stood about to talk of their affairs
he had nothing to say. He was a talkative man and his apprentice, Will
Sellinger, son of the Bidwell house painter, was puzzled by his silence.

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

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




CHAPTER IV


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER V


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

In the spring of his second year in Bidwell, Hugh went often in the evening
to watch the plant setters at work in the moonlight on the French farm. He
did not make his presence known but hid himself in a fence corner behind
bushes and watched the workers. As he saw the stooped misshapen figures
crawling slowly along and heard the words of the old man driving them like
cattle, his heart was deeply touched and he wanted to protest. In the dim
light the slowly moving figures of women appeared, and after them came the
crouched crawling men. They came down the long row toward him, wriggling
into his line of sight like grotesquely misshapen animals driven by some
god of the night to the performance of a terrible task. An arm went up. It
came down again swiftly. The three-cornered hoe sank into the ground. The
slow rhythm of the crawler was broken. He reached with his disengaged hand
for the plant that lay on the ground before him and lowered it into the
hole the hoe had made. With his fingers he packed the earth about the