s, others have to
think of hundreds. It's all their minds are big enough to comprehend. They
snatch at a little measly advantage and miss the big one. That's what these
men have done."

For a long time the two rode in silence. Tom, who had also sold his stock,
wondered if Steve knew. He decided he did. "However, he's decided to deal
with me. He needs some one and has chosen me," he thought. He made up his
mind to be bold. After all, Steve was young. Only a year or two before he
was nothing but a young upstart and the very boys in the street laughed at
him. Tom grew a little indignant, but was careful to take thought before
he spoke. "Perhaps, although he's young and don't look like much, he's a
faster and shrewder thinker than any of us," he told himself.

"You do talk like a fellow who has something up his sleeve," he said
laughing. "If you want to know, I sold my stock the same as the others. I
wasn't going to take a chance of being a loser if I could help it. It may
be the small-town way, but you know things maybe I don't know. You can't
blame me for living up to my lights. I always did believe in the survival
of the fittest and I got a daughter to support and put through college. I
want to make a lady of her. You ain't got any kids yet and you're younger.
Maybe you want to take chances I don't want to take. How do I know what
you're up to?"

Again the two rode in silence. Steve had prepared himself for the talk. He
knew there was a chance that, in its turn, the corn-cutting machine Hugh
had invented might not prove practical and that in the end he might be
left with a factory on his hands and with nothing to manufacture in it. He
did not, however, hesitate. Again, as on the day in the bank when he was
confronted by the two older men, he made a bluff. "Well, you can come in or
stay out, just as you wish," he said a little sharply. "I'm going to get
hold of that factory, if I can, and I'm going to manufacture corn-cutting
machines. Already I have promises of orders enough to keep running for a
year. I can't take you in with me and have it said around town you were
one of the fellows who sold out the small investors. I've got a hundred
thousand dollars of stock in the company. You can have half of it. I'll
take your note for the fifty thousand. You won't ever have to pay it. The
earnings of the new factory will clean you up. You got to come clean,
though. Of course you can go get John Clark and come out and make an open
fight to get the factory yourselves, if you want to. I own the rights to
the corn-cutting machine and will take it somewhere else and manufacture
it. I don't mind telling you that, if we split up, I will pretty well
advertise what you three fellows did to the small investors after I asked
you not to do it. You can all stay here and own your empty factory and get
what satisfaction you can out of the love and respect you'll get from the
people. You can do what you please. I don't care. My hands are clean. I
ain't done anything I'm ashamed of, and if you want to come in with me, you
and I together will pull off something in this town we don't neither one of
us have to be ashamed of."

The two men drove back to the Butterworth farm house and Tom got out of the
buggy. He intended to tell Steve to go to the devil, but as they drove
along the road, he changed his mind. The young school teacher from Bidwell,
who had come on several occasions to call on his daughter Clara, was on
that night abroad with another young woman. He sat in a buggy with his arm
around her waist and drove slowly through the hill country. Tom and Steve
drove past them and the farmer, seeing in the moonlight the woman in the
arms of the man, imagined his daughter in her place. The thought made him
furious. "I'm losing the chance to be a big man in the town here in order
to play safe and be sure of money to leave to Clara, and all she cares
about is to galavant around with some young squirt," he thought bitterly.
He began to see himself as a wronged and unappreciated father. When he
got out of the buggy, he stood for a moment by the wheel and looked hard
at Steve. "I'm as good a sport as you are," he said finally. "Bring
around your stock and I'll give you the note. That's all it will be, you
understand: just my note. I don't promise to back it up with any collateral
and I don't expect you to offer it for sale." Steve leaned out of the buggy
and took him by the hand. "I won't sell your note, Tom," he said. "I'll
put it away. I want a partner to help me. You and I are going to do things
together."

The young promoter drove off along the road, and Tom went into the house
and to bed. Like his daughter he did not sleep. For a time he thought of
her and in imagination saw her again in the buggy with the school teacher
who had her in his arms. The thought made him stir restlessly about beneath
the sheets. "Damn women anyway," he muttered. To relieve his mind he
thought of other things. "I'll make out a deed and turn three of my farms
over to Clara," he decided shrewdly. "If things go wrong we won't be
entirely broke. I know Charlie Jacobs in the court-house over at the county
seat. I ought to be able to get a deed recorded without any one knowing it
if I oil Charlie's hand a little."

       *       *       *       *       *

Clara's last two weeks in the Woodburn household were spent in the midst of
a struggle, no less intense because no words were said. Both Henderson
Wood, burn and his wife felt that Clara owed them an explanation of the
scene at the front door with Frank Metcalf. When she did not offer it they
were offended. When he threw open the door and confronted the two people,
the plow manufacturer had got an impression that Clara was trying to escape
Frank Metcalf's embraces. He told his wife that he did not think she was
to blame for the scene on the front porch. Not being the girl's father he
could look at the matter coldly. "She's a good girl," he declared. "That
beast of a Frank Metcalf is all to blame. I daresay he followed her home.
She's upset now, but in the morning she'll tell us the story of what
happened."

The days went past and Clara said nothing. During her last week in the
house she and the two older people scarcely spoke. The young woman was in
an odd way relieved. Every evening she went to dine with Kate Chanceller
who, when she heard the story of the afternoon in the suburb and the
incident on the porch, went off without Clara's knowing of it and had a
talk with Henderson Woodburn in his office. After the talk the manufacturer
was puzzled and just a little afraid of both Clara and her friend. He tried
to tell his wife about it, but was not very clear. "I can't make it out,"
he said. "She is the kind of woman I can't understand, that Kate. She says
Clara wasn't to blame for what happened between her and Frank Metcalf, but
don't want to tell us the story, because she thinks young Metcalf wasn't to
blame either." Although he had been respectful and courteous as he listened
to Kate's talk, he grew angry when he tried to tell his wife what she had
said. "I'm afraid it was just a lot of mixed up nonsense," he declared.
"It makes me glad we haven't a daughter. If neither of them were to blame
what were they up to? What's getting the matter with the women of the
new generation? When you come down to it what's the matter with Kate
Chanceller?"

The plow manufacturer advised his wife to say nothing to Clara. "Let's wash
our hands of it," he suggested. "She'll go home in a few days now and we
will say nothing about her coming back next year. Let's be polite, but act
as though she didn't exist."

Clara accepted the new attitude of her uncle and aunt without comment. In
the afternoon she did not come home from the University but went to Kate's
apartment. The brother came home and after dinner played on the piano. At
ten o'clock Clara started home afoot and Kate accompanied her. The two
women went out of their way to sit on a bench in a park. They talked of
a thousand hidden phases of life Clara had hardly dared think of before.
During all the rest of her life she thought of those last weeks in Columbus
as the most deeply satisfactory time she ever lived through. In the
Woodburn house she was uncomfortable because of the silence and the hurt,
offended look on her aunt's face, but she did not spend much time there.
In the morning Henderson Woodburn ate his breakfast alone at seven, and
clutching his ever present portfolio of papers, was driven off to the plow
factory. Clara and her aunt had a silent breakfast at eight, and then
Clara also hurried away. "I'll be out for lunch and will go to Kate's for
dinner," she said as she went out of her aunt's presence, and she said it,
not with the air of one asking permission as had been her custom before the
Frank Metcalf incident, but as one having the right to dispose of her own
time. Only once did her aunt break the frigid air of offended dignity she
had assumed. One morning she followed Clara to the front door, and as she
watched her go down the steps from the front porch to the walk that led to
the street, called to her. Some faint recollection of a time of revolt in
her own youth perhaps came to her. Tears came into her eyes. To her the
world was a place of terror, where wolf-like men prowled about seeking
women to devour, and she was afraid something dreadful would happen to her
niece. "If you don't want to tell me anything, it's all right," she said
bravely, "but I wish you felt you could." When Clara turned to look at her,
she hastened to explain. "Mr. Woodburn said I wasn't to bother you about it
and I won't," she added quickly. Nervously folding and unfolding her arms,
she turned to stare up the street with the air of a frightened child that
looks into a den of beasts. "O Clara, be a good girl," she said. "I know
you're grown up now, but, O Clara, do be careful! Don't get into trouble."

The Woodburn house in Columbus, like the Butterworth house in the country
south of Bidwell, sat on a hill. The street fell away rather sharply as one
went toward the business portion of the city and the street car line, and
on the morning when her aunt spoke to her and tried with her feeble hands
to tear some stones out of the wall that was being built between them,
Clara hurried along the street under the trees, feeling as though she would
like also to weep. She saw no possibility of explaining to her aunt the new
thoughts she was beginning to have about life and did not want to hurt her
by trying. "How can I explain my thoughts when they're not clear in my own
mind, when I am myself just groping blindly about?" she asked herself. "She
wants me to be good," she thought. "What would she think if I told her that
I had come to the conclusion that, judging by her standards, I have been
altogether too good? What's the use trying to talk to her when I would only
hurt her and make things harder than ever?" She got to a street crossing
and looked back. Her aunt was still standing at the door of her house and
looking at her. There was something soft, small, round, insistent, both
terribly weak and terribly strong about the completely feminine thing she
had made of herself or that life had made of her. Clara shuddered. She did
not make a symbol of the figure of her aunt and her mind did not form
a connection between her aunt's life and what she had become, as Kate
Chanceller's mind would have done. She saw the little, round, weeping woman
as a boy, walking in the tree-lined streets of a town, sees suddenly the
pale face and staring eyes of a prisoner that looks out at him through
the iron bars of a town jail. Clara was startled as the boy would be
startled and, like the boy, she wanted to run quickly away. "I must think
of something else and of other kinds of women or I'll get things terribly
distorted," she told herself. "If I think of her and women like her I'll
grow afraid of marriage, and I want to be married as soon as I can find the
right man. It's the only thing I can do. What else is there a woman can
do?"

As Clara and Kate walked about in the evening, they talked continually of
the new position Kate believed women were on the point of achieving in the
world. The woman who was so essentially a man wanted to talk of marriage
and to condemn it, but continually fought the impulse in herself. She knew
that were she to let herself go she would say many things that, while they
might be true enough as regards herself, would not necessarily be true of
Clara. "Because I do not want to live with a man or be his wife is not very
good proof that the institution is wrong. It may be that I want to keep
Clara for myself. I think more of her than of any one else I've ever met.
How can I think straight about her marrying some man and becoming dulled to
the things that mean most to me?" she asked herself. One evening, when the
women were walking from Kate's apartment to the Woodburn house, they were
accosted by two men who wanted to walk with them. There was a small park
nearby and Kate led the men to it. "Come," she said, "we won't walk with
you, but you may sit with us here on a bench." The men sat down beside them
and the older one, a man with a small black mustache, made some remark
about the fineness of the night. The younger man who sat beside Clara
looked at her and laughed. Kate at once got down to business. "Well, you
wanted to walk with us: what for?" she asked sharply. She explained what
they had been doing. "We were walking and talking of women and what they
were to do with their lives," she explained. "We were expressing opinions,
you see. I don't say either of us had said anything that was very wise, but
we were having a good time and trying to learn something from each other.
Now what have you to say to us? You interrupted our talk and wanted to walk
with us: what for? You wanted to be in our company: now tell us what you've
got to contribute. You can't just come and walk with us like dumb things.
What have you got to offer that you think will make it worth while for us
to break up our conversation with each other and spend the time talking
with you?"

The older man, he of the mustache, turned to look at Kate, then got up from
the bench. He walked a little away and then turned and made a sign with his
hand to his companion. "Come on," he said, "let's get out of here. We're
wasting our time. It's a cold trail. They're a couple of highbrows. Come
on, let's be on our way."

The two women again walked along the street. Kate could not help feeling
somewhat proud of the way in which she had disposed of the men. She talked
of it until they got to the door of the Woodburn house, and, as she went
away along the street Clara thought she swaggered a little. She stood by
the door and watched her friend until she had disappeared around a corner.
A flash of doubt of the infallibility of Kate's method with men crossed her
mind. She remembered suddenly the soft brown eyes of the younger of the two
men in the park and wondered what was back of the eyes. Perhaps after all,
had she been alone with him, the man might have had something to say quite
as much to the point as the things she and Kate had been saying to each
other. "Kate made the men look like fools, but after all she wasn't very
fair," she thought as she went into the house.

       *       *       *       *       *

Clara was in Bidwell for a month before she realized what a change had
taken place in the life of her home town. On the farm things went on very
much as always, except that her father was very seldom there. He had gone
deeply into the project of manufacturing and selling corn-cutting machines
with Steve Hunter, and attended to much of the selling of the output of the
factory. Almost every month he went on trips to cities of the West. Even
when he was in Bidwell, he had got into the habit of staying at the town
hotel for the night. "It's too much trouble to be always running back and
forth," he explained to Jim Priest, whom he had put in charge of the farm
work. He swaggered before the old man who for so many years had been almost
like a partner in his smaller activities. "Well, I wouldn't like to have
anything said, but I think it just as well to have an eye on what's going
on," he declared. "Steve's all right, but business is business. We're
dealing in big affairs, he and I. I don't say he would try to get the best
of me; I'm just telling you that in the future I'll have to be in town most
of the time and can't think of things out here. You look out for the farm.
Don't bother me with details. You just tell me about it when there is any
buying or selling to do."

Clara arrived in Bidwell in the early afternoon of a warm day in June. The
hill country through which her train came into town was in the full flush
of its summer beauty. In the little patches of level land between the hills
grain was ripening in the fields. Along the streets of the tiny towns and
on dusty country roads farmers in overalls stood up in their wagons and
scolded at the horses, rearing and prancing in half pretended fright of the
passing train. In the forests on the hillsides the open places among the
trees looked cool and enticing. Clara put her cheek against the car window
and imagined herself wandering in cool forests with a lover. She forgot
the words of Kate Chanceller in regard to the independent future of women.
It was, she thought vaguely, a thing to be thought about only after some
more immediate problem was solved. Just what the problem was she didn't
definitely know, but she did know that it concerned some close warm contact
with life that she had as yet been unable to make. When she closed her
eyes, strong warm hands seemed to come out of nothingness and touch her
flushed cheeks. The fingers of the hands were strong like the branches of
trees. They touched with the firmness and gentleness of the branches of
trees nodding in a summer breeze.

Clara sat up stiffly in her seat and when the train stopped at Bidwell got
off and went to her waiting father with a firm, business-like air. Coming
out of the land of dreams, she took on something of the determined air
of Kate Chanceller. She stared at her father and an onlooker might have
thought them two strangers, meeting for the purpose of discussing some
business arrangement. A flavor of something like suspicion hung over them.
They got into Tom's buggy, and as Main Street was torn up for the purpose
of laying a brick pavement and digging a new sewer, they drove by a
roundabout way through residence streets until they got into Medina Road.
Clara looked at her father and felt suddenly very alert and on her guard.
It seemed to her that she was far removed from the green, unsophisticated
girl who had so often walked in Bidwell's streets; that her mind and spirit
had expanded tremendously in the three years she had been away; and she
wondered if her father would realize the change in her. Either one of two
reactions on his part might, she felt, make her happy. The man might turn
suddenly and taking her hand receive her into fellowship, or he might
receive her as a woman and his daughter by kissing her.

He did neither. They drove in silence through the town and passed over
a small bridge and into the road that led to the farm. Tom was curious
about his daughter and a little uncomfortable. Ever since the evening
on the porch of the farmhouse, when he had accused her of some unnamed
relationship with John May, he had felt guilty in her presence but had
succeeded in transferring the notion of guilt to her. While she was away
at school he had been comfortable. Sometimes he did not think of her for
a month at a time. Now she had written that she did not intend to go back.
She had not asked his advice, but had said positively that she was coming
home to stay. He wondered what was up. Had she got into another affair with
a man? He wanted to ask, had intended to ask, but in her presence found
that the words he had intended to say would not come to his lips. After
a long silence Clara began to ask questions about the farm, the men who
worked there, her aunt's health, the usual home-coming questions. Her
father answered with generalities. "They're all right," he said, "every one
and everything's all right."

The road began to lift out of the valley in which the town lay, and Tom
stopped the horse and pointing with the whip talked of the town. He was
relieved to have the silence broken, and decided not to say anything about
the letter announcing the end of her school life. "You see there," he said,
pointing to where the wall of a new brick factory arose above the trees
that grew beside the river. "That's a new factory we're building. We're
going to make corn-cutting machines there. The old factory's already too
small. We've sold it to a new company that's going to manufacture bicycles.
Steve Hunter and I sold it. We got twice what we paid for it. When the
bicycle factory's started, he and I'll own the control in that too. I tell
you the town's on the boom."

Tom boasted of his new position in the town and Clara turned and looked
sharply at him and then looked quickly away. He was annoyed by the action
and a flush of anger came to his cheeks. A side of his character his
daughter had never seen before came to the surface. When he was a simple
farmer he had been too shrewd to attempt to play the aristocrat with his
farm hands, but often, as he went about the barns and as he drove along
country roads and saw men at work in his fields, he had felt like a prince
in the presence of his vassals. Now he talked like a prince. It was that
that had startled Clara. There was about him an indefinable air of princely
prosperity. When she turned to look at him she noticed for the first time
how much his person had also changed. Like Steve Hunter he was beginning
to grow fat. The lean hardness of his cheeks had gone, his jaws seemed
heavier, even his hands had changed their color. He wore a diamond ring on
the left hand and it glistened in the sunlight. "Things have changed," he
declared, still pointing at the town. "Do you want to know who changed it?
Well, I had more to do with it than any one else. Steve thinks he did it
all, but he didn't. I'm the man who has done the most. He put through the
plant-setting machine company, but that was a failure. When you come right
down to it, things would have gone to pieces again if I hadn't gone to John
Clark and talked and bluffed him into giving us money when we wanted it. I
had most to do with finding the big market for our corn-cutters, too. Steve
lied to me and said he had 'em all sold for a year. He didn't have any sold
at all."

Tom struck the horse with the whip and drove rapidly along the road. Even
when the climb became difficult he would not let the horse walk, but kept
cracking the whip over his back. "I'm a different man than I was when you
went away," he declared. "You might as well know it, I'm the big man in
this town. It comes pretty near being my town when you come right down to
it. I'm going to take care of every one in Bidwell and give every one a
chance to make money, but it's my town now pretty near and you might as
well know it."

Embarrassed by his own words, Tom talked to cover his embarrassment.
Something he wanted very much to say got itself said. "I'm glad you went
to school and fitted yourself to be a lady," he began. "I want you should
marry pretty soon now. I don't know whether you met any one at school there
or not. If you did and he's all right, it's all right with me. I don't
want you should marry an ordinary man, but a smart one, an educated man, a
gentleman. We Butterworths are going to be bigger and bigger people here.
If you get married to a good man, a smart one, I'll build a house for you;
not just a little house but a big place, the biggest place Bidwell ever
seen." They came to the farm and Tom stopped the buggy in the road. He
shouted to a man in the barnyard who came running for her bags. When she
had got out of the buggy he immediately turned the horse about and drove
rapidly away. Her aunt, a large, moist woman, met her on the steps leading
to the front door, and embraced her warmly. The words her father had just
spoken ran a riotous course through Clara's brain. She realized that for
a year she had been thinking of marriage, had been wanting some man to
approach and talk of marriage, but she had not thought of the matter in the
way her father had put it. The man had spoken of her as though she were a
possession of his that must be disposed of. He had a personal interest in
her marriage. It was in someway not a private matter, but a family affair.
It was her father's idea, she gathered, that she was to go into marriage
to strengthen what he called his position in the community, to help him
be some vague thing he called a big man. She wondered if he had some one
in mind and could not avoid being a little curious as to who it could be.
It had never occurred to her that her marriage could mean anything to her
father beyond the natural desire of the parent that his child make a happy
marriage. She began to grow angry at the thought of the way in which her
father had approached the subject, but was still curious to know whether
he had gone so far as to have some one in mind for the role of husband,
and thought she would try to find out from her aunt. The strange farm hand
came into the house with her bags and she followed him upstairs to what had
always been her own room. Her aunt came puffing at her heels. The farm hand
went away and she began to unpack, while the older woman, her face very
red, sat on the edge of the bed. "You ain't been getting engaged to a man
down there where you been to school, have you, Clara?" she asked.

Clara looked at her aunt and blushed; then became suddenly and furiously
angry. Dropping the bag she had opened to the floor, she ran out of the
room. At the door she stopped and turned on the surprised and startled
woman. "No, I haven't," she declared furiously. "It's nobody's business
whether I have or not. I went to school for an education. I didn't go to
get me a man. If that's what you sent me for, why didn't you say so?"

Clara hurried out of the house and into the barnyard. She went into all
of the barns, but there were no men about. Even the strange farm hand who
had carried her bags into the house had disappeared, and the stalls in
the horse and cattle barns were empty. Then she went into the orchard and
climbing a fence went through a meadow and into the wood to which she had
always fled, when as a girl on the farm she was troubled or angry. For
a long time she sat on a log beneath a tree and tried to think her way
through the new idea of marriage she had got from her father's words. She
was still angry and told herself that she would leave home, would go to
some city and get work. She thought of Kate Chanceller who intended to be
a doctor, and tried to picture herself attempting something of the kind.
It would take money for study. She tried to imagine herself talking to her
father about the matter and the thought made her smile. Again she wondered
if he had any definite person in mind as her husband, and who it could
be. She tried to check off her father's acquaintances among the young men
of Bidwell. "It must be some new man who has come here, some one having
something to do with one of the factories," she thought.

After sitting on the log for a long time, Clara got up and walked under
the trees. The imaginary man, suggested to her mind by her father's words,
became every moment more and more a reality. Before her eyes danced the
laughing eyes of the young man who for a moment had lingered beside her
while Kate Chanceller talked to his companion that evening when they had
been challenged on the streets of Columbus. She remembered the young school
teacher, who had held her in his arms through a long Sunday afternoon, and
the day when, as an awakening maiden, she had heard Jim Priest talking to
the laborers in the barn about the sap that ran up the tree. The afternoon
slipped away and the shadows of the trees lengthened. On such a day and
alone there in the quiet wood, it was impossible for her to remain in the
angry mood in which she had left the house. Over her father's farm brooded
the passionate fulfillment of summer. Before her, seen through the trees,
lay yellow wheat fields, ripe for the cutting; insects sang and danced in
the air about her head; a soft wind blew and made a gentle singing noise
in the tops of the trees; at her back among the trees a squirrel chattered;
and two calves came along a woodland path and stood for a long time staring
at her with their large gentle eyes. She arose and went out of the wood,
crossed a falling meadow and came to a rail fence surrounding a corn field.
Jim Priest was cultivating corn and when he saw her left his horses and
came to her. He took both her hands in his and pumped her arms up and
down. "Well, Lord A'mighty, I'm glad to see you," he said heartily. "Lord
A'mighty, I'm glad to see you." The old farm hand pulled a long blade of
grass out of the ground beneath the fence and leaning against the top rail
began to chew it. He asked Clara the same question her aunt had asked, but
his asking did not annoy her. She laughed and shook her head. "No, Jim,"
she said, "I seem to have made a failure of going away to school. I didn't
get me a man. No one asked me, you see."

Both the woman and the old man became silent. Over the tops of the young
corn they could see down the hillside into the distant town. Clara wondered
if the man she was to marry was there. The idea of a marriage with her
had perhaps been suggested to his mind also. Her father, she decided, was
capable of that. He was evidently ready to go to any length to see her
safely married. She wondered why. When Jim Priest began to talk, striving
to explain his question, his words fitted oddly into the thoughts she was
having in regard to herself. "Now about marriage," he began, "you see now,
I never done it. I didn't get married at all. I don't know why. I wanted to
and I didn't. I was afraid to ask, maybe. I guess if you do it you're sorry
you did and if you don't you're sorry you didn't."

Jim went back to his team, and Clara stood by the fence and watched him
go down the long field and turn to come back along another of the paths
between the corn rows. When the horses came to where she stood, he stopped
again and looked at her. "I guess you'll get married pretty soon now,"
he said. The horses started on again and he held the cultivating machine
with one hand and looked back over his shoulder at her. "You're one of the
marrying kind," he called. "You ain't like me. You don't just think about
things. You do 'em. You'll be getting yourself married before very long.
You are one of the kind that does."




CHAPTER XI


If many things had happened to Clara Butterworth in the three years since
that day when John May so rudely tripped her first hesitating girlish
attempt to run out to life, things had also happened to the people she
had left behind in Bidwell. In so short a space of time her father, his
business associate Steve Hunter, Ben Peeler the town carpenter, Joe
Wainsworth the harness maker, almost every man and woman in town had become
something different in his nature from the man or woman bearing the same
name she had known in her girlhood.

Ben Peeler was forty years old when Clara went to Columbus to school. He
was a tall, slender, stoop-shouldered man who worked hard and was much
respected by his fellow townsmen. Almost any afternoon he might have been
seen going through Main Street, wearing his carpenter's apron and with a
carpenter's pencil stuck under his cap and balanced on his ear. He went
into Oliver Hall's hardware store and came out with a large package of
nails under his arm. A farmer who was thinking of building a new barn
stopped him in front of the post-office and for a half hour the two men
talked of the project. Ben put on his glasses, took the pencil out of his
cap and made some notation on the back of the package of nails. "I'll do a
little figuring; then I'll talk things over with you," he said. During the
spring, summer and fall Ben had always employed another carpenter and an
apprentice, but when Clara came back to town he was employing four gangs
of six men each and had two foremen to watch the work and keep it moving,
while his son, who in other times would also have been a carpenter, had
become a salesman, wore fancy vests and lived in Chicago. Ben was making
money and for two years had not driven a nail or held a saw in his hand. He
had an office in a frame building beside the New York Central tracks, south
of Main Street, and employed a book-keeper and a stenographer. In addition
to carpentry he had embarked in another business. Backed by Gordon Hart,
he had become a lumber dealer and bought and sold lumber under the firm
name of Peeler and Hart. Almost every day cars of lumber were unloaded
and stacked under sheds in the yard back of his office. He was no longer
satisfied with his income as a workman but, under the influence of Gordon
Hart, demanded also a swinging profit on the building materials. Ben now
drove about town in a vehicle called a buckboard and spent the entire day
hurrying from job to job. He had no time now to stop for a half hour's
gossip with a prospective builder of a barn, and did not come to loaf in
Birdie Spinks' drug-store at the end of the day. In the evening he went to
the lumber office and Gordon Hart came over from the bank. The two men
figured on jobs to be built, rows of workingmen's houses, sheds alongside
one of the new factories, large frame houses for the superintendents and
other substantial men of the town's new enterprises. In the old days Ben
had been glad to go occasionally into the country on a barn-building job.
He had liked the country food, the gossip with the farmer and his men at
the noon hour and the drive back and forth to town, mornings and evenings.
While he was in the country he managed to make a deal for his winter
potatoes, hay for his horse, and perhaps a barrel of cider to drink on
winter evenings. Now he had no time to think of such things. When a farmer
came to see him he shook his head. "Get some one else to figure on your
job," he advised. "You'll save money by getting a barn-building carpenter.
I can't bother. I have too many houses to build." Ben and Gordon sometimes
worked in the lumber office until midnight. On warm still nights the sweet
smell of new-cut boards filled the air of the yard and crept in through the
open windows, but the two men, intent on their figures, did not notice. In
the early evening one or two teams came back to the yard to finish hauling
lumber to a job where the men were to work on the next day. The voices
of the men, talking and singing as they loaded their wagons, broke the
silence. Later the wagons loaded high with boards went creaking away.
When the two men grew tired and sleepy, they locked the office and walked
through the yard to the driveway that led to a residence street. Ben was
nervous and irritable. One evening they found three men, sleeping on a pile
of boards in the yard, and drove them out. It gave both men something to
think about. Gordon Hart went home and before he slept made up his mind
that he would not let another day go by without getting the lumber in the
yard more heavily insured. Ben had not handled affairs long enough to come
quickly to so sensible a decision. All night he rolled and tumbled about in
his bed. "Some tramp with his pipe will set the place afire," he thought.
"I'll lose all the money I've made." For a long time he did not think of
the simple expedient of hiring a watchman to drive sleepy and penniless
wanderers away, and charging enough more for his lumber to cover the
additional expense. He got out of bed and dressed, thinking he would get
his shotgun out of the barn and go back to the yard and spend the night.
Then he undressed and got into bed again. "I can't work all day and spend
my nights down there," he thought resentfully. When at last he slept, he
dreamed of sitting in the lumber yard in the darkness with the gun in
his hand. A man came toward him and he discharged the gun and killed the
man. With the inconsistency common to the physical aspect of dreams, the
darkness passed away and it was daylight. The man he had thought dead was
not quite dead. Although the whole side of his head was torn away, he still
breathed. His mouth opened and closed convulsively. A dreadful illness took
possession of the carpenter. He had an elder brother who had died when
he was a boy, but the face of the man on the ground was the face of his
brother. Ben sat up in bed and shouted. "Help, for God's sake, help! It's
my own brother. Don't you see, it is Harry Peeler?" he cried. His wife
awoke and shook him. "What's the matter, Ben," she asked anxiously. "What's
the matter?" "It was a dream," he said, and let his head drop wearily on
the pillow. His wife went to sleep again, but he stayed awake the rest of
the night. When on the next morning Gordon Hart suggested the insurance
idea, he was delighted. "That settles it of course," he said to himself.
"It's simple enough, you see. That settles everything."

In his shop on Main Street Joe Wainsworth had plenty to do after the boom
came to Bidwell. Many teams were employed in the hauling of building
materials; loads of paving brick were being carted from cars to where they
were to be laid on Main Street; and teams hauled earth from where the new
Main Street sewer was being dug and from the freshly dug cellars of houses.
Never had there been so many teams employed and so much repairing of
harness to do. Joe's apprentice had left him, had been carried off by the
rush of young men to the places where the boom had arrived earlier. For a
year Joe had worked alone and had then employed a journeyman harness maker
who had drifted into town drunk and who got drunk every Saturday evening.
The new man was an odd character. He had a faculty for making money, but
seemed to care little about making it for himself. Within a week after he
came to town he knew every one in Bidwell. His name was Jim Gibson and he
had no sooner come to work for Joe than a contest arose between them. The
contest concerned the question of who was to run the shop. For a time
Joe asserted himself. He growled at the men who brought harness in to be
repaired, and refused to make promises as to when the work would be done.
Several jobs were taken away and sent to nearby towns. Then Jim Gibson
asserted himself. When one of the teamsters who had come to town with the
boom came with a heavy work harness on his shoulder, he went to meet him.
The harness was thrown with a rattling crash on the floor and Jim examined
it. "Oh, the devil, that's an easy job," he declared. "We'll fix that up in
a jiffy. You can have it to-morrow afternoon if you want it."

For a time Jim made it a practice to come to where Joe stood at work at his
bench and consult with him regarding prices to be charged for work. Then he
returned to the customer and charged more than Joe had suggested. After a
few weeks he slopped consulting Joe at all. "You're no good," he exclaimed,
laughing. "What you're doing in business I don't know." The old harness
maker stared at him for a minute and then went to his bench and to work.
"Business," he muttered, "what do I know about business? I'm a harness
maker, I am."

After Jim came to work for him, Joe made in one year almost twice the
amount he had lost in the failure of the plant-setting machine factory. The
money was not invested in stock of any factory but lay in the bank. Still
he was not happy. All day Jim Gibson, whom Joe had never dared tell the
tales of his triumph as a workman and to whom he did not brag as he had
formerly done to his apprentices, talked of his ability to get the best of
customers. He had, he declared, managed, in the last place he had worked
before he came to Bidwell, to sell a good many sets of harness as handmade
that were in reality made in a factory. "It isn't like the old times," he
said, "things are changing. We used to sell harness only to farmers or to
teamsters right in our towns who owned their own horses. We always knew the
men we did business with and always would know them. Now it's different.
The men now, you see, who are here in this town to work--well, next month
or next year they'll be somewhere else. All they care about you and me is
how much work they can get for a dollar. Of course they talk big about
honesty and all that stuff, but that's only their guff. They think maybe
we'll fall for it and they'll get more for the money they pay out. That's
what they're up to."

Jim tried hard to make his version of how the shop should be run clear
to his employer. Every day he talked for hours