared.

Hugh got a job with a carpenter who specialized in the building of barns
and stayed with him all through one fall. Later he went to work as a
section hand on a railroad. Nothing happened to him. He was like one
compelled to walk through life with a bandage over his eyes. On all
sides of him, in the towns and on the farms, an undercurrent of life
went on that did not touch him. In even the smallest of the towns,
inhabited only by farm laborers, a quaint interesting civilization was
being developed. Men worked hard but were much in the open air and
had time to think. Their minds reached out toward the solution of the
mystery of existence. The schoolmaster and the country lawyer read Tom
Paine's “Age of Reason” and Bellamy's “Looking Backward.” They discussed
these books with their fellows. There was a feeling, ill expressed, that
America had something real and spiritual to offer to the rest of the
world. Workmen talked to each other of the new tricks of their trades,
and after hours of discussion of some new way to cultivate corn, shape
a horseshoe or build a barn, spoke of God and his intent concerning
man. Long drawn out discussions of religious beliefs and the political
destiny of America were carried on.

And across the background of these discussions ran tales of action in
a sphere outside the little world in which the inhabitants of the towns
lived. Men who had been in the Civil War and who had climbed fighting
over hills and in the terror of defeat had swum wide rivers, told the
tale of their adventures.

In the evening, after his day of work in the field or on the railroad
with the section hands, Hugh did not know what to do with himself. That
he did not go to bed immediately after the evening meal was due to the
fact that he looked upon his tendency to sleep and to dream as an enemy
to his development; and a peculiarly persistent determination to make
something alive and worth while out of himself--the result of the five
years of constant talking on the subject by the New England woman--had
taken possession of him. “I'll find the right place and the right people
and then I'll begin,” he continually said to himself.

And then, worn out with weariness and loneliness, he went to bed in
one of the little hotels or boarding houses where he lived during those
years, and his dreams returned. The dream that had come that night as
he lay on the cliff above the Mississippi River near the town of
Burlington, came back time after time. He sat upright in bed in the
darkness of his room and after he had driven the cloudy, vague sensation
out of his brain, was afraid to go to sleep again. He did not want to
disturb the people of the house and so got up and dressed and without
putting on his shoes walked up and down in the room. Sometimes the room
he occupied had a low ceiling and he was compelled to stoop. He crept
out of the house carrying his shoes in his hand and sat down on the
sidewalk to put them on. In all the towns he visited, people saw him
walking alone through the streets late at night or in the early hours of
the morning. Whispers concerning the matter ran about. The story of what
was spoken of as his queerness came to the men with whom he worked,
and they found themselves unable to talk freely and naturally in his
presence. At the noon hour when the men ate the lunch they had carried
to work, when the boss was gone and it was customary among the workers
to talk of their own affairs, they went off by themselves. Hugh followed
them about. They went to sit under a tree, and when Hugh came to stand
nearby, they became silent or the more vulgar and shallow among them
began to show off. While he worked with a half dozen other men as a
section hand on the railroad, two men did all the talking. Whenever the
boss went away an old man who had a reputation as a wit told stories
concerning his relations with women. A young man with red hair took the
cue from him. The two men talked loudly and kept looking at Hugh. The
younger of the two wits turned to another workman who had a weak, timid
face. “Well, you,” he cried, “what about your old woman? What about her?
Who is the father of your son? Do you dare tell?”

In the towns Hugh walked about in the evening and tried always to keep
his mind fixed on definite things. He felt that humanity was for some
unknown reason drawing itself away from him, and his mind turned back
to the figure of Sarah Shepard. He remembered that she had never been
without things to do. She scrubbed her kitchen floor and prepared food
for cooking; she washed, ironed, kneaded dough for bread, and mended
clothes. In the evening, when she made the boy read to her out of one of
the school books or do sums on a slate, she kept her hands busy knitting
socks for him or for her husband. Except when something had crossed her
so that she scolded and her face grew red, she was always cheerful.
When the boy had nothing to do at the station and had been sent by the
station master to work about the house, to draw water from the cistern
for a family washing, or pull weeds in the garden, he heard the woman
singing as she went about the doing of her innumerable petty tasks. Hugh
decided that he also must do small tasks, fix his mind upon definite
things. In the town where he was employed as a section hand, the cloud
dream in which the world became a whirling, agitated center of disaster
came to him almost every night. Winter came on and he walked through
the streets at night in the darkness and through the deep snow. He was
almost frozen; but as the whole lower part of his body was habitually
cold he did not much mind the added discomfort, and so great was the
reserve of strength in his big frame that the loss of sleep did not
affect his ability to labor all day without effort.

Hugh went into one of the residence streets of the town and counted the
pickets in the fences before the houses. He returned to the hotel and
made a calculation as to the number of pickets in all the fences in
town. Then he got a rule at the hardware store and carefully measured
the pickets. He tried to estimate the number of pickets that could be
cut out of certain sized trees and that gave his mind another opening.
He counted the number of trees in every street in town. He learned to
tell at a glance and with relative accuracy how much lumber could be cut
out of a tree. He built imaginary houses with lumber cut from the trees
that lined the streets. He even tried to figure out a way to utilize the
small limbs cut from the tops of the trees, and one Sunday went into the
wood back of the town and cut a great armful of twigs, which he carried
to his room and later with great patience wove into the form of a
basket.




BOOK TWO


CHAPTER III


Bidwell, Ohio, was an old town as the ages of towns go in the Central
West, long before Hugh McVey, in his search for a place where he could
penetrate the wall that shut him off from humanity, went there to live
and to try to work out his problem. It is a busy manufacturing town now
and has a population of nearly a hundred thousand people; but the time
for the telling of the story of its sudden and surprising growth has not
yet come.

From the beginning Bidwell has been a prosperous place. The town lies
in the valley of a deep, rapid-flowing river that spreads out just
above the town, becomes for the time wide and shallow, and goes singing
swiftly along over stones. South of the town the river not only spreads
out, but the hills recede. A wide flat valley stretches away to the
north. In the days before the factories came the land immediately about
town was cut up into small farms devoted to fruit and berry raising,
and beyond the area of small farms lay larger tracts that were immensely
productive and that raised huge crops of wheat, corn, and cabbage.

When Hugh was a boy sleeping away his days in the grass beside his
father's fishing shack by the Mississippi River, Bidwell had already
emerged out of the hardships of pioneer days. On the farms that lay in
the wide valley to the north the timber had been cut away and the stumps
had all been rooted out of the ground by a generation of men that had
passed. The soil was easy to cultivate and had lost little of its virgin
fertility. Two railroads, the Lake Shore and Michigan Central--later
a part of the great New York Central System--and a less important
coal-carrying road, called the Wheeling and Lake Erie, ran through the
town. Twenty-five hundred people lived then in Bidwell. They were for
the most part descendants of the pioneers who had come into the country
by boat through the Great Lakes or by wagon roads over the mountains
from the States of New York and Pennsylvania.

The town stood on a sloping incline running up from the river, and the
Lake Shore and Michigan Central Railroad had its station on the river
bank at the foot of Main Street. The Wheeling Station was a mile away to
the north. It was to be reached by going over a bridge and along a piked
road that even then had begun to take on the semblance of a street. A
dozen houses had been built facing Turner's Pike and between these were
berry fields and an occasional orchard planted to cherry, peach or apple
trees. A hard path went down to the distant station beside the road,
and in the evening this path, wandering along under the branches of
the fruit trees that extended out over the farm fences, was a favorite
walking place for lovers.

The small farms lying close about the town of Bidwell raised berries
that brought top prices in the two cities, Cleveland and Pittsburgh,
reached by its two railroads, and all of the people of the town who
were not engaged in one of the trades--in shoe making, carpentry, horse
shoeing, house painting or the like--or who did not belong to the small
merchant and professional classes, worked in summer on the land. On
summer mornings, men, women and children went into the fields. In the
early spring when planting went on and all through late May, June and
early July when berries and fruit began to ripen, every one was rushed
with work and the streets of the town were deserted. Every one went to
the fields. Great hay wagons loaded with children, laughing girls, and
sedate women set out from Main Street at dawn. Beside them walked tall
boys, who pelted the girls with green apples and cherries from the trees
along the road, and men who went along behind smoking their morning
pipes and talking of the prevailing prices of the products of their
fields. In the town after they had gone a Sabbath quiet prevailed. The
merchants and clerks loitered in the shade of the awnings before the
doors of the stores, and only their wives and the wives of the two or
three rich men in town came to buy and to disturb their discussions of
horse racing, politics and religion.

In the evening when the wagons came home, Bidwell awoke. The tired berry
pickers walked home from the fields in the dust of the roads swinging
their dinner pails. The wagons creaked at their heels, piled high with
boxes of berries ready for shipment. In the stores after the evening
meal crowds gathered. Old men lit their pipes and sat gossiping along
the curbing at the edge of the sidewalks on Main Street; women with
baskets on their arms did the marketing for the next day's living;
the young men put on stiff white collars and their Sunday clothes, and
girls, who all day had been crawling over the fields between the rows
of berries or pushing their way among the tangled masses of raspberry
bushes, put on white dresses and walked up and down before the men.
Friendships begun between boys and girls in the fields ripened into
love. Couples walked along residence streets under the trees and talked
with subdued voices. They became silent and embarrassed. The bolder
ones kissed. The end of the berry picking season brought each year a new
outbreak of marriages to the town of Bidwell.

In all the towns of mid-western America it was a time of waiting. The
country having been cleared and the Indians driven away into a vast
distant place spoken of vaguely as the West, the Civil War having been
fought and won, and there being no great national problems that touched
closely their lives, the minds of men were turned in upon themselves.
The soul and its destiny was spoken of openly on the streets. Robert
Ingersoll came to Bidwell to speak in Terry's Hall, and after he had
gone the question of the divinity of Christ for months occupied the
minds of the citizens. The ministers preached sermons on the subject
and in the evening it was talked about in the stores. Every one had
something to say. Even Charley Mook, who dug ditches, who stuttered so
that not a half dozen people in town could understand him, expressed his
opinion.

In all the great Mississippi Valley each town came to have a character
of its own, and the people who lived in the towns were to each other
like members of a great family. The individual idiosyncrasies of each
member of the great family stood forth. A kind of invisible roof beneath
which every one lived spread itself over each town. Beneath the roof
boys and girls were born, grew up, quarreled, fought, and formed
friendships with their fellows, were introduced into the mysteries of
love, married, and became the fathers and mothers of children, grew old,
sickened, and died.

Within the invisible circle and under the great roof every one knew his
neighbor and was known to him. Strangers did not come and go swiftly and
mysteriously and there was no constant and confusing roar of machinery
and of new projects afoot. For the moment mankind seemed about to take
time to try to understand itself.

In Bidwell there was a man named Peter White who was a tailor and worked
hard at his trade, but who once or twice a year got drunk and beat his
wife. He was arrested each time and had to pay a fine, but there was a
general understanding of the impulse that led to the beating. Most of
the women knowing the wife sympathized with Peter. “She is a noisy thing
and her jaw is never still,” the wife of Henry Teeters, the grocer, said
to her husband. “If he gets drunk it's only to forget he's married to
her. Then he goes home to sleep it off and she begins jawing at him. He
stands it as long as he can. It takes a fist to shut up that woman. If
he strikes her it's the only thing he can do.”

Allie Mulberry the half-wit was one of the highlights of life in the
town. He lived with his mother in a tumble-down house at the edge of
town on Medina Road. Beside being a half-wit he had something the matter
with his legs. They were trembling and weak and he could only move
them with great difficulty. On summer afternoons when the streets were
deserted, he hobbled along Main Street with his lower jaw hanging down.
Allie carried a large club, partly for the support of his weak legs and
partly to scare off dogs and mischievous boys. He liked to sit in the
shade with his back against a building and whittle, and he liked to be
near people and have his talent as a whittler appreciated. He made fans
out of pieces of pine, long chains of wooden beads, and he once achieved
a singular mechanical triumph that won him wide renown. He made a ship
that would float in a beer bottle half filled with water and laid on
its side. The ship had sails and three tiny wooden sailors who stood
at attention with their hands to their caps in salute. After it was
constructed and put into the bottle it was too large to be taken out
through the neck. How Allie got it in no one ever knew. The clerks and
merchants who crowded about to watch him at work discussed the matter
for days. It became a never-ending wonder among them. In the evening
they spoke of the matter to the berry pickers who came into the stores,
and in the eyes of the people of Bidwell Allie Mulberry became a hero.
The bottle, half-filled with water and securely corked, was laid on a
cushion in the window of Hunter's Jewelry Store. As it floated about on
its own little ocean crowds gathered to look at it. Over the bottle
was a sign with the words--“Carved by Allie Mulberry of
Bidwell”--prominently displayed. Below these words a query had been
printed. “How Did He Get It Into The Bottle?” was the question asked.
The bottle stayed in the window for months and merchants took the
traveling men who visited them, to see it. Then they escorted their
guests to where Allie, with his back against the wall of a building and
his club beside him, was at work on some new creation of the whittler's
art. The travelers were impressed and told the tale abroad. Allie's fame
spread to other towns. “He has a good brain,” the citizen of Bidwell
said, shaking his head. “He don't appear to know very much, but look
what he does! He must be carrying all sorts of notions around inside of
his head.”

Jane Orange, widow of a lawyer, and with the single exception of Thomas
Butterworth, a farmer who owned over a thousand acres of land and lived
with his daughter on a farm a mile south of town, the richest person
in town, was known to every one in Bidwell, but was not liked. She was
called stingy and it was said that she and her husband had cheated every
one with whom they had dealings in order to get their start in life. The
town ached for the privilege of doing what they called “bringing them
down a peg.” Jane's husband had once been the Bidwell town attorney and
later had charge of the settlement of an estate belonging to Ed Lucas, a
farmer who died leaving two hundred acres of land and two daughters. The
farmer's daughters, every one said, “came out at the small end of the
horn,” and John Orange began to grow rich. It was said he was worth
fifty thousand dollars. All during the latter part of his life the
lawyer went to the city of Cleveland on business every week, and when he
was at home and even in the hottest weather he went about dressed in
a long black coat. When she went to the stores to buy supplies for
her house Jane Orange was watched closely by the merchants. She was
suspected of carrying away small articles that could be slipped into
the pockets of her dress. One afternoon in Toddmore's grocery, when she
thought no one was looking, she took a half dozen eggs out of a basket
and looking quickly around to be sure she was unobserved, put them into
her dress pocket. Harry Toddmore, the grocer's son who had seen the
theft, said nothing, but went unobserved out at the back door. He got
three or four clerks from other stores and they waited for Jane Orange
at a corner. When she came along they hurried out and Harry Toddmore
fell against her. Throwing out his hand he struck the pocket containing
the eggs a quick, sharp blow. Jane Orange turned and hurried away toward
home, but as she half ran through Main Street clerks and merchants came
out of the stores, and from the assembled crowd a voice called attention
to the fact that the contents of the stolen eggs having run down the
inside of her dress and over her stockings began to make a stream on the
sidewalk. A pack of town dogs excited by the shouts of the crowd ran at
her heels, barking and sniffing at the yellow stream that dripped from
her shoes.

An old man with a long white beard came to Bidwell to live. He had been
a carpet-bag Governor of a southern state in the reconstruction days
after the Civil War and had made money. He bought a house on Turner's
Pike close beside the river and spent his days puttering about in a
small garden. In the evening he came across the bridge into Main Street
and went to loaf in Birdie Spink's drug store. He talked with great
frankness and candor of his life in the South during the terrible time
when the country was trying to emerge from the black gloom of defeat,
and brought to the Bidwell men a new point of view on their old enemies,
the “Rebs.”

The old man--the name by which he had introduced himself in Bidwell was
that of Judge Horace Hanby--believed in the manliness and honesty of
purpose of the men he had for a time governed and who had fought a
long grim war with the North, with the New Englanders and sons of New
Englanders from the West and Northwest. “They're all right,” he said
with a grin. “I cheated them and made some money, but I liked them. Once
a crowd of them came to my house and threatened to kill me and I told
them that I did not blame them very much, so they let me alone.” The
judge, an ex-politician from the city of New York who had been involved
in some affair that made it uncomfortable for him to return to live
in that city, grew prophetic and philosophic after he came to live in
Bidwell. In spite of the doubt every one felt concerning his past, he
was something of a scholar and a reader of books, and won respect by his
apparent wisdom. “Well, there's going to be a new war here,” he said.
“It won't be like the Civil War, just shooting off guns and killing
peoples' bodies. At first it's going to be a war between individuals
to see to what class a man must belong; then it is going to be a long,
silent war between classes, between those who have and those who can't
get. It'll be the worst war of all.”

The talk of Judge Hanby, carried along and elaborated almost every
evening before a silent, attentive group in the drug store, began to
have an influence on the minds of Bidwell young men. At his suggestion
several of the town boys, Cliff Bacon, Albert Small, Ed Prawl, and two
or three others, began to save money for the purpose of going east to
college. Also at his suggestion Tom Butterworth the rich farmer sent
his daughter away to school. The old man made many prophecies concerning
what would happen in America. “I tell you, the country isn't going to
stay as it is,” he said earnestly. “In eastern towns the change has
already come. Factories are being built and every one is going to work
in the factories. It takes an old man like me to see how that changes
their lives. Some of the men stand at one bench and do one thing not
only for hours but for days and years. There are signs hung up saying
they mustn't talk. Some of them make more money than they did before the
factories came, but I tell you it's like being in prison. What would
you say if I told you all America, all you fellows who talk so big about
freedom, are going to be put in a prison, eh?

“And there's something else. In New York there are already a dozen
men who are worth a million dollars. Yes, sir, I tell you it's true, a
million dollars. What do you think of that, eh?”

Judge Hanby grew excited and, inspired by the absorbed attention of his
audience, talked of the sweep of events. In England, he explained, the
cities were constantly growing larger, and already almost every one
either worked in a factory or owned stock in a factory. “In New England
it is getting the same way fast,” he explained. “The same thing'll
happen here. Farming'll be done with tools. Almost everything now done
by hand'll be done by machinery. Some'll grow rich and some poor. The
thing is to get educated, yes, sir, that's the thing, to get ready for
what's coming. It's the only way. The younger generation has got to be
sharper and shrewder.”

The words of the old man, who had been in many places and had seen men
and cities, were repeated in the streets of Bidwell. The blacksmith and
the wheelwright repeated his words when they stopped to exchange news of
their affairs before the post-office. Ben Peeler, the carpenter, who
had been saving money to buy a house and a small farm to which he
could retire when he became too old to climb about on the framework of
buildings, used the money instead to send his son to Cleveland to a new
technical school. Steve Hunter, the son of Abraham Hunter the Bidwell
jeweler, declared that he was going to get up with the times, and when
he went into a factory, would go into the office, not into the shop. He
went to Buffalo, New York, to attend a business college.

The air of Bidwell began to stir with talk of new times. The evil
things said of the new life coming were soon forgotten. The youth and
optimistic spirit of the country led it to take hold of the hand of the
giant, industrialism, and lead him laughing into the land. The cry,
“get on in the world,” that ran all over America at that period and that
still echoes in the pages of American newspapers and magazines, rang in
the streets of Bidwell.

In the harness shop belonging to Joseph Wainsworth it one day struck a
new note. The harness maker was a tradesman of the old school and was
vastly independent. He had learned his trade after five years' service
as apprentice, and had spent an additional five years in going from
place to place as a journeyman workman, and felt that he knew his
business. Also he owned his shop and his home and had twelve hundred
dollars in the bank. At noon one day when he was alone in the shop, Tom
Butterworth came in and told him he had ordered four sets of farm work
harness from a factory in Philadelphia. “I came in to ask if you'll
repair them if they get out of order,” he said.

Joe Wainsworth began to fumble with the tools on his bench. Then he
turned to look the farmer in the eye and to do what he later spoke of to
his cronies as “laying down the law.” “When the cheap things begin to
go to pieces take them somewhere else to have them repaired,” he said
sharply. He grew furiously angry. “Take the damn things to Philadelphia
where you got 'em,” he shouted at the back of the farmer who had turned
to go out of the shop.

Joe Wainsworth was upset and thought about the incident all the
afternoon. When farmer-customers came in and stood about to talk of
their affairs he had nothing to say. He was a talkative man and his
apprentice, Will Sellinger, son of the Bidwell house painter, was
puzzled by his silence.

When the boy and the man were alone in the shop, it was Joe Wainsworth's
custom to talk of his days as a journeyman workman when he had gone from
place to place working at his trade. If a trace were being stitched or a
bridle fashioned, he told how the thing was done at a shop where he had
worked in the city of Boston and in another shop at Providence, Rhode
Island. Getting a piece of paper he made drawings illustrating the
cuts of leather that were made in the other places and the methods
of stitching. He claimed to have worked out his own method for doing
things, and that his method was better than anything he had seen in all
his travels. To the men who came into the shop to loaf during winter
afternoons he presented a smiling front and talked of their affairs, of
the price of cabbage in Cleveland or the effect of a cold snap on the
winter wheat, but alone with the boy, he talked only of harness making.
“I don't say anything about it. What's the good bragging? Just the same,
I could learn something to all the harness makers I've ever seen, and
I've seen the best of them,” he declared emphatically.

During the afternoon, after he had heard of the four factory-made work
harnesses brought into what he had always thought of as a trade that
belonged to him by the rights of a first-class workman, Joe remained
silent for two or three hours. He thought of the words of old Judge
Hanby and the constant talk of the new times now coming. Turning
suddenly to his apprentice, who was puzzled by his long silence and who
knew nothing of the incident that had disturbed his employer, he broke
forth into words. He was defiant and expressed his defiance. “Well,
then, let 'em go to Philadelphia, let 'em go any damn place
they please,” he growled, and then, as though his own words had
re-established his self-respect, he straightened his shoulders and
glared at the puzzled and alarmed boy. “I know my trade and do not have
to bow down to any man,” he declared. He expressed the old tradesman's
faith in his craft and the rights it gave the craftsman. “Learn your
trade. Don't listen to talk,” he said earnestly. “The man who knows his
trade is a man. He can tell every one to go to the devil.”




CHAPTER IV


Hugh McVey was twenty-three years old when he went to live in Bidwell.
The position of telegraph operator at the Wheeling station a mile north
of town became vacant and, through an accidental encounter with a former
resident of a neighboring town, he got the place.

The Missourian had been at work during the winter in a sawmill in the
country near a northern Indiana town. During the evenings he wandered on
country roads and in the town streets, but he did not talk to any one.
As had happened to him in other places, he had the reputation of being
queer. His clothes were worn threadbare and, although he had money
in his pockets, he did not buy new ones. In the evening when he went
through the town streets and saw the smartly dressed clerks standing
before the stores, he looked at his own shabby person and was ashamed to
enter. In his boyhood Sarah Shepard had always attended to the buying
of his clothes, and he made up his mind that he would go to the place in
Michigan to which she and her husband had retired, and pay her a visit.
He wanted Sarah Shepard to buy him a new outfit of clothes, but wanted
also to talk with her.

Out of the three years of going from place to place and working with
other men as a laborer, Hugh had got no big impulse that he felt would
mark the road his life should take; but the study of mathematical
problems, taken up to relieve his loneliness and to cure his inclination
to dreams, was beginning to have an effect on his character. He thought
that if he saw Sarah Shepard again he could talk to her and through her
get into the way of talking to others. In the sawmill where he worked he
answered the occasional remarks made to him by his fellow workers in
a slow, hesitating drawl, and his body was still awkward and his gait
shambling, but he did his work more quickly and accurately. In the
presence of his foster-mother and garbed in new clothes, he believed
he could now talk to her in a way that had been impossible during his
youth. She would see the change in his character and would be encouraged
about him. They would get on to a new basis and he would feel respect
for himself in another.

Hugh went to the railroad station to make inquiry regarding the fare to
the Michigan town and there had the adventure that upset his plans. As
he stood at the window of the ticket office, the ticket seller, who was
also the telegraph operator, tried to engage him in conversation. When
he had given the information asked, he followed Hugh out of the building
and into the darkness of a country railroad station at night, and the
two men stopped and stood together beside an empty baggage truck. The
ticket agent spoke of the loneliness of life in the town and said he
wished he could go back to his own place and be again with his own
people. “It may not be any better in my own town, but I know everybody
there,” he said. He was curious concerning Hugh as were all the people
of the Indiana town, and hoped to get him into talk in order that he
might find out why he walked alone at night, why he sometimes worked all
evening over books and figures in his room at the country hotel, and why
he had so little to say to his fellows. Hoping to fathom Hugh's silence
he abused the town in which they both lived. “Well,” he began, “I
guess I understand how you feel. You want to get out of this place.”
 He explained his own predicament in life. “I got married,” he said.
“Already I have three children. Out here a man can make more money
railroading than he can in my state, and living is pretty cheap. Just
to-day I had an offer of a job in a good town near my own place in Ohio,
but I can't take it. The job only pays forty a month. The town's all
right, one of the best in the northern part of the State, but you see
the job's no good. Lord, I wish I could go. I'd like to live again among
people such as live in that part of the country.”

The railroad man and Hugh walked along the street that ran from the
station up into the main street of the town. Wanting to meet the
advances that had been made by his companion and not knowing how to go
about it, Hugh adopted the method he had heard his fellow laborers use
with one another. “Well,” he said slowly, “come have a drink.”

The two men went into a saloon and stood by the bar. Hugh made a
tremendous effort to overcome his embarrassment. As he and the railroad
man drank foaming glasses of beer he explained that he also had once
been a railroad man and knew telegraphy, but that for several years he
had been doing other work. His companion looked at his shabby clothes
and nodded his head. He made a motion with his head to indicate that he
wanted Hugh to come with him outside into the darkness. “Well, well,”
 he exclaimed, when they had again got outside and had started along the
street toward the station. “I understand now. They've all been wondering
about you and I've heard lots of talk. I won't say anything, but I'm
going to do something for you.”

Hugh went to the station with his new-found friend and sat down in the
lighted office. The railroad man got out a sheet of paper and began to
write a letter. “I'm going to get you that job,” he said. “I'm writing
the letter now and I'll get it off on the midnight train. You've got to
get on your feet. I was a boozer myself, but I cut it all out. A glass
of beer now and then, that's my limit.”

He began to talk of the town in Ohio where he proposed to get Hugh the
job that would set him up in the world and save him from the habit of
drinking, and described it as an earthly paradise in which lived bright,
clear-thinking men and beautiful women. Hugh was reminded sharply of the
talk he had heard from the lips of Sarah Shepard, when in his youth she
spent long evenings telling him of the wonder of her own Michigan and
New England towns and people, and contrasted the life lived there with
that lived by the people of his own place.

Hugh decided not to try to explain away the mistake made by his new
acquaintance, and to accept the offer of assistance in getting the
appointment as telegraph operator.

The two men walked out of the station and stood again in the darkness.
The railroad man felt like one who has been given the privilege of
plucking a human soul out of the darkness of despair. He was full of
words that poured from his lips and he assumed a knowledge of Hugh and
his character entirely unwarranted by the circumstances. “Well,” he
exclaimed heartily, “you see I've given you a send-off. I have told them
you're a good man and a good operator, but that you will take the place
with its small salary because you've been sick and just now can't work
very hard.” The excited man followed Hugh along the street. It was
late and the store lights had been put out. From one of the town's two
saloons that lay in their way arose a clatter of voices. The old boyhood
dream of finding a place and a people among whom he could, by sitting
still and inhaling the air breathed by others, come into a warm
closeness with life, came back to Hugh. He stopped before the saloon to
listen to the voices within, but the railroad man plucked at his coat
sleeve and protested. “Now, now, you're going to cut it out, eh?” he
asked anxiously and then hurriedly explained his anxiety. “Of course
I know what's the matter with you. Didn't I tell you I've been there
myself? You've been working around. I know why that is. You don't have
to tell me. If there wasn't something the matter with him, no man who
knows telegraphy would work in a sawmill.

“Well, there's no good talking about it,” he added thoughtfully. “I've
given you a send-off. You're going to cut it out, eh?”

Hugh tried to protest and to explain that he was not addicted to the
habit of drinking, but the Ohio man would not listen. “It's all right,”
 he said again, and then they came to the hotel where Hugh lived and he
turned to go back to the station and wait for the midnight train that
would carry the letter away and that would, he felt, carry also his
demand that a fellow-human, who had slipped from the modern path of
work and progress should be given a new chance. He felt magnanimous and
wonderfully gracious. “It's all right, my boy,” he said heartily. “No
use talking to me. To-night when you came to the station to ask the fare
to that hole of a place in Michigan I saw you were embarrassed. 'What's
the matter with that fellow?' I said to myself. I got to thinking. Then
I came up town with you and right away you bought me a drink. I wouldn't
have thought anything about that if I hadn't been there myself. You'll
get on your feet. Bidwell, Ohio, is full of good men. You get in with
them and they'll help you and stick by you. You'll like those people.
They've got get-up to them. The place you'll work at there is far out of
town. It's away out about a mile at a little kind of outside-like place
called Pickleville. There used to be a saloon there and a factory for
putting up cucumber pickles, but they've both gone now. You won't be
tempted to slip in that place. You'll have a chance to get on your feet.
I'm glad I thought of sending you there.”

       *       *       *       *       *

The Wheeling and Lake Erie ran along a little wooded depression that cut
across the wide expanse of open farm lands north of the town of Bidwell.
It brought coal from the hill country of West Virginia and southeastern
Ohio to ports on Lake Erie, and did not pay much attention to the
carrying of passengers. In the morning a train consisting of a combined
express and baggage car and two passenger coaches went north and west
toward the lake, and in the evening the same train returned, bound
southeast into the Hills, The Bidwell station of the road was, in an odd
way, detached from the town's life. The invisible roof under which the
life of the town and the surrounding country was lived did not cover it.
As the Indiana railroad man had told Hugh, the station itself stood on a
spot known locally as Pickleville. Back of the station there was a small
building for the storage of freight and near at hand four or five houses
facing Turner's Pike. The pickle factory, now deserted and with its
windows gone, stood across the tracks from the station and beside a
small stream that ran under a bridge and across country through a grove
of trees to the river. On hot summer days a sour, pungent smell arose
from the old factory, and at night its presence lent a ghostly flavor to
the tiny corner of the world in which lived perhaps a dozen people.

All day and at night an intense persistent silence lay over Pickleville,
while in Bidwell a mile away the stir of new life began. In the evenings
and on rainy afternoons when men could not work in the fields, old Judge
Hanby went along Turner's Pike and across the wagon bridge into Bidwell
and sat in a chair at the back of Birdie Spink's drug store. He talked.
Men came in to listen to him and went out. New talk ran through the
town. A new force that was being born into American life and into
life everywhere all over the world was feeding on the old dying
individualistic life. The new force stirred and aroused the people. It
met a need that was universal. It was meant to seal men together, to
wipe out national lines, to walk under seas and fly through the air,
to change the entire face of the world in which men lived. Already the
giant that was to be king in the place of old kings was calling his
servants and his armies to serve him. He used the methods of old
kings and promised his followers booty and gain. Everywhere he went
unchallenged, surveying the land, raising a new class of men to
positions of power. Railroads had already been pushed out across the
plains; great coal fields from which was to be taken food to warm the
blood in the body of the giant were being opened up; iron fields were
being discovered; the roar and clatter of the breathing of the terrible
new thing, half hideous, half beautiful in its possibilities, that was
for so long to drown the voices and confuse the thinking of men, was
heard not only in the towns but even in lonely farm houses, where its
willing servants, the newspapers and magazines, had begun to circulate
in ever increasing numbers. At the town of Gibsonville, near Bidwell,
Ohio, and at Lima and Finley, Ohio, oil and gas fields were discovered.
At Cleveland, Ohio, a precise, definite-minded man named Rockefeller
bought and sold oil. From the first he served the new thing well and
he soon found others to serve with him. The Morgans, Fricks, Goulds,
Carnegies, Vanderbilts, servants of the new king, princes of the new
faith, merchants all, a new kind of rulers of men, defied the world-old
law of class that puts the merchant below the craftsman, and added
to the confusion of men by taking on the air of creators. They were
merchants glorified and dealt in giant things, in the lives of men and
in mines, forests, oil and gas fields, factories, and railroads.

And all over the country, in the towns, the farm houses, and the growing
cities of the new country, people stirred and awakened. Thought and
poetry died or passed as a heritage to feeble fawning men who also
became servants of the new order. Serious young men in Bidwell and in
other American towns, whose fathers had walked together on moonlight
nights along Turner's Pike to talk of God, went away to technical
schools. Their fathers had walked and talked and thoughts had grown
up in them. The impulse had reached back to their father's fathers on
moonlit roads of England, Germany, Ireland, France, and Italy, and
back of these to the moonlit hills of Judea where shepherds talked and
serious young men, John and Matthew and Jesus, caught the drift of the
talk and made poetry of it; but the serious-minded sons of these men in
the new land were swept away from thinking and dreaming. From all sides
the voice of the new age that was to do definite things shouted at them.
Eagerly they took up the cry and ran with it. Millions of voices arose.
The clamor became terrible, and confused the minds of all men. In making
way for the newer, broader brotherhood into which men are some day to
emerge, in extending the invisible roofs of the towns and cities to
cover the world, men cut and crushed their way through the bodies of
men.

And while the voices became louder and more excited and the new giant
walked about making a preliminary survey of the land, Hugh spent his
days at the quiet, sleepy railroad station at Pickleville and tried to
adjust his mind to the realization of the fact that he was not to be
accepted as fellow by the citizens of the new place to which he had
come. During the day he sat in the tiny telegraph office or, pulling an
express truck to the open window near his telegraph instrument, lay on
his back with a sheet of paper propped on his bony knees and did sums.
Farmers driving past on Turner's Pike saw him there and talked of him
in the stores in town. “He's a queer silent fellow,” they said. “What do
you suppose he's up to?”

Hugh walked in the streets of Bidwell at night as he had walked in the
streets of towns in Indiana and Illinois. He approached groups of men
loafing on a street corner and then went hurriedly past them. On quiet
streets as he went along under the trees, he saw women sitting in the
lamplight in the houses and hungered to have a house and a woman of his
own. One afternoon a woman school teacher came to the station to make
inquiry regarding the fare to a town in West Virginia. As the station
agent was not about Hugh gave her the information she sought and she
lingered for a few moments to talk with him. He answered the questions
she asked with monosyllables and she soon went away, but he was
delighted and looked upon the incident as an adventure. At night he
dreamed of the school teacher and when he awoke, pretended she was with
him in his bedroom. He put out his hand and touched the pillow. It was
soft and smooth as he imagined the cheek of a woman would be. He did
not know the school teacher's name but invented one for her. “Be quiet,
Elizabeth. Do not let me disturb your sleep,” he murmured into the
darkness. One evening he went to the house where the school teacher
boarded and stood in the shadow of a tree until he saw her come out and
go toward Main Street. Then he went by a roundabout way and walked past
her on the sidewalk before the lighted stores. He did not look at her,
but in passing her dress touched his arm and he was so excited later
that he could not sleep and spent half the night walking about and
thinking of the wonderful thing that had happened to him.

The ticket, express, and freight agent for the Wheeling and Lake Erie
at Bidwell, a man named George Pike, lived in one of the houses near the
station, and besides attending to his duties for the railroad company,
owned and worked a small farm. He was a slender, alert, silent man with
a long drooping mustache. Both he and his wife worked as Hugh had never
seen a man and woman work before. Their arrangement of the division of
labor was not based on sex but on convenience. Sometimes Mrs. Pike came
to the station to sell tickets, load express boxes and trunks on the
passenger trains and deliver heavy boxes of freight to draymen and
farmers, while her husband worked in the fields back of his house or
prepared the evening meal, and sometimes the matter was reversed and
Hugh did not see Mrs. Pike for several days at a time.

During the day there was little for the station agent or his wife to do
at the station and they disappeared. George Pike had made an arrangement
of wires and pulleys connecting the station with a large bell hung on
top of his house, and when some one came to the station to receive or
deliver freight Hugh pulled at the wire and the bell began to ring. In
a few minutes either George Pike or his wife came running from the house
or fields, dispatched the business and went quickly away again.

Day after day Hugh sat in a chair by a desk in the station or went
outside and walked up and down the station platform. Engines pulling
long caravans of coal cars ground past. The brakemen waved their hands
to him and then the train disappeared into the grove of trees that
grew beside the creek along which the tracks of the road were laid. In
Turner's Pike a creaking farm wagon appeared and then disappeared along
the tree-lined road that led to Bidwell. The farmer turned on his wagon
seat to stare at Hugh but unlike the railroad men did not wave his hand.
Adventurous boys came out along the road from town and climbed, shouting
and laughing, over the rafters in the deserted pickle factory across the
tracks or went to fish in the creek in the shade of the factory walls.
Their shrill voices added to the loneliness of the spot. It became
almost unbearable to Hugh. In desperation he turned from the rather
meaningless doing of sums and working out of problems regarding the
number of fence pickets that could be cut from a tree or the number of
steel rails or railroad ties consumed in building a mile of railroad,
the innumerable petty problems with which he had been keeping his mind
busy, and turned to more definite and practical problems. He remembered
an autumn he had put in cutting corn on a farm in Illinois and, going
into the station, waved his long arms about, imitating the movements of
a man in the act of cutting corn. He wondered if a machine might not be
made that would do the work, and tried to make drawings of the parts of
such a machine. Feeling his inability to handle so difficult a problem
he sent away for books and began the study of mechanics. He joined a
correspondence school started by a man in Pennsylvania, and worked for
days on the problems the man sent him to do. He asked questions and
began a little to understand the mystery of the application of power.
Like the other young men of Bidwell he began to put himself into touch
with the spirit of the age, but unlike them he did not dream of suddenly
acquired wealth. While they embraced new and futile dreams he worked to
destroy the tendency to dreams in himself.

Hugh came to Bidwell in the early spring and during May, June and July
the quiet station at Pickleville awoke for an hour or two each evening.
A certain percentage of the sudden and almost overwhelming increase in
express business that came with the ripening of the fruit and berry crop
came to the Wheeling, and every evening a dozen express trucks, piled
high with berry boxes, waited for the south bound train. When the train
came into the station a small crowd had assembled. George Pike and
his stout wife worked madly, throwing the boxes in at the door of the
express car. Idlers standing about became interested and lent a hand.
The engineer climbed out of his locomotive, stretched his legs and
crossing a narrow road got a drink from the pump in George Pike's yard.

Hugh walked to the door of his telegraph office and standing in the
shadows watched the busy scene. He wanted to take part in it, to laugh
and talk with the men standing about, to go to the engineer and ask
questions regarding the locomotive and its construction, to help George
Pike and his wife, and perhaps cut through their silence and his own
enough to become acquainted with them. He thought of all these things
but stayed in the shadow of the door that led to the telegraph office
until, at a signal given by the train conductor, the engineer climbed
into his engine and the train began to move away into the evening
darkness. When Hugh came out of his office the station platform was
deserted again. In the grass across the tracks and beside the ghostly
looking old factory, crickets sang. Tom Wilder, the Bidwell hack driver,
had got a traveling man off the train and the dust left by the heels
of his team still hung in the air over Turner's Pike. From the darkness
that brooded over the trees that grew along the creek beyond the factory
came the hoarse croak of frogs. On Turner's Pike a half dozen Bidwell
young men accompanied by as many town girls walked along the path beside
the road under the trees. They had come to the station to have somewhere
to go, had made up a party to come, but now the half unconscious purpose
of their coming was apparent. The party split itself up into couples and
each strove to get as far away as possible from the others. One of the
couples came back along the path toward the station and went to the pump
in George Pike's yard. They stood by the pump, laughing and pretending
to drink out of a tin cup, and when they got again into the road the
others had disappeared. They became silent. Hugh went to the end of the
platform and watched as they walked slowly along. He became furiously
jealous of the young man who put his arm about the waist of his
companion and then, when he turned and saw Hugh staring at him, took it
away again.

The telegraph operator went quickly along the platform until he was out
of range of the young man's eyes, and, when he thought the gathering
darkness would hide him, returned and crept along the path beside the
road after him. Again a hungry desire to enter into the lives of the
people about him took possession of the Missourian. To be a young man
dressed in a stiff white collar, wearing neatly made clothes, and in the
evening to walk about with young girls seemed like getting on the road
to happiness. He wanted to run shouting along the path beside the road
until he had overtaken the young man and woman, to beg them to take him
with them, to accept him as one of themselves, but when the momentary
impulse had passed and he returned to the telegraph office and lighted
a lamp, he looked at his long awkward body and could not conceive
of himself as ever by any chance becoming the thing he wanted to be.
Sadness swept over him and his gaunt face, already cut and marked with
deep lines, became longer and more gaunt. The old boyhood notion, put
into his mind by the words of his foster-mother, Sarah Shepard, that a
town and a people could remake him and erase from his body the marks
of what he thought of as his inferior birth, began to fade. He tried to
forget the people about him and turned with renewed energy to the study
of the problems in the books that now lay in a pile upon his desk. His
inclination to dreams, balked by the persistent holding of his mind to
definite things, began to reassert itself in a new form, and his brain
played no more with pictures of clouds and men in agitated movement but
took hold of steel, wood, and iron. Dumb masses of materials taken out
of the earth and the forests were molded by his mind into fantastic
shapes. As he sat in the telegraph office during the day or walked alone
through the streets of Bidwell at night, he saw in fancy a thousand new
machines, formed by his hands and brain, doing the work that had been
done by the hands of men. He had come to Bidwell, not only in the hope
that there he would at last find companionship, but also because his
mind was really aroused and he wanted leisure to begin trying to do
tangible things. When the citizens of Bidwell would not take him into
their town life but left him standing to one side, as the tiny dwelling
place for men called Pickleville where he lived stood aside out from
under the invisible roof of the town, he decided to try to forget men
and to express himself wholly in work.




CHAPTER V


Hugh's first inventive effort stirred the town of Bidwell deeply. When
word of it ran about, the men who had been listening to the talk of
Judge Horace Hanby and whose minds had turned toward the arrival of the
new forward-pushing impulse in American life thought they saw in Hugh
the instrument of its coming to Bidwell. From the day of his coming to
live among them, there had been much curiosity in the stores and houses
regarding the tall, gaunt, slow-speaking stranger at Pickleville. George
Pike had told Birdie Spinks the druggist how Hugh worked all day over
books, and how he made drawings for parts of mysterious machines and
left them on his desk in the telegraph office. Birdie Spinks told others
and the tale grew. When Hugh walked alone in the streets during the
evening and thought no one took account of his presence, hundreds of
pairs of curious eyes followed him about.

A tradition in regard to the telegraph operator began to grow up. The
tradition made Hugh a gigantic figure, one who walked always on a plane
above that on which other men lived. In the imagination of his fellow
citizens of the Ohio town, he went about always thinking great thoughts,
solving mysterious and intricate problems that had to do with the new
mechanical age Judge Hanby talked about to the eager listeners in the
drug-store. An alert, talkative people saw among them one who could not
talk and whose long face was habitually serious, and could not think
of him as having daily to face the same kind of minor problems as
themselves.

The Bidwell young man who had come down to the Wheeling station with a
group of other young men, who had seen the evening train go away to
the south, who had met at the station one of the town girls and had, in
order to escape the others and be alone with her, taken her to the pump
in George Pike's yard on the pretense of wanting a drink, walked away
with her into the darkness of the summer evening with his mind fixed
on Hugh. The young man's name was Ed Hall and he was apprentice to Ben
Peeler, the carpenter who had sent his son to Cleveland to a technical
school. He wanted to marry the girl he had met at the station and
did not see how he could manage it on his salary as a carpenter's
apprentice. When he looked back and saw Hugh standing on the station
platform, he took the arm he had put around the girl's waist quickly
away and began to talk. “I'll tell you what,” he said earnestly, “if
things don't pretty soon get on the stir around here I'm going to get
out. I'll go over by Gibsonburg and get a job in the oil fields, that's
what I'll do. I got to have more money.” He sighed heavily and looked
over the girl's head into the darkness. “They say that telegraph fellow
back there at the station is up to something,” he ventured. “It's all
the talk. Birdie Spinks says he is an inventor; says George Pike told
him; says he is working all the time on new inventions to do things by
machinery; that his passing off as a telegraph operator is only a bluff.
Some think maybe he was sent here to see about starting a factory to
make one of his inventions, sent by rich men maybe in Cleveland or some
other place. Everybody says they'll bet there'll be factories here in
Bidwell before very long now. I wish I knew. I don't want to go away if
I don't have to, but I got to have more money. Ben Peeler won't never
give me a raise so I can get married or nothing. I wish I knew that
fellow back there so I could ask him what's up. They say he's smart. I
suppose he wouldn't tell me nothing. I wish I was smart enough to invent
something and maybe get rich. I wish I was the kind of fellow they say
he is.”

Ed Hall again put his arm about the girl's waist and walked away. He
forgot Hugh and thought of himself and of how he wanted to marry the
girl whose young body nestled close to his own--wanted her to be utterly
his. For a few hours he passed out of Hugh's growing sphere of influence
on the collective thought of the town, and lost himself in the immediate
deliciousness of kisses.

And as he passed out of Hugh's influence others came in. On Main Street
in the evening every one speculated on the Missourian's purpose in
coming to Bidwell. The forty dollars a month paid him by the Wheeling
railroad could not have tempted such a man. They were sure of that.
Steve Hunter the jeweler's son had returned to town from a course in
a business college at Buffalo, New York, and hearing the talk became
interested. Steve had in him the making of a live man of affairs, and
he decided to investigate. It was not, however, Steve's method to go
at things directly, and he was impressed by the notion, then abroad in
Bidwell, that Hugh had been sent to town by some one, perhaps by a group
of capitalists who intended to start factories there.

Steve thought he would go easy. In Buffalo, where he had gone to the
business college, he had met a girl whose father, E. P. Horn, owned
a soap factory; had become acquainted with her at church and had been
introduced to her father. The soap maker, an assertive positive man who
manufactured a product called Horn's Household Friend Soap, had his own
notion of what a young man should be and how he should make his way
in the world, and had taken pleasure in talking to Steve. He told the
Bidwell jeweler's son of how he had started his own factory with but
little money and had succeeded and gave Steve many practical hints on
the organization of companies. He talked a great deal of a thing called
“control.” “When you get ready to start for yourself keep that in mind,”
 he said. “You can sell stock and borrow money at the bank, all you can
get, but don't give up control. Hang on to that. That's the way I made
my success. I always kept the control.”

Steve wanted to marry Ernestine Horn, but felt that he should show what
he could do as a business man before he attempted to thrust himself into
so wealthy and prominent a family. When he returned to his own town
and heard the talk regarding Hugh McVey and his inventive genius, he
remembered the soap maker's words regarding control, and repeated them
to himself. One evening he walked along Turner's Pike and stood in the
darkness by the old pickle factory. He saw Hugh at work under a lamp in
the telegraph office and was impressed. “I'll lay low and see what
he's up to,” he told himself. “If he's got an invention, I'll get up a
company. I'll get money in and I'll start a factory. The people here'll
tumble over each other to get into a thing like that. I don't believe
any one sent him here. I'll bet he's just an inventor. That kind always
are queer. I'll keep my mouth shut and watch my chance. If there is
anything starts, I'll start it and I'll get into control, that's what
I'll do, I'll get into control.”

       *       *       *       *       *

In the country stretching away north beyond the fringe of small berry
farms lying directly about town, were other and larger farms. The land
that made up these larger farms was also rich and raised big crops.
Great stretches of it were planted to cabbage for which a market had
been built up in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati. Bidwell was
often in derision called Cabbageville by the citizens of nearby towns.
One of the largest of the cabbage farms belonged to a man named Ezra
French, and was situated on Turner's Pike, two miles from town and a
mile beyond the Wheeling station.

On spring evenings when it was dark and silent about the station
and when the air was heavy with the smell of new growth and of land
fresh-turned by the plow, Hugh got out of his chair in the telegraph
office and walked in the soft darkness. He went along Turner's Pike to
town, saw groups of men standing on the sidewalks before the stores and
young girls walking arm in arm along the street, and then came back to
the silent station. Into his long and habitually cold body the warmth
of desire began to creep. The spring rains came and soft winds blew down
from the hill country to the south. One evening when the moon shone he
went around the old pickle factory to where the creek went chattering
under leaning willow trees, and as he stood in the heavy shadows by the
factory wall, tried to imagine himself as one who had become suddenly
clean-limbed, graceful, and agile. A bush grew beside the stream near
the factory and he took hold of it with his powerful hands and tore it
out by the roots. For a moment the strength in his shoulders and arms
gave him an intense masculine satisfaction. He thought of how powerfully
he could hold the body of a woman against his body and the spark of the
fires of spring that had touched him became a flame. He felt new-made
and tried to leap lightly and gracefully across the stream, but stumbled
and fell in the water. Later he went soberly back to the station and
tried again to lose himself in the study of the problems he had found in
his books.

The Ezra French farm lay beside Turner's Pike a mile north of the
Wheeling station and contained two hundred acres of land of which a
large part was planted to cabbages. It was a profitable crop to raise
and required no more care than corn, but the planting was a terrible
task. Thousands of plants that had been raised from seeds planted in a
seed-bed back of the barn had to be laboriously transplanted. The plants
were tender and it was necessary to handle them carefully. The planter
crawled slowly and painfully along, and from the road looked like a
wounded beast striving to make his way to a hole in a distant wood. He
crawled forward a little and then stopped and hunched himself up into
a ball-like mass. Taking the plant, dropped on the ground by one of
the plant droppers, he made a hole in the soft ground with a small
three-cornered hoe, and with his hands packed the earth about the plant
roots. Then he crawled on again.

Ezra the cabbage farmer had come west from one of the New England states
and had grown comfortably wealthy, but he would not employ extra labor
for the plant setting and the work was done by his sons and daughters.
He was a short, bearded man whose leg had been broken in his youth by a
fall from the loft of a barn. As it had not mended properly he could
do little work and limped painfully about. To the men of Bidwell he was
known as something of a wit, and in the winter he went to town every
afternoon to stand in the stores and tell the Rabelaisian stories for
which he was famous; but when spring came he became restlessly active,
and in his own house and on the farm, became a tyrant. During the time
of the cabbage setting he drove his sons and daughters like slaves.
When in the evening the moon came up, he made them go back to the fields
immediately after supper and work until midnight. They went in sullen
silence, the girls to limp slowly along dropping the plants out of
baskets carried on their arms, and the boys to crawl after them and set
the plants. In the half darkness the little group of humans went slowly
up and down the long fields. Ezra hitched a horse to a wagon and brought
the plants from the seed-bed behind the barn. He went here and there
swearing and protesting against every delay in the work. When his wife,
a tired little old woman, had finished the evening's work in the house,
he made her come also to the fields. “Come, come,” he said, sharply, “we
need every pair of hands we can get.” Although he had several thousand
dollars in the Bidwell bank and owned mortgages on two or three
neighboring farms, Ezra was afraid of poverty, and to keep his family at
work pretended to be upon the point of losing all his possessions. “Now
is our chance to save ourselves,” he declared. “We must get in a big
crop. If we do not work hard now we'll starve.” When in the field his
sons found themselves unable to crawl longer without resting, and stood
up to stretch their tired bodies, he stood by the fence at the field's
edge and swore. “Well, look at the mouths I have to feed, you lazies!”
 he shouted. “Keep at the work. Don't be idling around. In two weeks
it'll be too late for planting and then you can rest. Now every plant
we set will help to save us from ruin. Keep at the job. Don't be idling
around.”

In the spring of his second year in Bidwell, Hugh went often in the
evening to watch the plant setters at work in the moonlight on the
French farm. He did not make his presence known but hid himself in
a fence corner behind bushes and watched the workers. As he saw the
stooped misshapen figures crawling slowly along and heard the words of
the old man driving them like cattle, his heart was deeply touched and
he wanted to protest. In the dim light the slowly moving figures of
women appeared, and after them came the crouched crawling men. They
came down the long row toward him, wriggling into his line of sight like
grotesquely misshapen animals driven by some god of the night to the
performance of a terrible task. An arm went up. It came down again
swiftly. The three-cornered hoe sank into the ground. The slow rhythm
of the crawler was broken. He reached with his disengaged hand for the
plant that lay on the ground before him and lowered it into the hole the
hoe had made. With his fingers he packed the earth about the roots of
the plant and then again began the slow crawl forward. There were four
of the French boys and the two older ones worked in silence. The younger
boys complained. The three girls and their mother, who were attending
to the plant dropping, came to the end of the row and turning, went away
into the darkness. “I'm going to quit this slavery,” one of the younger
boys said. “I'll get a job over in town. I hope it's true what they say,
that factories are coming.”

The four young men came to the end of the row and, as Ezra was not in
sight, stood a moment by the fence near where Hugh was concealed. “I'd
rather be a horse or a cow than what I am,” the complaining voice went
on. “What's the good being alive if you have to work like this?”

For a moment as he listened to the voices of the complaining workers,
Hugh wanted to go to them and ask them to let him share in their labor.
Then another thought came. The crawling figures came sharply into his
line of vision. He no longer heard the voice of the youngest of the
French boys that seemed to come out of the ground. The machine-like
swing of the bodies of the plant setters suggested vaguely to his mind
the possibility of building a machine that would do the work they were
doing. His mind took eager hold of that thought and he was relieved.
There had been something in the crawling figures and in the moonlight
out of which the voices came that had begun to awaken in his mind the
fluttering, dreamy state in which he had spent so much of his boyhood.
To think of the possibility of building a plant-setting machine was
safer. It fitted into what Sarah Shepard had so often told him was the
safe way of life. As he went back through the darkness to the railroad
station, he thought about the matter and decided that to become an
inventor would be the sure way of placing his feet at last upon the path
of progress he was trying to find.

Hugh became absorbed in the notion of inventing a machine that would
do the work he had seen the men doing in the field. All day he thought
about it. The notion once fixed in his mind gave him something tangible
to work upon. In the study of mechanics, taken up in a purely
amateur spirit, he had not gone far enough to feel himself capable of
undertaking the actual construction of such a machine, but thought
the difficulty might be overcome by patience and by experimenting with
combinations of wheels, gears and levers whittled out of pieces of wood.
From Hunter's Jewelry Store he got a cheap clock and spent days
taking it apart and putting it together again. He dropped the doing
of mathematical problems and sent away for books describing the
construction of machines. Already the flood of new inventions, that was
so completely to change the methods of cultivating the soil in America,
had begun to spread over the country, and many new and strange kinds
of agricultural implements arrived at the Bidwell freight house of
the Wheeling railroad. There Hugh saw a harvesting machine for cutting
grain, a mowing machine for cutting hay and a long-nosed strange-looking
implement that was intended to root potatoes out of the ground very much
after the method pursued by energetic pigs. He studied these carefully.
For a time his mind turned away from the hunger for human contact and
he was content to remain an isolated figure, absorbed in the workings of
his own awakening mind.

An absurd and amusing thing happened. After the impulse to try to invent
a plant-setting machine came to him, he went every evening to conceal
himself in the fence corner and watch the French family at their labors.
Absorbed in watching the mechanical movements of the men who crawled
across the fields in the moonlight, he forgot they were human. After
he had watched them crawl into sight, turn at the end of the rows, and
crawl away again into the hazy light that had reminded him of the dim
distances of his own Mississippi River country, he was seized with
a desire to crawl after them and to try to imitate their movements.
Certain intricate mechanical problems, that had already come into his
mind in connection with the proposed machine, he thought could be better
understood if he could get the movements necessary to plant setting
into his own body. His lips began to mutter words and getting out of the
fence corner where he had been concealed he began to crawl across the
field behind the French boys. “The down stroke will go so,” he muttered,
and bringing up his arm swung it above his head. His fist descended into
the soft ground. He had forgotten the rows of new set plants and crawled
directly over them, crushing them into the soft ground. He stopped
crawling and waved his arm about. He tried to relate his arms to the
mechanical arms of the machine that was being created in his mind.
Holding one arm stiffly in front of him he moved it up and down. “The
stroke will be shorter than that. The machine must be built close to the
ground. The wheels and the horses will travel in paths between the
rows. The wheels must be broad to provide traction. I will gear from the
wheels to get power for the operation of the mechanism,” he said aloud.

Hugh arose and stood in the moonlight in the cabbage field, his arms
still going stiffly up and down. The great length of his figure and
his arms was accentuated by the wavering uncertain light. The laborers,
aware of some strange presence, sprang to their feet and stood listening
and looking. Hugh advanced toward them, still muttering words and
waving his arms. Terror took hold of the workers. One of the woman plant
droppers screamed and ran away across the field, and the others ran
crying at her heels. “Don't do it. Go away,” the older of the French
boys shouted, and then he with his brothers also ran.

Hearing the voices Hugh stopped and stared about. The field was empty.
Again he lost himself in his mechanical calculations. He went back along
the road to the Wheeling station and to the telegraph office where he
worked half the night on a rude drawing he was trying to make of the
parts of his plant setting machine, oblivious to the fact that he had
created a myth that would run through the whole countryside. The French
boys and their sisters stoutly declared that a ghost had come into the
cabbage fields and had threatened them with death if they did not go
away and quit working at night. In a trembling voice their mother backed
up their assertion. Ezra French, who had not seen the apparition and did
not believe the tale, scented a revolution. He swore. He threatened the
entire family with starvation. He declared that a lie had been invented
to deceive and betray him.

However, the work at night in the cabbage fields on the French farm was
at an end. The story was told in the town of Bidwell, and as the entire
French family except Ezra swore to its truth, was generally believed.
Tom Foresby, an old citizen who was a spiritualist, claimed to have
heard his father say that there had been in early days an Indian
burying-ground on the Turner Pike.

The cabbage field on the French farm became locally famous. Within
a year two other men declared they had seen the figure of a gigantic
Indian dancing and singing a funeral dirge in the moonlight. Farmer
boys, who had been for an evening in town and were returning late at
night to lonely farmhouses, whipped their horses into a run when they
came to the farm. When it was far behind them they breathed more freely.
Although he continued to swear and threaten, Ezra never again succeeded
in getting his family into the fields at night. In Bidwell he declared
that the story of the ghost invented by his lazy sons and daughters had
ruined his chance for making a decent living out of his farm.




CHAPTER VI


Steve Hunter decided that it was time something was done to wake up his
native town. The call of the spring wind awoke something in him as in
Hugh. It came up from the south bringing rain followed by warm fair
days. Robins hopped about on the lawns before the houses on the
residence streets of Bidwell, and the air was again sweet with the
pregnant sweetness of new-plowed ground. Like Hugh, Steve walked about
alone through the dark, dimly lighted residence streets during the
spring evenings, but he did not try awkwardly to leap over creeks in
the darkness or pull bushes out of the ground, nor did he waste his time
dreaming of being physically young, clean-limbed and beautiful.

Before the coming of his great achievements in the industrial field,
Steve had not been highly regarded in his home town. He had been a noisy
boastful youth and had been spoiled by his father. When he was twelve
years old what were called safety bicycles first came into use and for
a long time he owned the only one in town. In the evening he rode it up
and down Main Street, frightening the horses and arousing the envy
of the town boys. He learned to ride without putting his hands on the
handle-bars and the other boys began to call him Smarty Hunter and
later, because he wore a stiff, white collar that folded down over his
shoulders, they gave him a girl's name. “Hello, Susan,” they shouted,
“don't fall and muss your clothes.”

In the spring that marked the beginning of his great industrial
adventure, Steve was stirred by the soft spring winds into dreaming his
own kind of dreams. As he walked about through the streets, avoiding the
other young men and women, he remembered Ernestine, the daughter of the
Buffalo soap maker, and thought a great deal about the magnificence of
the big stone house in which she lived with her father. His body ached
for her, but that was a matter he felt could be managed. How he could
achieve a financial position that would make it possible for him to ask
for her hand was a more difficult problem. Since he had come back from
the business college to live in his home town, he had secretly, and at
the cost of two new five dollar dresses, arranged a physical alliance
with a girl named Louise Trucker whose father was a farm laborer,
and that left his mind free for other things. He intended to become a
manufacturer, the first one in Bidwell, to make himself a leader in the
new movement that was sweeping over the country. He had thought out
what he wanted to do and it only remained to find something for him to
manufacture to put his plans through. First of all he had selected with
great care certain men he intended to ask to go in with him. There was
John Clark the banker, his own father, E. H. Hunter the town jeweler,
Thomas Butterworth the rich farmer, and young Gordon Hart, who had a job
as assistant cashier in the bank. For a month he had been dropping hints
to these men of something mysterious and important about to happen. With
the exception of his father who had infinite faith in the shrewdness and
ability of his son, the men he wanted to impress were only amused. One
day Thomas Butterworth went into the bank and stood talking the matter
over with John Clark. “The young squirt was always a Smart-Aleck and
a blow-hard,” he said. “What's he up to now? What's he nudging and
whispering about?”

As he walked in the main street of Bidwell, Steve began to acquire
that air of superiority that later made him so respected and feared. He
hurried along with a peculiarly intense absorbed look in his eyes. He
saw his fellow townsmen as through a haze, and sometimes did not see
them at all. As he went along he took papers from his pocket, read
them hurriedly, and then quickly put them away again. When he did
speak--perhaps to a man who had known him from boyhood--there was in his
manner something gracious to the edge of condescension. One morning in
March he met Zebe Wilson the town shoemaker on the sidewalk before the
post-office. Steve stopped and smiled. “Well, good morning, Mr. Wilson,”
 he said, “and how is the quality of leather you are getting from the
tanneries now?”

Word regarding this strange salutation ran about among the merchants
and artisans. “What's he up to now?” they asked each other. “Mr. Wilson,
indeed! Now what's wrong between that young squirt and Zebe Wilson?”

In the afternoon, four clerks from the Main Street stores and Ed Hall
the carpenter's apprentice, who had a half day off because of rain,
decided to investigate. One by one they went along Hamilton Street
to Zebe Wilson's shop and stepped inside to repeat Steve Hunter's
salutation. “Well, good afternoon, Mr. Wilson,” they said, “and how is
the quality of leather you are getting from the tanneries now?” Ed Hall,
the last of the five who went into the shop to repeat the formal and
polite inquiry, barely escaped with his life. Zebe Wilson threw a
shoemaker's hammer at him and it went through the glass in the upper
part of the shop door.

Once when Tom Butterworth and John Clark the banker were talking of the
new air of importance he was assuming, and half indignantly speculated
on what he meant by his whispered suggestion of something significant
about to happen, Steve came along Main Street past the front door of the
bank. John Clark called him in. The three men confronted each other and
the jeweler's son sensed the fact that the banker and the rich farmer
were amused by his pretensions. At once he proved himself to be what
all Bidwell later acknowledged him to be, a man who could handle men
and affairs. Having at that time nothing to support his pretensions he
decided to put up a bluff. With a wave of his hand and an air of knowing
just what he was about, he led the two men into the back room of the
bank and shut the door leading into the large room to which the general
public was admitted. “You would have thought he owned the place,” John
Clark afterward said with a note of admiration in his voice to young
Gordon Hart when he described what took place in the back room.

Steve plunged at once into what he had to say to the two solid moneyed
citizens of his town. “Well, now, look here, you two,” he began
earnestly. “I'm going to tell you something, but you got to keep still.”
 He went to the window that looked out upon an alleyway and glanced about
as though fearful of being overheard, then sat down in the chair usually
occupied by John Clark on the rare occasions when the directors of the
Bidwell bank held a meeting. Steve looked over the heads of the two men
who in spite of themselves were beginning to be impressed. “Well,”
 he began, “there is a fellow out at Pickleville. You have maybe heard
things said about him. He's telegraph operator out there. Perhaps you
have heard how he is always making drawings of parts of machines. I
guess everybody in town has been wondering what he's up to.”

Steve looked at the two men and then got nervously out of the chair
and walked about the room. “That fellow is my man. I put him there,” he
declared. “I didn't want to tell any one yet.”

The two men nodded and Steve became lost in the notion created in his
fancy. It did not occur to him that what he had just said was untrue.
He began to scold the two men. “Well, I suppose I'm on the wrong track
there,” he said. “My man has made an invention that will bring millions
in profits to those who get into it. In Cleveland and Buffalo I'm
already in touch with big bankers. There's to be a big factory built,
but you see yourself how it is, here I'm at home. I was raised as a boy
here.”

The excited young man plunged into an exposition of the spirit of the
new times. He grew bold and scolded the older men. “You know yourself
that factories are springing up everywhere, in towns all over the
State,” he said. “Will Bidwell wake up? Will we have factories here? You
know well enough we won't, and I know why. It's because a man like me
who was raised here has to go to a city to get money to back his plans.
If I talked to you fellows you would laugh at me. In a few years I might
make you more money than you have made in your whole lives, but what's
the use talking? I'm Steve Hunter; you knew me when I was a kid. You'd
laugh. What's the use my trying to tell you fellows my plans?”

Steve turned as though to go out of the room, but Tom Butterworth took
hold of his arm and led him back to a chair. “Now, you tell us what
you're up to,” he demanded. In turn he grew indignant. “If you've got
something to manufacture you can get backing here as well as any place,”
 he said. He became convinced that the jeweler's son was telling the
truth. It did not occur to him that a Bidwell young man would dare lie
to such solid men as John Clark and himself. “You let them city bankers
alone,” he said emphatically. “You tell us your story. What you got to
tell?”

In the silent little room the three men stared at each other. Tom
Butterworth and John Clark in their turn began to have dreams. They
remembered the tales they had heard of vast fortunes made quickly by men
who owned new and valuable inventions. The land was at that time full of
such tales. They were blown about on every wind. Quickly they realized
that they had made a mistake in their attitude toward Steve, and were
anxious to win his regard. They had called him into the bank to bully
him and to laugh at him. Now they were sorry. As for Steve, he only
wanted to get away--to get by himself and think. An injured look crept
over his face. “Well,” he said, “I thought I'd give Bidwell a chance.
There are three or four men here. I have spoken to all of you and
dropped a hint of something in the wind, but I'm not ready to be very
definite yet.”

Seeing the new look of respect in the eyes of the two men Steve
became bold. “I was going to call a meeting when I was ready,” he said
pompously. “You two do what I've been doing. You keep your mouths shut.
Don't go near that telegraph operator and don't talk to a soul. If you
mean business I'll give you a chance to make barrels of money, more'n
you ever dreamed of, but don't be in a hurry.” He took a bundle of
letters out of his inside coat pocket, and beat with them on the edge
of the table that occupied the center of the room. Another bold thought
came into his mind.

“I've got letters here offering me big money to take my factory either
to Cleveland or Buffalo,” he declared emphatically. “It isn't money
that's hard to get. I can tell you men that. What a man wants in his
home town is respect. He don't want to be looked on as a fool because he
tries to do something to rise in the world.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Steve walked boldly out of the bank and into Main Street. When he had
got out of the presence of the two men he was frightened. “Well, I've
done it. I've made a fool of myself,” he muttered aloud. In the bank he
had said that Hugh McVey the telegraph operator was his man, that he had
brought the fellow to Bidwell. What a fool he had been. In his anxiety
to impress the two older men he had told a story, the falsehood of which
could be discovered in a few minutes. Why had he not kept his dignity
and waited? There had been no occasion for being so definite. He had
gone too far, had been carried away. To be sure he had told the two men
not to go near the telegraph operator, but that would no doubt but serve
to arouse their suspicions of the thinness of his story. They would talk
the matter over and start an investigation of their own. Then they would
find out he had lied. He imagined the two men as already engaged in a
whispered conversation regarding the probability of his tale. Like most
shrewd men he had an exalted notion regarding the shrewdness of others.
He walked a little away from the bank and then turned to look back. A
shiver ran over his body. Into his mind came the sickening fear that the
telegraph operator at Pickleville was not an inventor at all. The town
was full of tales, and in the bank he had taken advantage of that fact
to make an impression; but what proof had he? No one had seen one of the
inventions supposed to have been worked out by the mysterious
stranger from Missouri. There had after all been nothing but whispered
suspicions, old wives' tales, fables invented by men who had nothing to
do but loaf in the drug-store and make up stories.

The thought that Hugh McVey might not be an inventor overpowered him and
he put it quickly aside. He had something more immediate to think about.
The story of the bluff he had just made in the bank would be found out
and the whole town would rock with laughter at his expense. The young
men of the town did not like him. They would roll the story over on
their tongues. Ribald old fellows who had nothing else to do would take
up the story with joy and would elaborate it. Fellows like the cabbage
farmer, Ezra French, who had a talent for saying cutting things would
exercise it. They would make up imaginary inventions, grotesque, absurd
inventions. Then they would get young fellows to come to him and propose
that he take them up, promote them, and make every one rich. Men would
shout jokes at him as he went along Main Street. His dignity would be
gone forever. He would be made a fool of by the very school boys as
he had been in his youth when he bought the bicycle and rode it about
before the eyes of other boys in the evenings.

Steve hurried out of Main Street and went over the bridge that crossed
the river into Turner's Pike. He did not know what he intended to do,
but felt there was much at stake and that he would have to do something
at once. It was a warm, cloudy day and the road that led to Pickleville
was muddy. During the night before it had rained and more rain was
promised. The path beside the road was slippery, and so absorbed was he
that as he plunged along, his feet slipped out from under him and he
sat down in a small pool of water. A farmer driving past along the road
turned to laugh at him. “You go to hell,” Steve shouted. “You just mind
your own business and go to hell.”

The distracted young man tried to walk sedately along the path. The long
grass that grew beside the path wet his shoes, and his hands were wet
and muddy. Farmers turned on their wagon seats to stare at him. For some
obscure reason he could not himself understand, he was terribly afraid
to face Hugh McVey. In the bank he had been in the presence of men who
were trying to get the best of him, to make a fool of him, to have fun
at his expense. He had felt that and had resented it. The knowledge had
given him a certain kind of boldness; it had enabled his mind to make up
the story of the inventor secretly employed at his own expense and the
city bankers anxious to furnish him capital. Although he was terribly
afraid of discovery, he felt a little glow of pride at the thought of
the boldness with which he had taken the letters out of his pocket and
had challenged the two men to call his bluff.

Steve, however, felt there was something different about the man in
the telegraph office in Pickleville. He had been in town for nearly
two years and no one knew anything about him. His silence might be
indicative of anything. He was afraid the tall silent Missourian might
decide to have nothing to do with him, and pictured himself as being
brushed rudely aside, being told to mind his own business.

Steve knew instinctively how to handle business men. One simply created
the notion of money to be made without effort. He had done that to the
two men in the bank and it had worked. After all he had succeeded in
making them respect him. He had handled the situation. He wasn't such
a fool at that kind of a thing. The other thing he had to face might be
very different. Perhaps after all Hugh McVey was a big inventor, a
man with a powerful creative mind. It was possible he had been sent
to Bidwell by a big business man of some city. Big business men did
strange, mysterious things; they put wires out in all directions,
controlled a thousand little avenues for the creation of wealth.

Just starting out on his own career as a man of affairs, Steve had an
overpowering respect for what he thought of as the subtlety of men of
affairs. With all the other American youths of his generation he had
been swept off his feet by the propaganda that then went on and is
still going on, and that is meant to create the illusion of greatness
in connection with the ownership of money. He did not then know and, in
spite of his own later success and his own later use of the machinery
by which illusion is created, he never found out that in an industrial
world reputations for greatness of mind are made as a Detroit
manufacturer would make automobiles. He did not know that men are
employed to bring up the name of a politician so that he may be called
a statesman, as a new brand of breakfast food that it may be sold; that
most modern great men are mere illusions sprung out of a national hunger
for greatness. Some day a wise man, one who has not read too many books
but who has gone about among men, will discover and set forth a very
interesting thing about America. The land is vast and there is a
national hunger for vastness in individuals. One wants an Illinois-sized
man for Illinois, an Ohio-sized man for Ohio, and a Texas-sized man for
Texas.

To be sure, Steve Hunter had no notion of all this. He never did get a
notion of it. The men he had already begun to think of as great and to
try to imitate were like the strange and gigantic protuberances that
sometimes grow on the side of unhealthy trees, but he did not know it.
He did not know that throughout the country, even in that early day, a
system was being built up to create the myth of greatness. At the seat
of the American Government at Washington, hordes of somewhat clever
and altogether unhealthy young men were already being employed for the
purpose. In a sweeter age many of these young men might have become
artists, but they had not been strong enough to stand against the
growing strength of dollars. They had become instead newspaper
correspondents and secretaries to politicians. All day and every day
they used their minds and their talents as writers in the making of
puffs and the creating of myths concerning the men by whom they were
employed. They were like the trained sheep that are used at great
slaughter-houses to lead other sheep into the killing pens. Having
befouled their own minds for hire, they made their living by befouling
the minds of others. Already they had found out that no great cleverness
was required for the work they had to do. What was required was constant
repetition. It was only necessary to say over and over that the man
by whom they were employed was a great man. No proof had to be brought
forward to substantiate the claims they made; no great deeds had to
be done by the men who were thus made great, as brands of crackers or
breakfast food are made salable. Stupid and prolonged and insistent
repetition was what was necessary.

As the politicians of the industrial age have created a myth about
themselves, so also have the owners of dollars, the big bankers, the
railroad manipulators, the promoters of industrial enterprise. The
impulse to do so is partly sprung from shrewdness but for the most part
it is due to a hunger within to be of some real moment in the world.
Knowing that the talent that had made them rich is but a secondary
talent, and being a little worried about the matter, they employ men to
glorify it. Having employed a man for the purpose, they are themselves
children enough to believe the myth they have paid money to have
created. Every rich man in the country unconsciously hates his press
agent.

Although he had never read a book, Steve was a constant reader of the
newspapers and had been deeply impressed by the stories he had read
regarding the shrewdness and ability of the American captains of
industry. To him they were supermen and he would have crawled on his
knees before a Gould or a Cal Price--the commanding figures among
moneyed men of that day. As he went down along Turner's Pike that day
when industry was born in Bidwell, he thought of these men and of lesser
rich men of Cleveland and Buffalo, and was afraid that in approaching
Hugh he might be coming into competition with one of these men. As he
hurried along under the gray sky, he however realized that the time
for action had come and that he must at once put the plans that he had
formed in his mind to the test of practicability; that he must at once
see Hugh McVey, find out if he really did have an invention that could
be manufactured, and if he did try to secure some kind of rights of
ownership over it. “If I do not act at once, either Tom Butterworth or
John Clark will get in ahead of me,” he thought. He knew they were both
shrewd capable men. Had they not become well-to-do? Even during the talk
in the bank, when they had seemed to be impressed by his words, they
might well have been making plans to get the better of him. They would
act, but he must act first.

Steve hadn't the courage of the lie he had told. He did not have
imagination enough to understand how powerful a thing is a lie.
He walked quickly along until he came to the Wheeling Station at
Pickleville, and then, not having the courage to confront Hugh at once,
went past the station and crept in behind the deserted pickle factory
that stood across the tracks. Through a broken window at the back he
climbed, and crept like a thief across the earth floor until he came
to a window that looked out upon the station. A freight train rumbled
slowly past and a farmer came to the station to get a load of goods
that had arrived by freight. George Pike came running from his house to
attend to the wants of the farmer. He went back to his house and Steve
was left alone in the presence of the man on whom he felt all of his
future depended. He was as excited as a village girl in the presence of
a lover. Through the windows of the telegraph office he could see
Hugh seated at a desk with a book before him. The presence of the book
frightened him. He decided that the mysterious Missourian must be some
strange sort of intellectual giant. He was sure that one who could sit
quietly reading hour after hour in such a lonely isolated place could
be of no ordinary clay. As he stood in the deep shadows inside the
old building and stared at the man he was trying to find courage to
approach, a citizen of Bidwell named Dick Spearsman came to the station
and going inside, talked to the telegraph operator. Steve trembled with
anxiety. The man who had come to the station was an insurance agent who
also owned a small berry farm at the edge of town. He had a son who had
gone west to take up land in the state of Kansas, and the father thought
of visiting him. He came to the station to make inquiry regarding the
railroad fare, but when Steve saw him talking to Hugh, the thought came
into his mind that John Clark or Thomas Butterworth might have sent him
to the station to make an investigation of the truth of the statements
he had made in the bank. “It would be like them to do it that way,” he
muttered to himself. “They wouldn't come themselves. They would send
some one they thought I wouldn't suspect. They would play safe, damn
'em.”

Trembling with fear, Steve walked up and down in the empty factory.
Cobwebs hanging down brushed against his face and he jumped aside as
though a hand had reached out of the darkness to touch him. In the
corners of the old building shadows lurked and distorted thoughts
began to come into his head. He rolled and lighted a cigarette and then
remembered that the flare of the match could probably be seen from the
station. He cursed himself for his carelessness. Throwing the cigarette
on the earth floor he ground it under his heel. When at last Dick
Spearsman had disappeared up the road that led to Bidwell and he came
out of the old factory and got again into Turner's Pike, he felt that he
was in no shape to talk of business but nevertheless must act at once.
In front of the factory he stopped in the road and tried to wipe the mud
off the seat of his trousers with a handkerchief. Then he went to the
creek and washed his soiled hands. With wet hands he arranged his tie
and straightened the collar of his coat. He had an air of one about
to ask a woman to become his wife. Striving to look as important and
dignified as possible, he went along the station platform and into the
telegraph office to confront Hugh and to find out at once and finally
what fate the gods had in store for him.

       *       *       *       *       *

It no doubt contributed to Steve's happiness in after life, in the
days when he was growing rich, and later when he reached out for public
honors, contributed to campaign funds, and even in secret dreamed of
getting into the United States Senate or being Governor of his state,
that he never knew how badly he overreached himself that day in his
youth when he made his first business deal with Hugh at the Wheeling
Station at Pickleville. Later Hugh's interest in the Steven Hunter
industrial enterprises was taken care of by a man who was as shrewd as
Steve himself. Tom Butterworth, who had made money and knew how to make
and handle money, managed such things for the inventor, and Steve's
chance was gone forever.

That is, however, a part of the story of the development of the town
of Bidwell and a story that Steve never understood. When he overreached
himself that day he did not know what he had done. He made a deal with
Hugh and was happy to escape the predicament he thought he had got
himself into when he talked too much to the two men in the bank.

Although Steve's father had always a great faith in his son's shrewdness
and when he talked to other men represented him as a peculiarly capable
and unappreciated man, the two did not in private get on well. In the
Hunter household they quarreled and snarled at each other. Steve's
mother had died when he was a small boy and his one sister, two years
older than himself, kept herself always in the house and seldom appeared
on the streets. She was a semi-invalid. Some obscure nervous disease had
twisted her body out of shape, and her face twitched incessantly.
One morning in the barn back of the Hunter house Steve, then a lad of
fourteen, was oiling his bicycle when his sister appeared and stood
watching him. A small wrench lay on the ground and she picked it up.
Suddenly and without warning she began to beat him on the head. He was
compelled to knock her down in order to tear the wrench out of her hand.
After the incident she was ill in bed for a month.

Elsie Hunter was always a source of unhappiness to her brother. As he
began to get up in life Steve had a growing passion for being respected
by his fellows. It got to be something of an obsession with him and
among other things he wanted very much to be thought of as one who had
good blood in his veins. A man whom he hired searched out his
ancestry, and with the exception of his immediate family it seemed
very satisfactory. The sister, with her twisted body and her face that
twitched so persistently, seemed to be everlastingly sneering at him. He
grew half afraid to come into her presence. After he began to grow rich
he married Ernestine, the daughter of the soap maker at Buffalo, and
when her father died she also had a great deal of money. His own father
died and he set up a household of his own. That was in the time when big
houses began to appear at the edge of the berry lands and on the hills
south of Bidwell. On his father's death Steve became guardian for his
sister. The jeweler had left a small estate and it was entirely in the
son's hands. Elsie lived with one servant in a small house in town and
was put in the position of being entirely dependent on her brother's
bounty. In a sense it might be said that she lived by her hatred of him.
When on rare occasions he came to her house she would not see him. A
servant came to the door and reported her asleep. Almost every month she
wrote a letter demanding that her share of her father's money be
handed over to her, but it did no good. Steve occasionally spoke to an
acquaintance of his difficulty with her. “I am more sorry for the woman
than I can say,” he declared. “It's the dream of my life to make the
poor afflicted soul happy. You see yourself that I provide her with
every comfort of life. Ours is an old family. I have it from an expert
in such matters that we are descendants of one Hunter, a courtier in the
court of Edward the Second of England. Our blood has perhaps become
a little thin. All the vitality of the family was centered in me.
My sister does not understand me and that has been the cause of much
unhappiness and heart burning, but I shall always do my duty by her.”

In the late afternoon of the spring day that was also the most eventful
day of his life, Steve went quickly along the Wheeling Station platform
to the door of the telegraph office. It was a public place, but before
going in he stopped, again straightened his tie and brushed his clothes,
and then knocked at the door. As there was no response he opened the
door softly and looked in. Hugh was at his desk but did not look up.
Steve went in and closed the door. By chance the moment of his entrance
was also a big moment in the life of the man he had come to see.
The mind of the young inventor, that had for so long been dreamy and
uncertain, had suddenly become extraordinarily clear and free. One of
the inspired moments that come to intense natures, working intensely,
had come to him. The mechanical problem he was trying so hard to work
out became clear. It was one of the moments that Hugh afterwards thought
of as justifying his existence, and in later life he came to live for
such moments. With a nod of his head to Steve he arose and hurried out
to the building that was used by the Wheeling as a freight warehouse.
The jeweler's son ran at his heels. On an elevated platform before the
freight warehouse sat an odd looking agricultural implement, a machine
for rooting potatoes out of the ground that had been received on the day
before and was now awaiting delivery to some farmer. Hugh dropped to his
knees beside the machine and examined it closely. Muttered exclamations
broke from his lips. For the first time in his life he was not
embarrassed in the presence of another person. The two men, the one
almost grotesquely tall, the other short of stature and already inclined
toward corpulency, stared at each other. “What is it you're inventing? I
came to see you about that,” Steve said timidly.

Hugh did not answer the question directly. He stepped across the narrow
platform to the freight warehouse and began to make a rude drawing on
the side of the building. Then he tried to explain his plant-setting
machine. He spoke of it as a thing already achieved. At the moment he
thought of it in that way. “I had not thought of the use of a
large wheel with the arms attached at regular intervals,” he said
absent-mindedly. “I will have to find money now. That'll be the next
step. It will be necessary to make a working model of the machine now. I
must find out what changes I'll have to make in my calculations.”

The two men returned to the telegraph office and while Hugh listened
Steve made his proposal. Even then he did not understand what the
machine that was to be made was to do. It was enough for him that a
machine was to be made and he wanted to share in its ownership at once.
As the two men walked back from the freight warehouse, his mind took
hold of Hugh's remark about getting money. Again he was afraid. “There's
some one in the background,” he thought. “Now I must make a proposal he
can't refuse. I mustn't leave until I've made a deal with him.”

Fairly carried away by his anxiety, Steve proposed to provide money out
of his own pocket to make the model of the machine. “We'll rent the old
pickle factory across the track,” he said, opening the door and pointing
with a trembling finger. “I can get it cheap. I'll have windows and
a floor put in. Then I'll get you a man to whittle out a model of the
machine. Allie Mulberry can do it. I'll get him for you. He can whittle
anything if you only show him what you want. He's half crazy and won't
get on to our secret. When the model is made, leave it to me, you just
leave it to me.”

Rubbing his hands together Steve walked boldly to The telegrapher's
desk and picking up a sheet of paper began to write out a contract. It
provided that Hugh Was to get a royalty of ten per cent. of the selling
price on the machine he had invented and that was to be manufactured
by a company to be organized by Steven Hunter. The contract also stated
that a promoting company was to be organized at once and money provided
for the experimental work Hugh had yet to do. The Missourian was
to begin getting a salary at once. He was to risk nothing, as Steve
elaborately explained. When he was ready for them mechanics were to be
employed and their salaries paid. When the contract had been written and
read aloud, a copy was made and Hugh, who was again embarrassed beyond
words, signed his name.

With a flourish of his hand Steve laid a little pile of money on the
desk. “That's for a starter,” he said and turned to frown at George Pike
who at that moment came to the door. The freight agent went quickly away
and the two men were left alone together. Steve shook hands with his new
partner. He went out and then came in again. “You understand,” he said
mysteriously. “The fifty dollars is your first month's salary. I was
ready for you. I brought it along. You just leave everything to me, just
you leave it to me.” Again he went out and Hugh was left alone. He saw
the young man go across the tracks to the old factory and walk up and
down before it. When a farmer came along and shouted at him, he did not
reply, but stepping back into the road swept the deserted old building
with his eyes as a general might have looked over a battlefield. Then
he went briskly down the road toward town and the farmer turned on his
wagon seat to stare after him.

Hugh McVey also stared. When Steve had gone away, he walked to the end
of the station platform and looked along the road toward town. It seemed
to him wonderful that he had at last held conversation with a citizen
of Bidwell. A little of the import of the contract he had signed came to
him, and he went into the station and got his copy of it and put it in
his pocket. Then he came out again. When he read it over and realized
anew that he was to be paid a living wage and have time and help to work
out the problem that had now become vastly important to his happiness,
it seemed to him that he had been in the presence of a kind of god.
He remembered the words of Sarah Shepard concerning the bright alert
citizens of eastern towns and realized that he had been in the presence
of such a being, that he had in some way become connected in his
new work with such a one. The realization overcame him completely.
Forgetting entirely his duties as a telegrapher, he closed the office
and went for a walk across the meadows and in the little patches of
woodlands that still remained standing in the open plain north of
Pickleville. He did not return until late at night, and when he did, had
not solved the puzzle as to what had happened. All he got out of it was
the fact that the machine he had been trying to make was of great and
mysterious importance to the civilization into which he had come to
live and of which he wanted so keenly to be a part. There seemed to him
something almost sacred in that fact. A new determination to complete
and perfect his plant-setting machine had taken possession of him.

       *       *       *       *       *

The meeting to organize a promotion company that would in turn launch
the first industrial enterprise in the town of Bidwell was held in the
back room of the Bidwell bank one afternoon in June. The berry season
had just come to an end and the streets were full of people. A circus
had come to town and at one o'clock there was a parade. Before the
stores horses belonging to visiting country people stood hitched in two
long rows. The meeting in the bank was not held until four o'clock,
when the banking business was at an end for the day. It had been a hot,
stuffy afternoon and a storm threatened. For some reason the whole town
had an inkling of the fact that a meeting was to be held on that day,
and in spite of the excitement caused by the coming of the circus, it
was in everybody's mind. From the very beginning of his upward journey
in life, Steve Hunter had the faculty of throwing an air of mystery and
importance about everything he did. Every one saw the workings of the
machinery by which the myth concerning himself was created, but was
nevertheless impressed. Even the men of Bidwell who retained the ability
to laugh at Steve could not laugh at the things he did.

For two months before the day on which the meeting was held, the town
had been on edge. Every one knew that Hugh McVey had suddenly given
up his place in the telegraph office and that he was engaged in some
enterprise with Steve Hunter. “Well, I see he has thrown off the mask,
that fellow,” said Alban Foster, superintendent of the Bidwell schools,
in speaking of the matter to the Reverend Harvey Oxford, the minister of
the Baptist Church.

Steve saw to it that although every one was curious the curiosity was
unsatisfied. Even his father was left in the dark. The two men had a
sharp quarrel about the matter, but as Steve had three thousand dollars
of his own, left him by his mother, and was well past his twenty-first
year, there was nothing his father could do.

At Pickleville the windows and doors at the back of the deserted factory
were bricked up, and over the windows and the door at the front, where a
floor had been laid, iron bars specially made by Lew Twining the Bidwell
blacksmith had been put. The bars over the door locked the place at
night and gave the factory the air of a prison. Every evening before he
went to bed Steve walked to Pickleville. The sinister appearance of the
building at night gave him a peculiar satisfaction. “They'll find out
what I'm up to when I want 'em to,” he said to himself. Allie Mulberry
worked at the factory during the day. Under Hugh's direction he whittled
pieces of wood into various shapes, but had no idea of what he was
doing. No one but the half-wit and Steve Hunter were admitted to the
society of the telegraph operator. When Allie Mulberry came into the
Main Street at night, every one stopped him and a thousand questions
were asked, but he only shook his head and smiled foolishly. On
Sunday afternoons crowds of men and women walked down Turner's Pike to
Pickleville and stood looking at the deserted building, but no one tried
to enter. The bars were in place and window shades were drawn over the
windows. Above the door that faced the road there was a large sign.
“Keep Out. This Means You,” the sign said.

The four men who met Steve in the bank knew vaguely that some sort of
invention was being perfected, but did not know what it was. They spoke
in an offhand way of the matter to their friends and that increased the
general curiosity. Every one tried to guess what was up. When Steve was
not about, John Clark and young Gordon Hart pretended to know everything
but gave the impression of men sworn to secrecy. The fact that Steve
told them nothing seemed to them a kind of insult. “The young upstart,
I believe yet he's a bluff,” the banker declared to his friend, Tom
Butterworth.

On Main Street the old and young men who stood about before the stores
in the evening tried also to make light of the jeweler's son and the air
of importance he constantly assumed. They also spoke of him as a young
upstart and a windbag, but after the beginning of his connection with
Hugh McVey, something of conviction went out of their voices. “I read
in the paper that a man in Toledo made thirty thousand dollars out of an
invention. He got it up in less than a day. He just thought of it. It's
a new kind of way for sealing fruit cans,” a man in the crowd before
Birdie Spink's drug store absent-mindedly observed.

Inside the drug store by the empty stove, Judge Hanby talked
persistently of the time when factories would come. He seemed to those
who listened a sort of John the Baptist crying out of the coming of
the new day. One evening in May of that year, when a goodly crowd was
assembled, Steve Hunter came in and bought a cigar. Every one became
silent. Birdie Spinks was for some mysterious reason a little upset.
In the store something happened that, had there been some one there to
record it, might later have been remembered as the moment that marked
the coming of the new age to Bidwell. The druggist, after he had handed
out the cigar, looked at the young man whose name had so suddenly come
upon every one's lips and whom he had known from babyhood, and then
addressed him as no young man of his age had ever before been addressed
by an older citizen of the town. “Well, good evening, Mr. Hunter,” he
said respectfully. “And how do you find yourself this evening?”

To the men who met him in the bank, Steve described the plant-setting
machine and the work it was intended to do. “It's the most perfect thing
of its kind I've ever seen,” he said with the air of one who has spent
his life as an expert examiner of machinery. Then, to the amazement of
every one, he produced sheets covered with figures estimating the cost
of manufacturing the machine. To the men present it seemed as though
the question as to the practicability of the machine had already been
settled. The sheets covered with figures made the actual beginning of
manufacturing seem near at hand. Without raising his voice and quite as
a matter of course, Steve proposed that the men present subscribe each
three thousand dollars to the stock of a promotion company, the money
to be used to perfect the machine and put it actually to work in the
fields, while a larger company for the building of a factory was being
organized. For the three thousand dollars each of the men would receive
later six thousand dollars in stock in the larger company. They would
make one hundred per cent. on their first investment. As for himself he
owned the invention and it was very valuable. He had already received
many offers from other men in other places. He wanted to stick to his
own town and to the men who had known him since he was a boy. He would
retain a controlling interest in the larger company and that would
enable him to take care of his friends. John Clark he proposed to make
treasurer of the promotion company. Every one could see he would be the
right man. Gordon Hart should be manager. Tom Butterworth could, if he
could find time to give it, help him in the actual organization of the
larger company. He did not propose to do anything in a small way. Much
stock would have to be sold to farmers, as well as to townspeople, and
he could see no reason why a certain commission for the selling of stock
should not be paid.

The four men came out of the back room of the bank just as the storm
that had all day been threatening broke on Main Street. They stood
together by the front window and watched the people skurry along past
the stores homeward-bound from the circus. Farmers jumping into their
wagons started their horses away on the trot. The whole street was
populous with people shouting and running. To an observing person
standing at the bank window, Bidwell, Ohio, might have seemed no longer
a quiet town filled with people who lived quiet lives and thought quiet
thoughts, but a tiny section of some giant modern city. The sky was
extraordinarily black as from the smoke of a mill. The hurrying people
might have been workmen escaping from the mill at the end of the day.
Clouds of dust swept through the street. Steve Hunter's imagination was
aroused. For some reason the black clouds of dust and the running people
gave him a tremendous sense of power. It almost seemed to him that he
had filled the sky with clouds and that something latent in him had
startled the people. He was anxious to get away from the men who had
just agreed to join him in his first great industrial adventure. He felt
that they were after all mere puppets, creatures he could use, men who
were being swept along by him as the people running along the streets
were being swept along by the storm. He and the storm were in a way akin
to each other. He had an impulse to be alone with the storm, to walk
dignified and upright in the face of it as he felt that in the future he
would walk dignified and upright in the face of men.

Steve went out of the bank and into the street. The men inside shouted
at him, telling him he would get wet, but he paid no attention to their
warning. When he had gone and when his father had run quickly across
the street to his jewelry store, the three men who were left in the
bank looked at each other and laughed. Like the loiterers before Birdie
Spinks' drug-store, they wanted to belittle him and had an inclination
to begin calling him names; but for some reason they could not do
it. Something had happened to them. They looked at each other with a
question in their eyes. Each man waited for the others to speak. “Well,
whatever happens we can't lose much of anything,” John Clark finally
observed.

And over the bridge and out into Turner's Pike walked Steve Hunter, the
embryo industrial magnate. Across the great stretches of fields that
lay beside the road the wind ran furiously, tearing leaves off trees,
carrying great volumes of dust before it. The hurrying black clouds
in the sky were, he fancied, like clouds of smoke pouring out of the
chimneys of factories owned by himself. In fancy also he saw his town
become a city, bathed in the smoke of his enterprises. As he looked
abroad over the fields swept by the storm of wind, he realized that the
road along which he walked would in time become a city street. “Pretty
soon I'll get an option on this land,” he said meditatively. An exalted
mood took possession of him and when he got to Pickleville he did not go
into the shop where Hugh and Allie Mulberry were at work, but turning,
walked back toward town in the mud and the driving rain.

It was a time when Steve wanted to be by himself, to feel himself the
one great man of the community. He had intended to go into the old
pickle factory and escape the rain, but when he got to the railroad
tracks, had turned back because he realized suddenly that in the
presence of the silent, intent inventor he had never been able to feel
big. He wanted to feel big on that evening and so, unmindful of the rain
and of his hat, that was caught up by the wind and blown away into a
field, he went along the deserted road thinking great thoughts. At a
place where there were no houses he stopped for a moment and lifted
his tiny hands to the skies. “I'm a man. I tell you what, I'm a man.
Whatever any one says, I tell you what, I'm a man,” he shouted into the
void.




CHAPTER VII


Modern men and women who live in industrial cities are like mice that
have come out of the fields to live in houses that do not belong to
them. They live within the dark walls of the houses where only a dim
light penetrates, and so many have come that they grow thin and haggard
with the constant toil of getting food and warmth. Behind the walls
the mice scamper about in droves, and there is much squealing and
chattering. Now and then a bold mouse stands upon his hind legs and
addresses the others. He declares he will force his way through the
walls and conquer the gods who have built the house. “I will kill them,”
 he declares. “The mice shall rule. You shall live in the light and the
warmth. There shall be food for all and no one shall go hungry.”

The little mice, gathered in the darkness out of sight in the great
houses, squeal with delight. After a time when nothing happens they
become sad and depressed. Their minds go back to the time when they
lived in the fields, but they do not go out of the walls of the houses,
because long living in droves has made them afraid of the silence of
long nights and the emptiness of skies. In the houses giant children are
being reared. When the children fight and scream in the houses and in
the streets, the dark spaces between the walls rumble with strange and
appalling noises.

The mice are terribly afraid. Now and then a single mouse for a moment
escapes the general fear. A mood comes over such a one and a light
comes into his eyes. When the noises run through the houses he makes up
stories about them. “The horses of the sun are hauling wagon loads of
days over the tops of trees,” he says and looks quickly about to see if
he has been heard. When he discovers a female mouse looking at him he
runs away with a flip of his tail and the female follows. While other
mice are repeating his saying and getting some little comfort from it,
he and the female mouse find a warm dark corner and lie close together.
It is because of them that mice continue to be born to dwell within the
walls of the houses.

When the first small model of Hugh McVey's plant-setting machine had
been whittled out by the half-wit Allie Mulberry, it replaced the famous
ship, floating in the bottle, that for two or three years had been lying
in the window of Hunter's jewelry store. Allie was inordinately proud of
the new specimen of his handiwork. As he worked under Hugh's directions
at a bench in a corner of the deserted pickle factory, he was like a
strange dog that has at last found a master. He paid no attention
to Steve Hunter who, with the air of one bearing in his breast some
gigantic secret, came in and went out at the door twenty times a day,
but kept his eyes on the silent Hugh who sat at a desk and made drawings
on sheets of paper. Allie tried valiantly to follow the instructions
given him and to understand what his master was trying to do, and Hugh,
finding himself unembarrassed by the presence of the half-wit, sometimes
spent hours trying to explain the workings of some intricate part of
the proposed machine. Hugh made each part crudely out of great pieces of
board and Allie reproduced the part in miniature. Intelligence began to
come into the eyes of the man who all his life had whittled meaningless
wooden chains, baskets formed out of peach stones, and ships intended
to float in bottles. Love and understanding began a little to do for him
what words could not have done. One day when a part Hugh had fashioned
would not work the half-wit himself made the model of a part that worked
perfectly. When Hugh incorporated it in the machine, he was so happy
that he could not sit still, and walked up and down cooing with delight.

When the model of the machine appeared in the jeweler's window, a fever
of excitement took hold of the minds of the people. Every one declared
himself either for or against it. Something like a revolution took
place. Parties were formed. Men who had no interest in the success of
the invention, and in the nature of things could not have, were ready
to fight any one who dared to doubt its success. Among the farmers who
drove into town to see the new wonder were many who said the machine
would not, could not, work. “It isn't practical,” they said. Going off
by themselves and forming groups, they whispered warnings. A hundred
objections sprang to their lips. “See all the little wheels and cogs the
thing has,” they said. “You see it won't work. You take now in a field
where there are stones and old tree roots, maybe, sticking in the
ground. There you'll see. Fools'll buy the machine, yes. They'll spend
their money. They'll put in plants. The plants'll die. The money'll be
wasted. There'll be no crop.” Old men, who had been cabbage farmers in
the country north of Bidwell all their lives, and whose bodies were all
twisted out of shape by the terrible labor of the cabbage fields,
came hobbling into town to look at the model of the new machine. Their
opinions were anxiously sought by the merchant, the carpenter, the
artisan, the doctor--by all the townspeople. Almost without exception,
they shook their heads in doubt. Standing on the sidewalk before the
jeweler's window, they stared at the machine and then, turning to the
crowd that had gathered about, they shook their heads in doubt. “Huh,”
 they exclaimed, “a thing of wheels and cogs, eh? Well, so young Hunter
expects that thing to take the place of a man. He's a fool. I always
said that boy was a fool.” The merchants and townspeople, their ardor
a little dampened by the adverse decision of the men who knew
plant-setting, went off by themselves. They went into Birdie Spinks'
drugstore, but did not listen to the talk of Judge Hanby. “If the
machine works, the town'll wake up,” some one declared. “It means
factories, new people coming in, houses to be built, goods to be
bought.” Visions of suddenly acquired wealth began to float in their
minds. Young Ed Hall, apprentice to Ben Peeler the carpenter, grew
angry. “Hell,” he exclaimed, “why listen to a lot of damned old calamity
howlers? It's the town's duty to get out and plug for that machine. We
got to wake up here. We got to forget what we used to think about Steve
Hunter. Anyway, he saw a chance, didn't he? and he took it. I wish I was
him. I only wish I was him. And what about that fellow we thought was
maybe just a telegraph operator? He fooled us all slick, now didn't he?
I tell you we ought to be proud to have such men as him and Steve Hunter
living in Bidwell. That's what I say. I tell you it's the town's duty
to get out and plug for them and for that machine. If we don't, I know
what'll happen. Steve Hunter's a live one. I been thinking maybe he was.
He'll take that invention and that inventor of his to some other town or
to a city. That's what he'll do. Damn it, I tell you we got to get out
and back them fellows up. That's what I say.”

On the whole the town of Bidwell agreed with young Hall. The excitement
did not die, but grew every day more intense. Steve Hunter had a
carpenter come to his father's store and build in the show window facing
Main Street, a long shallow box formed in the shape of a field. This he
filled with pulverized earth and then by an arrangement of strings and
pulleys connected with a clockwork device the machine was pulled across
the field. In a receptacle at the top of the machine had been placed
some dozens of tiny plants no larger than pins. When the clockwork
was started and the strings pulled to imitate applied horse power, the
machine crept slowly forward, an arm came down and made a hole in the
ground, the plant dropped into the hole and spoon-like hands appeared
and packed the earth about the plant roots. At the top of the machine
there was a tank filled with water, and when the plant was set, a
portion of water, nicely calculated as to quantity, ran down a pipe and
was deposited at the plant roots.

Evening after evening the machine crawled forward across the tiny field,
setting the plants in perfect order. Steve Hunter busied himself with
it; he did nothing else; and rumors of a great company to be formed in
Bidwell to manufacture the device were whispered about. Every evening
a new tale was told. Steve went to Cleveland for a day and it was said
that Bidwell was to lose its chance, that big moneyed men had induced
Steve to take his factory project to the city. Hearing Ed Hall berate
a farmer who doubted the practicability of the machine, Steve took him
aside and talked to him. “We're going to need live young men who know
how to handle other men for jobs as superintendent and things like
that,” he said. “I make no promises. I only want to tell you that I like
live young fellows who can see the hole in a bushel basket. I like that
kind. I like to see them get up in the world.”

Steve heard the farmers continually expressing their skepticism about
making the plants that had been set by the machine grow into maturity,
and had the carpenter build another tiny field in a side window of the
store. He had the machine moved and plants set in the new field. He
let these grow. When some of the plants showed signs of dying he came
secretly at night and replaced them with sturdier shoots so that the
miniature field showed always a brave, vigorous front to the world.

Bidwell became convinced that the most rigorous of all forms of human
labor practiced by its people was at an end. Steve made and had hung in
the store window a large sheet showing the relative cost of planting an
acre of cabbage with the machine, and by what was already called “the
old way,” by hand. Then he formally announced that a stock company would
be formed in Bidwell and that every one would have a chance to get into
it. He printed an article in the weekly paper in which he said that many
offers had come to him to take his project to the city or to other and
larger towns. “Mr. McVey, the celebrated inventor, and I both want to
stick to our own people,” he said, regardless of the fact that Hugh knew
nothing of the article and had never been taken into the lives of the
people addressed. A day was set for the beginning of the taking of stock
subscriptions, and in private conversations Steve whispered of huge
profits to be made. The matter was talked over in every household and
plans were made for raising money to buy stock. John Clark agreed to
lend a certain percentage on the value of the town property and Steve
secured a long-time option on all the land facing Turner's Pike clear
down to Pickleville. When the town heard of this it was filled with
wonder. “Gee,” the loiterers before the store exclaimed, “old Bidwell
is going to grow up. Now look at that, will you? There are going to be
houses clear down to Pickleville.” Hugh went to Cleveland to see about
having one of his new machines made in steel and wood and in a size that
would permit its actual use in the field. He returned, a hero in the
town's eyes. His silence made it possible for the people, who could not
entirely forget their former lack of faith in Steve, to let their minds
take hold of something they thought was truly heroic.

In the evening, after going again to see the machine in the window
of the jewelry store, crowds of young and old men wandered down along
Turner's Pike to the Wheeling Station where a new man had come to
replace Hugh. They hardly saw the evening train when it came in. Like
devotees before a shrine they gazed with something like worship in their
eyes at the old pickle factory, and when by chance Hugh came among them,
unconscious of the sensation he was creating, they became embarrassed
as he was always embarrassed by their presence. Every one dreamed of
becoming suddenly rich by the power of the man's mind. They thought of
him as thinking always great thoughts. To be sure, Steve Hunter might be
more than half bluff and blow and pretense, but there was no bluff and
blow about Hugh. He didn't waste his time in words. He thought, and out
of his thought sprang almost unbelievable wonders.

In every part of the town of Bidwell, the new impulse toward progress
was felt. Old men, who had become settled in their ways and who had
begun to pass their days in a sort of sleepy submission to the idea of
the gradual passing away of their lives, awoke and went into Main Street
in the evening to argue with skeptical farmers. Beside Ed Hall, who had
become a Demosthenes on the subject of progress and the duty of the town
to awake and stick to Steve Hunter and the machine, a dozen other men
held forth on the street corners. Oratorical ability awoke in the most
unexpected places. Rumors flew from lip to lip. It was said that within
a year Bidwell was to have a brick factory covering acres of ground,
that there would be paved streets and electric lights.

Oddly enough the most persistent decrier of the new spirit in Bidwell
was the man who, if the machine turned out to be a success, would profit
most from its use. Ezra French, the profane, refused to be convinced.
When pressed by Ed Hall, Dr. Robinson, and other enthusiasts, he fell
back upon the word of that God whose name had been so much upon his
lips. The decrier of God became the defender of God. “The thing, you
see, can't be done. It ain't all right. Something awful'll happen. The
rains won't come and the plants'll dry up and die. It'll be like it
was in Egypt in the Bible times,” he declared. The old farmer with the
twisted leg stood before the crowd in the drug-store and proclaimed the
truth of God's word. “Don't it say in the Bible men shall work and labor
by the sweat of their brows?” he asked sharply. “Can a machine like that
sweat? You know it can't. And it can't do the work either. No, siree.
Men've got to do it. That's the way things have been since Cain killed
Abel in the Garden of Eden. God intended it so and there can't no
telegraph operator or no smart young squirt like Steve Hunter--fellows
in a town like this--set themselves up before me to change the workings
of God's laws. It can't be done, and if it could be done it would be
wicked and ungodly to try. I'll have nothing to do with it. It ain't
right. That's what I say and all your smart talk ain't a-going to change
me.”

It was in the year 1892 that Steve Hunter organized the first industrial
enterprise that came to Bidwell. It was called the Bidwell Plant-Setting
Machine Company, and in the end it turned out to be a failure. A large
factory was built on the river bank facing the New York Central tracks.
It is now occupied by an enterprise called the Hunter Bicycle Company
and is what in industrial parlance is called a live, going concern.

For two years Hugh worked faithfully trying to perfect the first of his
inventions. After the working models of the plant-setter were brought
from Cleveland, two trained mechanics were employed to come to Bidwell
and work with him. In the old pickle factory an engine was installed
and lathes and other tool-making machines were set up. For a long time
Steve, John Clark, Tom Butterworth, and the other enthusiastic promoters
of the enterprise had no doubt as to the final outcome. Hugh wanted to
perfect the machine, had his heart set on doing the job he had set out
to do, but he had then and, for that matter, he continued during his
whole life to have but little conception of the import in the lives of
the people about him of the things he did. Day after day, with two
city mechanics and Allie Mulberry to drive the team of horses Steve had
provided, he went into a rented field north of the factory. Weak places
developed in the complicated mechanism, and new and stronger parts
were made. For a time the machine worked perfectly. Then other defects
appeared and other parts had to be strengthened and changed. The machine
became too heavy to be handled by one team. It would not work when the
soil was either too wet or too dry. It worked perfectly in both wet and
dry sand but would do nothing in clay. During the second year and
when the factory was nearing completion and much machinery had been
installed, Hugh went to Steve and told him of what he thought were the
limitations of the machine. He was depressed by his failure, but in
working with the machine, he felt he had succeeded in educating himself
as he never could have done by studying books. Steve decided that the
factory should be started and some of the machines made and sold. “You
keep the two men you have and don't talk,” he said. “The machine may yet
turn out to be better than you think. One can never tell. I have made it
worth their while to keep still.” On the afternoon of the day on which
he had his talk with Hugh, Steve called the four men who were associated
with him in the promotion of the enterprise into the back room of the
bank and told them of the situation. “We're up against something
here,” he said. “If we let word of the failure of this machine get out,
where'll we be? It is a case of the survival of the fittest.”

Steve explained his plan to the men in the room. After all, he said,
there was no occasion for any of them to get excited. He had taken them
into the thing and he proposed to get them out. “I'm that kind of a
man,” he said pompously. In a way, he declared, he was glad things had
turned out as they had. The four men had little actual money invested.
They had all tried honestly to do something for the town and he would
see to it that everything came out all right. “We'll be honest with
every one,” he said. “The stock in the company has all been sold. We'll
make some of the machines and sell them. If they're failures, as this
inventor thinks, it will not be our fault. The plant, you see, will
have to be sold cheap. When that times comes we five will have to save
ourselves and the future of the town. The machinery we have bought, is,
you see, iron and wood working machinery, the very latest kind. It can
be used to make some other thing. If the plant-setting machine is a
failure we'll simply buy up the plant at a low price and make something
else. Perhaps it'll be better for the town to have the entire stock
control in our hands. You see we few men have got to run things here.
It's going to be on our shoulders to see that labor is employed. A lot
of small stock-holders are a nuisance. As man to man I'm going to ask
each of you not to sell his stock, but if any one comes to you and asks
about its value, I expect you to be loyal to our enterprise. I'll begin
looking about for something to replace the plant-setting machine, and
when the shop closes we'll start right up again. It isn't every day men
get a chance to sell themselves a fine plant full of new machinery as we
can do in a year or so now.”

Steve went out of the bank and left the four men staring at each other.
Then his father got up and went out. The other men, all connected with
the bank, arose and wandered out. “Well,” said John Clark, somewhat
heavily, “he's a smart man. I suppose after all it is up to us to stick
with him and with the town. As he says, labor has got to be employed. I
can't see that it does a carpenter or a farmer any good to own a little
stock in a factory. It only takes their minds off their work. They have
foolish dreams of getting rich and don't attend to their own affairs. It
would be an actual benefit to the town if a few men owned the factory.”
 The banker lighted a cigar and going to a window stared out into the
main street of Bidwell. Already the town had changed. Three new brick
buildings were being erected on Main Street within sight of the bank
window. Workmen employed in the building of the factory had come to town
to live, and many new houses were being built. Everywhere things were
astir. The stock of the company had been oversubscribed, and almost
every day men came into the bank and spoke of wanting to buy more.
Only the day before a farmer had come in with two thousand dollars. The
banker's mind began to secrete the poison of his age. “After all, it's
men like Steve Hunter, Tom Butterworth, Gordon Hart, and myself that
have to take care of things, and to be in shape to do it we have to look
out for ourselves,” he soliloquized. Again he stared into Main Street.
Tom Butterworth went out at the front door. He wanted to be by himself
and think his own thoughts. Gordon Hart returned to the empty back room
and standing by a window looked out into an alleyway. His thoughts ran
in the same channel as those that played through the mind of the bank
president. He also thought of men who wanted to buy stock in the company
that was doomed to failure. He began to doubt the judgment of Hugh McVey
in the matter of failure. “Such fellows are always pessimists,” he told
himself. From the window at the back of the bank, he could see over the
roofs of a row of small sheds and down a residence street to where two
new workingmen's houses were being built. His thoughts only differed
from the thoughts of John Clark because he was a younger man. “A few men
of the younger generation, like Steve and myself will have to take hold
of things,” he muttered aloud. “We'll have to have money to work with.
We'll have to take the responsibility of the ownership of money.”

At the front of the bank John Clark puffed at his cigar. He felt like a
soldier weighing the chances of battle. Vaguely he thought of himself as
a general, a kind of U. S. Grant of industry. The lives and happiness
of many people, he told himself, depended on the clear working of his
brain. “Well,” he thought, “when factories start coming to a town and
it begins to grow as this town is growing no man can stop it. The
fellow who thinks of individual men, little fellows with their savings
invested, who may be hurt by an industrial failure, is just a weakling.
Men have to face the duties life brings. The few men who see clearly
have to think first of themselves. They have to save themselves in order
that they may save others.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Things kept on the stir in Bidwell and the gods of chance played into
the hands of Steve Hunter. Hugh invented an apparatus for lifting a
loaded coal-car off the railroad tracks, carrying it high up into the
air and dumping its contents into a chute. By its use an entire car of
coal could be emptied with a roaring rush into the hold of a ship or the
engine room of a factory. A model of the new invention was made and
a patent secured. Then Steve Hunter carried it off to New York. He
received two hundred thousand dollars in cash for it, half of

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/7414