und 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 which went to Hugh. Steve's faith
in the inventive genius of the Missourian was renewed and strengthened. He
looked forward with a feeling almost approaching pleasure to the time when
the town would be forced to face the fact that the plant-setting machine
was a failure, and the factory with its new machinery would have to be
thrown on the market. He knew that his associates in the promotion of the
enterprise were secretly selling their stock. One day he went to Cleveland
and had a long talk with a banker there. Hugh was at work on a corn-cutting
machine and already he had secured an option on it. "Perhaps when the
time comes to sell the factory there'll be more than one bidder," he told
Ernestine, the soap maker's daughter, who had married him within a month
after the sale of the car-unloading device. He grew indignant when he told
her of the disloyalty of the two men in the bank, and the rich farmer,
Tom Butterworth. "They're selling their shares and letting the small
stock-holders lose their money," he declared. "I told 'em not to do it. Now
if anything happens to spoil their plans they'll not have me to blame."

Nearly a year had been spent in stirring up the people of Bidwell to the
point of becoming investors. Then things began to stir. The ground was
broken for the erection of the factory. No one knew of the difficulties
that had been encountered in attempting to perfect the machine and word
was passed about that in actual tests in the fields it had proven itself
entirely practical. The skeptical farmers who came into town on Saturdays
were laughed at by the town enthusiasts. A field, that had been planted
during one of the brief periods when the machine finding ideal soil
conditions had worked perfectly, was left to grow. As when he operated
the tiny model in the store window, Steve took no chances. He engaged Ed
Hall to go at night and replace the plants that did not live. "It's fair
enough," he explained to Ed. "A hundred things can cause the plants to die,
but if they die it'll be blamed on the machine. What will become of the
town if we don't believe in the thing we're going to manufacture here?"

The crowds of people, who in the evenings walked out along Turner's Pike
to look at the field with its long rows of sturdy young cabbages, moved
restlessly about and talked of the new days. From the field they went along
the railroad tracks to the site of the factory. The brick walls began to
mount up into the sky. Machinery began to arrive and was housed under
temporary sheds against the time when it could be installed. An advance
horde of workmen came to town and new faces appeared on Main Street in the
evening. The thing that was happening in Bidwell happened in towns all over
the Middle West. Out through the coal and iron regions of Pennsylvania,
into Ohio and Indiana, and on westward into the States bordering on the
Mississippi River, industry crept. Gas and oil were discovered in Ohio and
Indiana. Over night, towns grew into cities. A madness took hold of the
minds of the people. Villages like Lima and Findlay, Ohio, and like Muncie
and Anderson in Indiana, became small cities within a few weeks. To some of
these places, so anxious were the people to get to them and to invest their
money, excursion trains were run. Town lots that a few weeks before the
discovery of oil or gas could have been bought for a few dollars sold for
thousands. Wealth seemed to be spurting out of the very earth. On farms in
Indiana and Ohio giant gas wells blew the drilling machinery out of the
ground, and the fuel so essential to modern industrial development rushed
into the open. A wit, standing in the presence of one of the roaring gas
wells exclaimed, "Papa, Earth has indigestion; he has gas on his stomach.
His face will be covered with pimples."

Having, before the factories came, no market for the gas, the wells were
lighted and at night great torches of flame lit the skies. Pipes were laid
on the surface of the ground and by a day's work a laborer earned enough to
heat his house at tropical heat through an entire winter. Farmers owning
oil-producing land went to bed in the evening poor and owing money at the
bank, and awoke in the morning rich. They moved into the towns and invested
their money in the factories that sprang up everywhere. In one county in
southern Michigan, over five hundred patents for woven wire farm fencing
were taken out in one year, and almost every patent was a magnet about
which a company for the manufacture of fence formed itself. A va