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 hi