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 regarding the matter. He tried to get Joe to put in a stock of factory-made harness and when he was unsuccessful was angry. "O the devil," he cried. "Can't you understand what you're up against? The factories are bound to win. For why? Look here, there can't any one but some old moss-back who has worked around horses all his life tell the difference between hand- and machine-sewed harness. The machine-made can be sold cheaper. It looks all right and the factories are able to put on a lot of do-dads. That catches the young fellows. It's good business. Quick sales and profits, that's the story." Jim laughed and then said something that made the shivers run up and down Joe's back. "If I had the money and was steady I'd start a shop in this town and show you up," he said. "I'd pretty near run you out. The trouble with me is I wouldn't stick to business if I had the money. I tried it once and made money; then when I got a little ahead I shut up the shop and went on a big drunk. I was no good for a month. When I work for some one else I'm all right. I get drunk on Saturdays and that satisfies me. I like to work and scheme for money, but it ain't any good to me when I get it and never will be. What I want you to do here is to shut your eyes and give me a chance. That's all I ask. Just shut your eyes and give me a chance." All day Joe sat astride his harness maker's horse, and when he was not at work, stared out through a dirty window into an alleyway and tried to understand Jim's idea of what a harness maker's attitude should be toward his customers, now that new times had come. He felt very old. Although Jim was as old in years lived as himself, he seemed very young. He began to be a little afraid of the man. He could not understand why the money, nearly twenty-five hundred dollars he had put in the bank during the two years Jim had been with him, seemed so unimportant and the twelve hundred dollars he had earned slowly after twenty years of work seemed so important. As there was much repair work always waiting to be done in the shop, he did not go home to lunch, but every day carried a few sandwiches to the shop in his pocket. At the noon hour, when Jim had gone to his boarding-house, he was alone, and if no one came in, he was happy. It seemed to him the best time of the day. Every few minutes he went to the front door to look out. The quiet Main Street, on which his shop had faced since he was a young man just come home from his trade adventures, and which had always been such a sleepy place at the noon hour in the summer, was now like a battle-field from which an army had retreated. A great gash had been cut in the street where the new sewer was to be laid. Swarms of workingmen, most of them strangers, had come into Main Street from the factories by the railroad tracks. They stood in groups in lower Main Street by Wymer's tobacco store. Some of them had gone into Ben Head's saloon for a glass of beer and came out wiping their mustaches. The men who were digging the sewer, foreign men, Italians he had heard, sat on the banks of dry earth in the middle of the street. Their dinner pails were held between their legs and as they ate they talked in a strange language. He remembered the day he had come to Bidwell with his bride, the girl he had met on his trade journey and who had waited for him until he had mastered his trade and had a shop of his own. He had gone to New York State to get her and had arrived back in Bidwell at noon on just such another summer day. There had not been many people about, but every one had known him. On that day every one had been his friend. Birdie Spinks rushed out of his drug store and had insisted that he and his bride go home to dinner with him. Every one had wanted them to come to his house for dinner. It had been a happy, joyous time. The harness maker had always been sorry his wife had borne him no children. He had said nothing and had always pretended he did not want them and now, at last, he was glad they had not come. He went back to his bench and to work, hoping Jim would be late in getting back from lunch. The shop was very quiet after the activity of the street that had so bewildered him. It was, he thought, like a retreat, almost like a church when you went to the door and looked in on a week day. He had done that once and had liked the empty silent church better than he did a church with a preacher and a lot of people in it. He had told his wife about the matter. "It was like the shop in the evening when I've got a job of work done and the boy has gone home," he had said. The harness maker looked out through the open door of his shop and saw Tom Butterworth and Steve Hunter going along Main Street, engaged in earnest conversation. Steve had a cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth and Tom had on a fancy vest. He thought again of the money he had lost in the plant-setting machine venture and was furious. The noon hour was spoiled and he was almost glad when Jim came back from his mid-day meal. The position in which he found himself in the shop amused Jim Gibson. He chuckled to himself as he waited on the customers who came in, and as he worked at the bench. One day when he came back along Main Street from the noon meal, he decided to try an experiment. "If I lose my job what difference does it make?" he asked himself. He stopped at a saloon and had a drink of whisky. When he got to the shop he began to scold his employer, to threaten him as though he were his apprentice. Swaggering suddenly in, he walked to where Joe was at work and slapped him roughly on the back. "Come, cheer up, old daddy," he said. "Get the gloom out of you. I'm tired of your muttering and growling at things." The employee stepped back and watched his employer. Had Joe ordered him out of the shop he would not have been surprised, and as he said later when he told Ben Head's bartender of the incident, would not have cared very much. The fact that he did not care, no doubt saved him. Joe was frightened. For just a moment he was so angry he could not speak, and then he remembered that if Jim left him he would have to wait on trade and would have to dicker with the strange teamsters regarding the repairing of the work harness. Bending over the bench he worked for an hour in silence. Then, instead of demanding an explanation of the rude familiarity with which Jim had treated him, he began to explain. "Now look here, Jim," he pleaded, "don't you pay any attention to me. You do as you please here. Don't you pay any attention to me." Jim said nothing, but a smile of triumph lit up his face. Late in the afternoon he left the shop. "If any one comes in, tell them to wait. I won't be gone very long," he said insolently. Jim went into Ben Head's saloon and told the bartender how his experiment had come out. The story was later told from store to store up and down the Main Street of Bidwell. "He was like a boy who has been caught with his hand in the jam pot," Jim explained. "I can't think what's the matter with him. Had I been in his, shoes I would have kicked Jim Gibson out of the shop. He told me not to pay any attention to him and to run the shop as I pleased. Now what do you think of that? Now what do you think of that for a man who owns his own shop and has money in the bank? I tell you, I don't know how it is, but I don't work for Joe any more. He works for me. Some day you come in the shop casual-like and I'll boss him around for you. I'm telling you I don't know how it is that it come about, but I'm the boss of the shop as sure as the devil." All of Bidwell was looking at itself and asking itself questions. Ed Hall, who had been a carpenter's apprentice earning but a few dollars a week with his master, Ben Peeler, was now foreman in the corn-cutter factory and received a salary of twenty-five dollars every Saturday night. It was more money than he had ever dreamed of earning in a week. On pay nights he dressed himself in his Sunday clothes and had himself shaved at Joe Trotter's barber shop. Then he went along Main Street, fingering the money in his pocket and half fearing he would suddenly awaken and find it all a dream. He went into Wymer's tobacco store to get a cigar, and old Claude Wymer came to wait on him. On the second Saturday evening after he got his new position, the tobacconist, a rather obsequious man, called him Mr. Hall. It was the first time such a thing had happened and it upset him a little. He laughed and made a joke of it. "Don't get high and mighty," he said, and turned to wink at the men loafing in the shop. Later he thought about the matter and was sorry he had not accepted the new title without protest. "Well, I'm foreman, and a lot of the young fellows I've always known and fooled around with will be working under me," he told himself. "I can't be getting thick with them." Ed walked along the street feeling very keenly the importance of his new place in the community. Other young fellows in the factory were getting a dollar and a half a day. At the end of the week he got twenty-five dollars, almost three times as much. The money was an indication of superiority. There could be no doubt about that. Ever since he had been a boy he had heard older men speak respectfully of men who possessed money. "Get on in the world," they said to young men, when they talked seriously. Among themselves they did not pretend that they did not want money. "It's money makes the mare go," they said. Down Main Street to the New York Central tracks Ed went, and then turned out of the street and disappeared into the station. The evening train had passed and the place was deserted. He went into the dimly lighted waiting-room. An oil lamp, turned low, and fastened by a bracket to the wall made a little circle of light in a corner. The room was like a church in the early morning of a wintry day, cold and still. He went hurriedly to the light, and taking the roll of money from his pocket, counted it. Then he went out of the room and along the station platform almost to Main Street, but was not satisfied. On an impulse he returned to the waiting room again and, late in the evening on his way home, he stopped there for a final counting of the money before he went to bed. Peter Fry was a blacksmith and had a son who was clerk in the Bidwell Hotel. He was a tall young fellow with curly yellow hair and watery blue eyes and smoked cigarettes, a habit that was an offense to the nostrils of the men of his times. His name was Jacob, but he was called in derision Fizzy Fry. The young man's mother was dead and he got his meals at the hotel and at night slept on a cot in the hotel office. He had a passion for gayly colored neckties and waistcoats and was forever trying unsuccessfully to attract the attention of the town girls. When he and his father met on the street, they did not speak to each other. Sometimes the father stopped and stared at his son. "How did I happen to be the father of a thing like that?" he muttered aloud. The blacksmith was a square-shouldered, heavily built man with a bushy black beard and a tremendous voice. When he was a young man he sang in the Methodist choir, but after his wife died he stopped going to church and began putting his voice to other uses. He smoked a short clay pipe that had become black with age and that at night could not be seen against his black curly beard. Smoke rolled out of his mouth in clouds and appeared to come up out of his belly. He was like a volcanic mountain and was called, by the men who loafed in Birdie Spinks' drug store, Smoky Pete. Smoky Pete was in more ways than one like a mountain given to eruptions. He did not get drunk, but after his wife died he got into the habit of having two or three drinks of whisky every evening. The whisky inflamed his mind and he strode up and down Main Street, ready to quarrel with any one his eye lighted upon. He got into the habit of roaring at his fellow citizens and making ribald jokes at their expense. Every one was a little afraid of him and he became in an odd way the guardian of the town morals. Sandy Ferris, a house painter, became a drunkard and did not support his family. Smoky Pete abused him in the public streets and in the sight of all men. "You cheap thing, warming your belly with whisky while jour children freeze, why don't you try being a man?" he shouted at the house painter, who staggered into a side street and went to sleep off his intoxication in a stall in Clyde Neighbors' livery barn. The blacksmith kept at the painter until the whole town took up his cry and the saloons became ashamed to accept his custom. He was forced to reform. The blacksmith did not, however, discriminate in the choice of victims. His was not the spirit of the reformer. A merchant of Bidwell, who had always been highly respected and who was an elder in his church, went one evening to the county seat and there got into the company of a notorious woman known throughout the county as Nell Hunter. The two went into a little room at the back of a saloon and were seen by two Bidwell young men who had gone to the county seat for an evening of adventure. When the merchant, named Pen Beck, realized he had been seen, he was afraid the tale of his indiscretion would be carried to his home town, and left the woman to join the young men. He was not a drinking man, but began at once to buy drinks for his companions. The three got very drunk and drove home together late at night in a rig the young men had hired for the occasion from Clyde Neighbors. On the way the merchant kept trying to explain his presence in the company of the woman. "Don't say anything about it," he urged. "It would be misunderstood. I have a friend whose son has been taken in by the woman. I was trying to get her to let him alone." The two young men were delighted that they had caught the merchant off his guard. "It's all right," they assured him. "Be a good fellow and we won't tell your wife or the minister of your church." When they had all the drinks they could carry, they got the merchant into the buggy and began to whip the horse. They had driven half way to Bidwell and all of them had fallen into a drunken sleep, when the horse became frightened at something in the road and ran away. The buggy was overturned and they were all thrown into the road. One of the young men had an arm broken and Pen Beck's coat was almost torn in two. He paid the young man's doctor's bill and settled with Clyde Neighbors for the damage to the buggy. For a long time the story of the merchant's adventure did not leak out, and when it did, but a few intimate friends of the young men knew it. Then it reached the ears of Smoky Pete. On the day he heard it he could hardly bear to wait until evening came. He hurried to Ben Head's saloon, had two drinks of whisky and then went to stand with the loafers before Birdie Spinks' drug store. At half past seven Pen Beck turned into Main Street from Cherry Street, where he lived. When he was more than three blocks away from the crowd of men before the drug store, Smoky Pete's roaring voice began to question him. "Well, Penny, my lad, so you went for a night among the ladies?" he shouted. "You've been fooling around with my girl, Nell Hunter, over at the county seat. I'd like to know what you mean. You'll have to make an explanation to me." The merchant stopped and stood on the sidewalk, unable to decide whether to face his tormentor or flee. It was just at the quiet time of the evening when the housewives of the town had finished their evening's work and stood resting by the kitchen doors. It seemed to Pen Beck that Smoky Pete's voice could be heard for a mile. He decided to face it out and if necessary to fight the blacksmith. As he came hurriedly toward the group before the drug store, Smoky Pete's voice took up the story of the merchant's wild night. He stepped out from the men in front of the store and seemed to be addressing himself to the whole street. Clerks, merchants, and customers rushed out of the stores. "Well," he cried, "so you made a night of it with my girl Nell Hunter. When you sat with her in the back room of the saloon you didn't know I was there. I was hidden under a table. If you'd done anything more than bite her on the neck I'd have come out and called you to time." Smoky Pete broke into a roaring laugh and waved his arms to the people gathered in the street and wondering what it was all about. It was for him one of the really delicious spots of his life. He tried to explain to the people what he was talking about. "He was with Nell Hunter in the back room of a saloon over at the county seat," he shouted. "Edgar Duncan and Dave Oldham saw him there. He came home with them and the horse ran away. He didn't commit adultery. I don't want you to think that happened. All that happened was he bit my best girl, Nell Hunter, on the neck. That's what makes me so mad. I don't like to have her bitten by him. She is my girl and belongs to me." The blacksmith, forerunner of the modern city newspaper reporter in his love of taking the center of the stage in order to drag into public sight the misfortunes of his fellows, did not finish his tirade. The merchant, white with anger, rushed up and struck him a blow on the chest with his small and rather fat fist. The blacksmith knocked him into the gutter and later, when he was arrested, went proudly off to the office of the town mayor and paid his fine. It was said by the enemies of Smoky Pete that he had not taken a bath for years. He lived alone in a small frame house at the edge of town. Behind his house was a large field. The house itself was unspeakably dirty. When the factories came to town, Tom Butterworth and Steve Hunter bought the field intending to cut it into building lots. They wanted to buy the blacksmith's house and finally did secure it by paying a high price. He agreed to move out within a year but after the money was paid repented and wished he had not sold. A rumor began to run about town connecting the name of Tom Butterworth with that of Fanny Twist, the town milliner. It was said the rich farmer had been seen coming out of her shop late at night. The blacksmith also heard another story whispered in the streets. Louise Trucker, the farmer's daughter who had at one time been seen creeping through a side street in the company of young Steve Hunter, had gone to Cleveland and it was said she had become the proprietor of a prosperous house of ill fame. Steve's money, it was declared, had been used to set her up in business. The two stories offered unlimited opportunity for expansion in the blacksmith's mind, but while he was preparing himself to do what he called bringing the two men down in the sight and hearing of the whole town, a thing happened that upset his plans. His son Fizzy Fry left his place as clerk in the hotel and went to work in the corn-cutting machine factory. One day his father saw him coming from the factory at noon with a dozen other workmen. The young man had on overalls and smoked a pipe. When he saw his father he stopped, and when the other men had gone on, explained his sudden transformation. "I'm in the shop now, but I won't be there long," he said proudly. "You know Tom Butterworth stays at the hotel? Well, he's given me a chance. I got to stay in the shop for a while to learn about things. After that I'm to have a chance as shipping clerk. Then I'll be a traveler on the road." He looked at his father and his voice broke. "You haven't thought very much of me, but I'm not so bad," he said. "I don't want to be a sissy, but I'm not very strong. I worked at the hotel because there wasn't anything else I thought I could do." Peter Fry went home to his house but could not eat the food he had cooked for himself on the tiny stove in the kitchen. He went outdoors and stood for a long time, looking out across the cow-pasture Tom Butterworth and Steve Hunter had bought and that they proposed should become a part of the rapidly growing city. He had himself taken no part in the new impulses that had come upon the town, except that he had taken advantage of the failure of the town's first industrial effort to roar insults at those of his townsmen who had lost their money. One evening he and Ed Hall had got into a fight about the matter on Main Street, and the blacksmith had been compelled to pay another fine. Now he wondered what was the matter with him. He had evidently made a mistake about his son. Had he made a mistake about Tom Butterworth and Steve Hunter? The perplexed man went back to his shop and all the afternoon worked in silence. His heart had been set on the creation of a dramatic scene on Main Street, when he openly attacked the two most prominent men of the town, and he even pictured himself as likely to be put in the town jail where he would have an opportunity to roar things through the iron bars at the citizens gathered in the street. In anticipation of such an event, he had prepared himself to attack the reputation of other people. He had never attacked women but, if he were locked up, he intended to do so. John May had once told him that Tom Butterworth's daughter, who had been away to college for a year, had been sent away because she was in the family way. John May had claimed he was responsible for her condition. Several of Tom's farm hands he said had been on intimate terms with the girl. The blacksmith had told himself that if he got into trouble for publicly attacking the father he would be justified in telling what he knew about the daughter. The blacksmith did not come into Main Street that evening. As he went home from work he saw Tom Butterworth standing with Steve Hunter before the post-office. For several weeks Tom had been spending most of his time away from town, had only appeared in town for a few hours at a time, and had not been seen on the streets in the evening. The blacksmith had been waiting to catch both men on the street at one time. Now that this opportunity had come, he began to be afraid he would not dare take it. "What right have I to spoil my boy's chances?" he asked himself, as he went rather heavily along the street toward his own house. It rained on that evening and for the first time in years Smoky Pete did not go into Main Street. He told himself that the rain kept him at home, but the thought did not satisfy him. All evening he moved restlessly about the house and at half past eight went to bed. He did not, however, sleep, but lay with his trousers on and with his pipe in his mouth, trying to think. Every few minutes he took the pipe from his mouth, blew out a cloud of smoke and swore viciously. At ten o'clock the farmer, who had owned the cow-pasture back of his house and who still kept his cows there, saw his neighbor tramping about in the rain in the field and saying things he had planned to say on Main Street in the hearing of the entire town. The farmer also had gone to bed early, but at ten o'clock he decided that, as the rain continued to fall and as it was growing somewhat cold, he had better get up and let his cows into the barn. He did not dress, but threw a blanket about his shoulders and went out without a light. He let down the bars separating the field from the barnyard and then saw and heard Smoky Pete in the field. The blacksmith walked back and forth in the darkness, and as the farmer stood by the fence, began to talk in a loud voice. "Well, Tom Butterworth, you're fooling around with Fanny Twist," he cried into the silence and emptiness of the night. "You're sneaking into her shop late at night, eh? Steve Hunter has set Louise Trucker up in business in a house in Cleveland. Are you and Fanny Twist going to open a house here? Is that the next industrial enterprise we're to have here in this town?" The amazed farmer stood in the rain in the darkness, listening to the words of his neighbor. The cows came through the gate and went into the barn. His bare legs were cold and he drew them alternately up under the blanket. For ten minutes Peter Fry tramped up and down in the field. Once he came quite near the farmer, who drew himself down beside the fence and listened, filled with amazement and fright. He could dimly see the tall, old man striding along and waving his arms about. When he had said many bitter, hateful things regarding the two most prominent men of Bidwell, he began to abuse Tom Butterworth's daughter, calling her a bitch and the daughter of a dog. The farmer waited until Smoky Pete had gone back to his house and, when he saw a light in the kitchen, and fancied he could also see his neighbor cooking food at a stove, he went again into his own house. He had himself never quarreled with Smoky Pete and was glad. He was glad also that the field at the back of his house had been sold. He intended to sell the rest of his farm and move west to Illinois. "The man's crazy," he told himself. "Who but a crazy man would talk that way in the darkness? I suppose I ought to report him and get him locked up, but I guess I'll forget what I heard. A man who would talk like that about nice respectable people would do anything. He might set fire to my house some night or something like that. I guess I'll just forget what I heard." BOOK FOUR CHAPTER XII After the success of his corn cutting machine and the apparatus for unloading coal cars that brought him a hundred thousand dollars in cash, Hugh could not remain the isolated figure he had been all through the first several years of his life in the Ohio community. From all sides men reached out their hands to him: and more than one woman thought she would like to be his wife. All men lead their lives behind a wall of misunderstanding they themselves have built, and most: men die in silence and unnoticed behind the walls. Now and then a man, cut off from his fellows by the peculiarities of his nature, becomes absorbed in doing something that is impersonal, useful, and beautiful. Word of his activities is carried over the walls. His name is shouted and is carried by the wind into the tiny inclosure in which other men live and in which they are for the most part absorbed in doing some petty task for the furtherance of their own comfort. Men and women stop their complaining about the unfairness and inequality of life and wonder about the man whose name they have heard. From Bidwell, Ohio, to farms all over the Middle West, Hugh McVey's name had been carried. His machine for cutting corn was called the McVey Corn-Cutter. The name was printed in white letters against a background of red on the side of the machine. Farmer boys in the States of Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and all the great corn-growing States saw it and in idle moments wondered what kind of man had invented the machine they operated. A Cleveland newspaper man came to Bidwell and went to Pickleville to see Hugh. He wrote a story telling of Hugh's early poverty and his efforts to become an inventor. When the reporter talked to Hugh he found the inventor so embarrassed and uncommunicative that he gave up trying to get a story. Then he went to Steve Hunter who talked to him for an hour. The story made Hugh a strikingly romantic figure. His people, the story said, came out of the mountains of Tennessee, but they were not poor whites. It was suggested that they were of the best English stock. There was a tale of Hugh's having in his boyhood contrived some kind of an engine that carried water from a valley to a mountain community; another of his having seen a clock in a store in a Missouri town and of his having later made a clock of wood for his parents; and a tale of his having gone into the forest with his father's gun, shot a wild hog and carried it down the mountain side on his shoulder in order to get money to buy school books. After the tale was printed the advertising manager of the corn-cutter factory got Hugh to go with him one day to Tom Butterworth's farm. Many bushels of corn were brought out of the corn cribs and a great mountain of corn was built on the ground at the edge of a field. Back of the mountain of corn was a corn field just coming into tassel. Hugh was told to climb up on the mountain and sit there. Then his picture was taken. It was sent to newspapers all over the West with copies of the biography cut from the Cleveland paper. Later both the picture and the biography were used in the catalogue that described the McVey Corn-Cutter. The cutting of corn and putting it in shocks against the time of the husking is heavy work. In recent times it has come about that much of the corn grown on mid-American prairie lands is not cut. The corn is left standing in the fields, and men go through it in the late fall to pick the yellow ears. The workers throw the corn over their shoulders into a wagon driven by a boy, who follows them in their slow progress, and it is then hauled away to the cribs. When a field has been picked, the cattle are turned in and all winter they nibble at the dry corn blades and tramp the stalks into the ground. All day long on the wide western prairies when the gray fall days have come, you may see the men and the horses working their way slowly through the fields. Like tiny insects they crawl across the immense landscapes. After them in the late fall and in the winter when the prairies are covered with snow, come the cattle. They are brought from the far West in cattle cars and after they have nibbled the corn blades all day, are taken to barns and stuffed to bursting with corn. When they are fat they are sent to the great killing-pens in Chicago, the giant city of the prairies. In the still fall nights, as you stand on prairie roads or in the barnyard back of one of the farm houses, you may hear the rustling of the dry corn blades and then the crash of the heavy bodies of the beasts going forward as they nibble and trample the corn. In earlier days the method of corn harvesting was different. There was poetry in the operation then as there is now, but it was set to another rhythm. When the corn was ripe men went into the fields with heavy corn knives and cut the stalks of corn close to the ground. The stalks were cut with the right hand swinging the corn knife and carried on the left arm. All day a man carried a heavy load of the stalks from which yellow ears hung down. When the load became unbearably heavy it was carried to the shock, and when all the corn was cut in a certain area, the shock was made secure by binding it with tarred rope or with a tough stalk twisted to take the place of the rope. When the cutting was done the long rows of stalks stood up in the fields like sentinels, and the men crawled off to the farmhouses and to bed, utterly weary. Hugh's machine took all of the heavier part of the work away. It cut the corn near the ground and bound it into bundles that fell upon a platform. Two men followed the machine, one to drive the horses and the other to place the bundles of stalks against the shocks and to bind the completed shocks. The men went along smoking their pipes and talking. The horses stopped and the driver stared out over the prairies. His arms did not ache with weariness and he had time to think. The wonder and mystery of the wide open places got a little into his blood. At night when the work was done and the cattle fed and made comfortable in the barns, he did not go at once to bed but sometimes went out of his house and stood for a moment under the stars. This thing the brain of the son of a mountain man, the poor white of the river town, had done for the people of the plains. The dreams he had tried so hard to put away from him and that the New England woman Sarah Shepard had told him would lead to his destruction had come to something. The car-dumping apparatus, that had sold for two hundred thousand dollars, had given Steve Hunter money to buy the plant-setting machine factory, and with Tom Butterworth to start manufacturing the corn-cutters, had affected the lives of fewer people, but it had carried the Missourian's name into other places and had also made a new kind of poetry in railroad yards and along rivers at the back of cities where ships are loaded. On city nights as you lie in your houses you may hear suddenly a long reverberating roar. It is a giant that has cleared his throat of a carload of coal. Hugh McVey helped to free the giant. He is still doing it. In Bidwell, Ohio, he is still at it, making new inventions, cutting the bands that have bound the giant. He is one man who had not been swept aside from his purpose by the complexity of life. That, however, came near happening. After the coming of his success, a thousand little voices began calling to him. The soft hands of women reached out of the masses of people about him, out of the old dwellers and new dwellers in the city that was growing up about the factories where his machines were being made in ever increasing numbers. New houses were constantly being built along Turner's Pike that led down to his workshop at Pickleville. Beside Allie Mulberry a dozen mechanics were now employed in his experimental shop. They helped Hugh with a new invention, a hay-loading apparatus on which he was at work, and also made special tools for use in the corn-cutter factory and the new bicycle factory. A dozen new houses had been built in Pickleville itself. The wives of the mechanics lived in the houses and occasionally one of them came to see her husband at Hugh's shop. He found it less and less difficult to talk to people. The workmen, themselves not given to the use of many words, did not think his habitual silence peculiar. They were more skilled than Hugh in the use of tools and thought it rather an accident that he had done what they had not done. As he had grown rich by that road they also tried their hand at inventions. One of them made a patent door hinge that Steve sold for ten thousand dollars, keeping half the money for his services, as he had done in the case of Hugh's car-dumping apparatus. At the noon hour the men hurried to their houses to eat and then came back to loaf before the factory and smoke their noonday pipes. They talked of money-making, of the price of food stuffs, of the advisability of a man's buying a house on the partial payment plan. Sometimes they talked of women and of their adventures with women. Hugh sat by himself inside the door of the shop and listened. At night after he had gone to bed he thought of what they had said. He lived in a house belonging to a Mrs. McCoy, the widow of a railroad section hand killed in a railroad accident, who had a daughter. The daughter, Rose McCoy, taught a country school and most of the year was away from home from Monday morning until late on Friday afternoon. Hugh lay in bed thinking of what his workmen had said of women and heard the old housekeeper moving about down stairs. Sometimes he got out of bed to sit by an open window. Because she was the woman whose life touched his most closely, he thought often of the school teacher. The McCoy house, a small frame affair with a picket fence separating it from Turner's Pike, stood with its back door facing the Wheeling Railroad. The section hands on the railroad remembered their former fellow workman, Mike McCoy, and wanted to be good to his widow. They sometimes dumped half decayed railroad ties over the fence into a potato patch back of the house. At night, when heavily loaded coal trains rumbled past, the brakemen heaved large chunks of coal over the fence. The widow awoke whenever a train passed. When one of the brakemen threw a chunk of coal he shouted and his voice could be heard above the rumble of the coal cars. "That's for Mike," he cried. Sometimes one of the chunks knocked a picket out of the fence and the next day Hugh put it back again. When the train had passed the widow got out of bed and brought the coal into the house. "I don't want to give the boys away by leaving it lying around in the daylight," she explained to Hugh. On Sunday mornings Hugh took a crosscut saw and cut the railroad ties into lengths that would go into the kitchen stove. Slowly his place in the McCoy household had become fixed, and when he received the hundred thousand dollars and everybody, even the mother and daughter, expected him to move, he did not do so. He tried unsuccessfully to get the widow to take more money for his board and when that effort failed, life in the McCoy household went as it had when he was a telegraph operator receiving forty dollars a month. In the spring or fall, as he sat by his window at night, and when the moon came up and the dust in Turner's Pike was silvery white, Hugh thought of Rose McCoy, sleeping in some farmer's house. It did not occur to him that she might also be awake and thinking. He imagined her lying very still in bed. The section hand's daughter was a slender woman of thirty with tired blue eyes and red hair. Her skin had been heavily freckled in her youth and her nose was still freckled. Although Hugh did not know it, she had once been in love with George Pike, the Wheeling station agent, and a day had been set for the marriage. Then a difficulty arose in regard to religious beliefs and George Pike married another woman. It was then she became a school teacher. She was a woman of few words and she and Hugh had never been alone together, but as Hugh sat by the window on fall evenings, she lay awake in a room in the farmer's house, where she was boarding during the school season, and thought of him. She thought that had Hugh remained a telegraph operator at forty dollars a month something might have happened between them. Then she had other thoughts, or rather, sensations that had little to do with thoughts. The room in which she lay was very still and a streak of moonlight came in through the window. In the barn back of the farmhouse she could hear the cattle stirring about. A pig grunted and in the stillness that followed she could hear the farmer, who lay in the next room with his wife, snoring gently. Rose was not very strong and the physical did not rule in her nature, but she was very lonely and thought that, like the farmer's wife, she would like to have a man to lie with her. Warmth crept over her body and her lips became dry so that she moistened them with her tongue. Had you been able to creep unobserved into the room, you might have thought her much like a kitten lying by a stove. She closed her eyes and gave herself over to dreams. In her conscious mind she dreamed of being the wife of the bachelor Hugh McVey, but deep within her there was another dream, a dream having its basis in the memory of her one physical contact with a man. When they were engaged to be married George had often kissed her. On one evening in the spring they had gone to sit together on the grassy bank beside the creek in the shadow of the pickle factory, then deserted and silent, and had come near to going beyond kissing. Why nothing else had happened Rose did not exactly know. She had protested, but her protest had been feeble and had not expressed what she felt. George Pike had desisted in his effort to press love upon her because they were to be married, and he did not think it right to do what he thought of as taking advantage of a girl. At any rate he did desist and long afterward, as she lay in the farmhouse consciously thinking of her mother's bachelor boarder, her thoughts became less and less distinct and when she had slipped off into sleep, George Pike came back to her. She stirred uneasily in bed and muttered words. Rough but gentle hands touched her cheeks and played in her hair. As the night wore on and the position of the moon shifted, the streak of moonlight lighted her face. One of her hands reached up and seemed to be caressing the moonbeams. The weariness had all gone out of her face. "Yes, George, I love you, I belong to you," she whispered. Had Hugh been able to creep like the moonbeam into the presence of the sleeping school teacher, he must inevitably have loved her. Also he would perhaps have understood that it is best to approach human beings directly and boldly as he had approached the mechanical problems by which his days were filled. Instead he sat by his window in the presence of the moonlit night and thought of women as beings utterly unlike himself. Words dropped by Sarah Shepard to the awakening boy came creeping back to his mind. He thought women were for other men but not for him, and told himself he did not want a woman. And then in Turner's Pike something happened. A farmer boy, who had been to town and who had the daughter of a neighbor in his buggy, stopped in front of the house. A long freight train, grinding its way slowly past the station, barred the passage along the road. He held the reins in one hand and put the other about the waist of his companion. The two heads sought each other and lips met. They clung to each other. The same moon that shed its light on Rose McCoy in the distant farmhouse lighted the open place where the lovers sat in the buggy in the road. Hugh had to close his eyes and fight to put down an almost overpowering physical hunger in himself. His mind still protested that women were not for him. When his fancy made for him a picture of the school teacher Rose McCoy sleeping in a bed, he saw her only as a chaste white thing to be worshiped from afar and not to be approached, at least not by himself. Again he opened his eyes and looked at the lovers whose lips still clung together. His long slouching body stiffened and he sat up very straight in his chair. Then he closed his eyes again. A gruff voice broke the silence. "That's for Mike," it shouted and a great chunk of coal thrown from the train bounded across the potato patch and struck against the back of the house. Downstairs he could hear old Mrs. McCoy getting out of bed to secure the prize. The train passed and the lovers in the buggy sank away from each other. In the silent night Hugh could hear the regular beat of the hoofs of the farmer boy's horse as it carried him and his woman away into the darkness. The two people, living in the house with the old woman who had almost finished her life, and themselves trying feebly to reach out to life, never got to anything very definite in relation to each other. One Saturday evening in the late fall the Governor of the State came to Bidwell. There was a parade to be followed by a political meeting and the Governor, who was a candidate for re-election, was to address the people from the steps of the town hall. Prominent citizens were to stand on the steps beside the Governor. Steve and Tom were to be there, and they had asked Hugh to come, but he had refused. He asked Rose McCoy to go to the meeting with him, and they set out from the house at eight o'clock and walked to town. Then they stood at the edge of the crowd in the shadow of a store building and listened to the speech. To Hugh's amazement his name was mentioned. The Governor spoke of the prosperity of the town, indirectly hinting that it was due to the political sagacity of the party of which he was a representative, and then mentioned several individuals also partly responsible. "The whole country is sweeping forward to new triumphs under our banner," he declared, "but not every community is so fortunate as I find you here. Labor is employed at good wages. Life here is fruitful and happy. You are fortunate here in having among you such business men as Steven Hunter and Thomas Butterworth; and in the inventor Hugh McVey you have one of the greatest intellects and the most useful men that ever lived to help lift the burden off the shoulder of labor. What his brain is doing for labor, our party is doing in another way. The protective tariff is really the father of modern prosperity." The speaker paused and a cheer arose from the crowd. Hugh took hold of the school teacher's arm and drew her away down a side street. They walked home in silence, but when they got to the house and were about to go in, the school teacher hesitated. She wanted to ask Hugh to walk about in the darkness with her but did not have the courage of her desires. As they stood at the gate and as the tall man with the long serious face looked down at her, she remembered the speaker's words. "How could he care for me? How could a man like him care anything for a homely little school teacher like me?" she asked herself. Aloud she said something quite different. As they had come along Turner's Pike she had made up her mind she would boldly suggest a walk under the trees along Turner's Pike beyond the bridge, and had told herself that she would later lead him to the place beside the stream and in the shadow of the old pickle factory where she and George Pike had come so near being lovers. Instead she hesitated for a moment by the gate and then laughed awkwardly and passed in. "You should be proud. I would be proud if I could be spoken of like that. I don't see why you keep living here in a cheap little house like ours," she said. On a warm spring Sunday night during the year in which Clara Butterworth came back to Bidwell to live, Hugh made what was for him an almost desperate effort to approach the school teacher. It had been a rainy afternoon and Hugh had spent a part of it in the house. He came over from his shop at noon and went to his room. When she was at home the school teacher occupied a room next his own. The mother who seldom left the house had on that day gone to the country to visit a brother. The daughter got dinner for herself and Hugh and he tried to help her wash the dishes. A plate fell out of his hands and its breaking seemed to break the silent, embarrassed mood that had possession of them. For a few minutes they were children and acted like children. Hugh picked up another plate and the school teacher told him to put it down. He refused. "You're as awkward as a puppy. How you ever manage to do anything over at that shop of yours is more than I know." Hugh tried to keep hold of the plate which the school teacher tried to snatch away and for a few minutes they struggled laughing. Her cheeks were flushed and Hugh thought she looked bewitching. An impulse he had never had before came to him. He wanted to shout at the top of his lungs, throw the plate at the ceiling, sweep all of the dishes off the table and hear them crash on the floor, play like some huge animal loose in a tiny world. He looked at Rose and his hands trembled from the strength of the strange impulse. As he stood staring she took the plate out of his hand and went into the kitchen. Not knowing what else to do he put on his hat and went for a walk. Later he went to the shop and tried to work, but his hand trembled when he tried to hold a tool and the hay-loading apparatus on which he was at work seemed suddenly a very trivial and unimportant thing. At four o'clock Hugh got back to the house and found it apparently empty, although the door leading to Turner's Pike was open. The rain had stopped falling and the sun struggled to work its way through the clouds. He went upstairs to his own room and sat on the edge of his bed. The conviction that the daughter of the house was in her room next door came to him, and although the thought violated all the beliefs he had ever held regarding women in relation to himself, he decided that she had gone to her room to be near him when he came in. For some reason he knew that if he went to her door and knocked she would not be surprised and would not refuse him admission. He took off his shoes and set them gently on the floor. Then he went on tiptoes out into the little hallway. The ceiling was so low that he had to stoop to avoid knocking his head against it. He raised his hand intending to knock on the door, and then lost courage. Several times he went into the hallway with the same intent, and each time returned noiselessly to his own room. He sat in the chair by the window and waited. An hour passed. He heard a noise that indicated that the school teacher had been lying on her bed. Then he heard footsteps on the stairs, and presently saw her go out of the house and go along Turner's Pike. She did not go toward town but over the bridge past his shop and into the country. Hugh drew himself back out of sight. He wondered where she could be going. "The roads are muddy. Why does she go out? Is she afraid of me?" he asked himself. When he saw her turn at the bridge and look back toward the house, his hands trembled again. "She wants me to follow. She wants me to go with her," he thought. Hugh did presently go out of the house and along the road but did not meet the school teacher. She had in fact crossed the bridge and had gone along the bank of the creek on the farther side. Then she crossed over again on a fallen log and went to stand by the wall of the pickle factory. A lilac bush grew beside the wall and she stood out of sight behind it. When she saw Hugh in the road her heart beat so heavily that she had difficulty in breathing. He went along the road and presently passed out of sight, and a great weakness took possession of her. Although the grass was wet she sat on the ground against the wall of the building and closed her eyes. Later she put her face in her hands and wept. The perplexed inventor did not get back to his boarding house until late that night, and when he did he was unspeakably glad that he had not knocked on the door of Rose McCoy's room. He had decided during the walk that the whole notion that she had wanted him had been born in his own brain. "She's a nice woman," he had said to himself over and over during the walk, and thought that in coming to that conclusion he had swept away all possibilities of anything else in her. He was tired when he got home and went at once to bed. The old woman came home from the country and her brother sat in his buggy and shouted to the school teacher, who came out of her room and ran down the stairs. He heard the two women carry something heavy into the house and drop it on the floor. The farmer brother had given Mrs. McCoy a bag of potatoes. Hugh thought of the mother and daughter standing together downstairs and was unspeakably glad he had not given way to his impulse toward boldness. "She would be telling her now. She is a good woman and would be telling her now," he thought. At two o'clock that night Hugh got out of bed. In spite of the conviction that women were not for him, he had found himself unable to sleep. Something that shone in the eyes of the school teacher, when she struggled with him for the possession of the plate, kept calling to him and he got up and went to the window. The clouds had all gone out of the sky and the night was clear. At the window next his own sat Rose McCoy. She was dressed in a night gown and was looking away along Turner's Pike to the place where George Pike the station master lived with his wife. Without giving himself time to think, Hugh knelt on the floor and with his long arm reached across the space between the two windows. His fingers had almost touched the back of the woman's head and ached to play in the mass of red hair that fell down over her shoulders, when again self-consciousness overcame him. He drew his arm quickly back and stood upright in the room. His head banged against the ceiling and he heard the window of the room next door go softly down. With a conscious effort he took himself in hand. "She's a good woman. Remember, she's a good woman," he whispered to himself, and when he got again into his bed he refused to let his mind linger on the thoughts of the school teacher, but compelled them to turn to the unsolved problems he still had to face before he could complete his hay-loading apparatus. "You tend to your business and don't be going off on that road any more," he said, as though speaking to another person. "Remember she's a good woman and you haven't the right. That's all you have to do. Remember you haven't the right," he added with a ring of command in his voice. CHAPTER XIII Hugh first saw Clara Butterworth one day in July when she had been at home for a month. She came to his shop late one afternoon with her father and a man who had been employed to manage the new bicycle factory. The three got out of Tom's buggy and came into the shop to see Hugh's new invention, the hay-loading apparatus. Tom and the man named Alfred Buckley went to the rear of the shop, and Hugh was left alone with the woman. She was dressed in a light summer gown and her cheeks were flushed. Hugh stood by a bench near an open window and listened while she talked of how much the town had changed in the three years she had been away. "It is your doing, every one says that," she declared. Clara had been waiting for an opportunity to talk to Hugh. She began asking questions regarding his work and what was to come of it. "When everything is done by machines, what are people to do?" she asked. She seemed to take it for granted that the inventor had thought deeply on the subject of industrial development, a subject on which Kate Chanceller had often talked during a whole evening. Having heard Hugh spoken of as one who had a great brain, she wanted to see the brain at work. Alfred Buckley came often to her father's house and wanted to marry Clara. In the evening the two men sat on the front porch of the farmhouse and talked of the town and the big things that were to be done there. They spoke of Hugh, and Buckley, an energetic, talkative fellow with a long jaw and restless gray eyes who had come from New York City, suggested schemes for using him. Clara gathered that there was a plan on foot to get control of Hugh's future inventions and thereby gain an advantage over Steve Hunter. The whole matter puzzled Clara. Alfred Buckley had asked her to marry him and she had put the matter off. The proposal had been a formal thing, not at all what she had expected from a man she was to take as a partner for life, but Clara was at the moment very seriously determined upon marriage. The New York man was at her father's house several evenings every week. She had never walked about with him nor had they in any way come close to each other. He seemed too much occupied with work to be personal and had proposed marriage by writing her a letter. Clara got the letter from the post-office and it upset her so that she felt she could not for a time go into the presence of any one she knew. "I am unworthy of you, but I want you to be my wife. I will work for you. I am new here and you do not know me very well. All I ask is the privilege of proving my merit. I want you to be my wife, but before I dare come and ask you to do me so great an honor I feel I must prove myself worthy," the letter said. Clara had driven into town alone on the day when she received it and later got into her buggy and drove south past the Butterworth farm into the hills. She forgot to go home to lunch or to the evening meal. The horse jogged slowly along, protesting and trying to turn back at every cross road, but she kept on and did not get home until midnight. When she reached the farmhouse her father was waiting. He went with her into the barnyard and helped unhitch the horse. Nothing was said, and after a moment's conversation having nothing to do with the subject that occupied both their minds, she went upstairs and tried to think the matter out. She became convinced that her father had something to do with the proposal of marriage that he knew about it and had waited for her to come home in order to see how it had affected her. Clara wrote a reply that was as non-committal as the proposal itself. "I do not know whether I want to marry you or not. I will have to become acquainted with you. I however thank you for the offer of marriage and when you feel that the right time has come, we will talk about it," she wrote. After the exchange of letters, Alfred Buckley came to her father's house more often than before, but he and Clara did not become better acquainted. He did not talk to her, but to her father. Although she did not know it, the rumor that she was to marry the New York man had already run about town. She did not know whether her father or Buckley had told the tale. On the front porch of the farmhouse through the summer evenings the two men talked of the progress, of the town and the part they were taking and hoped to take in its future growth. The New York man had proposed a scheme to Tom. He was to go to Hugh and propose a contract giving the two men an option on all his future inventions. As the inventions were completed they were to be financed in New York City, and the two men would give up manufacture and make money much more rapidly as promoters. They hesitated because they were afraid of Steve Hunter, and because Tom was afraid Hugh would not fall in with their plan. "It wouldn't surprise me if Steve already had such a contract with him. He's a fool if he hasn't," the older man said. Evening after evening the two men talked and Clara sat in the deep shadows at the back of the porch and listened. The enmity that had existed between herself and her father seemed to be forgotten. The man who had asked her to marry him did not look at her, but her father did. Buckley did most of the talking and spoke of New York City business men, already famous throughout the Middle West as giants of finance, as though they were his life-long friends. "They'll put over anything I ask them to," he declared. Clara tried to think of Alfred Buckley as a husband. Like Hugh McVey he was tall and gaunt but unlike the inventor, whom she had seen two or three times on the street, he was not carelessly dressed. There was something sleek about him, something that suggested a well-bred dog, a hound perhaps. As he talked he leaned forward like a greyhound in pursuit of a rabbit. His hair was carefully parted and his clothes fitted him like the skin of an animal. He wore a diamond scarf pin. His long jaw, it seemed to her, was always wagging. Within a few days after the receipt of his letter she had made up her mind that she did not want him as a husband, and she was convinced he did not want her. The whole matter of marriage had, she was sure, been in some way suggested by her father. When she came to that conclusion she was both angry and in an odd way touched. She did not interpret it as fear of some sort of indiscretion on her part, but thought that her father wanted her to marry because he wanted her to be happy. As she sat in the darkness on the front porch of the farmhouse the voices of the two men became indistinct. It was as though her mind went out of her body and like a living thing journeyed over the world. Dozens of men she had seen and had casually addressed, young fellows attending school at Columbus and boys of the town with whom she had gone to parties and dances when she was a young girl, came to stand before her. She saw their figures distinctly, but remembered them at some advantageous moment of her contact with them. At Columbus there was a young man from a town in the southern end of the State, one of the sort that is always in love with a woman. During her first year in school he had noticed Clara, had been undecided as to whether he had better pay attention to her or to a little black-eyed town girl who was in their classes. Several times he walked down the college hill and along the street with Clara. The two stood at a street crossing where she was in the habit of taking a car. Several cars went by as they stood together by a bush that grew by a high stone wall. They talked of trivial matters, a comedy club that had been organized in the school, the chances of victory for the football team. The young man was one of the actors in a play to be given by the comedy club and told Clara of his experiences at rehearsals. As he talked his eyes began to shine and he seemed to be looking, not at her face or body, but at something within her. For a time, perhaps for fifteen minutes, there was a possibility that the two people would love each other. Then the young man went away and later she saw him walking under the trees on the college campus with the little black-eyed town girl. As she sat on the porch in the darkness in the summer evenings, Clara thought of the incident and of dozens of other swift-passing contacts she had made with men. The voices of the two men talking of money-making went on and on. Whenever she came back out of her introspective world of thought, Alfred Buckley's long jaw was wagging. He was always at work, steadily, persistently urging something on her father. It was difficult for Clara to think of her father as a rabbit, but the notion that Alfred Buckley was like a hound stayed with her. "The wolf and the wolfhound," she thought absent-mindedly. Clara was twenty-three and seemed to herself mature. She did not intend wasting any more time going to school and did not want to be a professional woman, like Kate Chanceller. There was something she did want and in a way some man, she did not know what man it would be, was concerned in the matter. She was very hungry for love, but might have got that from another woman. Kate Chanceller would have loved her. She was not unconscious of the fact that their friendship had been something more than friendship. Kate loved to hold Clara's hand and wanted to kiss and caress her. The inclination had been put down by Kate herself, a struggle had gone on in her, and Clara had been dimly conscious of it and had respected Kate for making it. Why? Clara asked herself that question a dozen times during the early weeks of that summer. Kate Chanceller had taught her to think. When they were together Kate did both the thinking and the talking, but now Clara's mind had a chance. There was something back of her desire for a man. She wanted something more than caresses. There was a creative impulse in her that could not function until she had been made love to by a man. The man she wanted was but an instrument she sought in order that she might fulfill herself. Several times during those evenings in the presence of the two men, who talked only of making money out of the products of another man's mind, she almost forced her mind out into a concrete thought concerning women, and then it became again befogged. Clara grew tired of thinking, and listened to the talk. The name of Hugh McVey played through the persistent conversation like a refrain. It became fixed in her mind. The inventor was not married. By the social system under which she lived that and that only made him a possibility for her purposes. She began to think of the inventor, and her mind, weary of playing about her own figure, played about the figure of the tall, serious-looking man she had seen on Main Street. When Alfred Buckley had driven away to town for the night, she went upstairs to her own room but did not get into bed. Instead, she put out her light and sat by an open window that looked out upon the orchard and from which she could see a little stretch of the road that ran past the farm house toward town. Every evening before Alfred Buckley went away, there was a little scene on the front porch. When the visitor got up to go, her father made some excuse for going indoors or around the corner of the house into the barnyard. "I will have Jim Priest hitch up your horse," he said and hurried away. Clara was left in the company of the man who had pretended he wanted to marry her, and who, she was convinced, wanted nothing of the kind. She was not embarrassed, but could feel his embarrassment and enjoyed it. He made formal speeches. "Well, the night is fine," he said. Clara hugged the thought that he was uncomfortable. "He has taken me for a green country girl, impressed with him because he is from the city and dressed in fine clothes," she thought. Sometimes her father stayed away five or ten minutes and she did not say a word. When her father returned Alfred Buckley shook hands with him and then turned to Clara, apparently now quite at his ease. "We have bored you, I'm afraid," he said. He took her hand and leaning over, kissed the back of it ceremoniously. Her father looked away. Clara went upstairs and sat by the window. She could hear the two men continuing their talk in the road before the house. After a time the front door banged, her father came into the house and the visitor drove away. Everything became quiet and for a long time she could hear the hoofs of Alfred Buckley's horse beating a rapid tattoo on the road that led down into town. Clara thought of Hugh McVey. Alfred Buckley had spoken of him as a backwoodsman with a streak of genius. He constantly harped on the notion that he and Tom could use the man for their own ends, and she wondered if both of the men were making as great a mistake about the inventor as they were about her. In the silent summer night, when the sound of the horse's hoofs had died away and when her father had quit stirring about the house, she heard another sound. The corn-cutting machine factory was very busy and had put on a night shift. When the night was still, or when there was a slight breeze blowing up the hill from town, there was a low rumbling sound coming from many machines working in wood and steel, followed at regular intervals by the steady breathing of a steam engine. The woman at the window, like every one else in her town and in all the towns of the mid-western country, became touched with the idea of the romance of industry. The dreams of the Missouri boy that he had fought, had by the strength of his persistency twisted into new channels so that they had expressed themselves in definite things, in corn-cutting machines and in machines for unloading coal cars and for gathering hay out of a field and loading it on wagons without aid of human hands, were still dreams and capable of arousing dreams in others. They awoke dreams in the mind of the woman. The figures of other men that had been playing through her mind slipped away and but the one figure remained. Her mind made up stories concerning Hugh. She had read the absurd tale that had been printed in the Cleveland paper and her fancy took hold of it. Like every other citizen of America she believed in heroes. In books and magazines she had read of heroic men who had come up out of poverty by some strange alchemy to combine in their stout persons all of the virtues. The broad, rich land demanded gigantic figures, and the minds of men had created the figures. Lincoln, Grant, Garfield, Sherman, and a half dozen other men were something more than human in the minds of the generation that came immediately after the days of their stirring performance. Already industry was creating a new set of semi-mythical figures. The factory at work in the night-time in the town of Bidwell became, to the mind of the woman sitting by the window in the farm house, not a factory but a powerful animal, a powerful beast-like thing that Hugh had tamed and made useful to his fellows. Her mind ran forward and took the taming of the beast for granted. The hunger of her generation found a voice in her. Like every one else she wanted heroes, and Hugh, to whom she had never talked and about whom she knew nothing, became a hero. Her father, Alfred Buckley, Steve Hunter and the rest were after all pigmies. Her father was a schemer; he had even schemed to get her married, perhaps to further his own plans. In reality his schemes were so ineffective that she did not need to be angry with him. There was but one man of them all who was not a schemer. Hugh was what she wanted to be. He was a creative force. In his hands dead inanimate things became creative forces. He was what she wanted not herself but perhaps a son, to be. The thought, at last definitely expressed, startled Clara, and she arose from the chair by the window and prepared to go to bed. Something within her body ached, but she did not allow herself to pursue further the thoughts she had been having. On the day when she went with her father and Alfred Buckley to visit Hugh's shop, Clara knew that she wanted to marry the man she would see there. The thought was not expressed in her but slept like a seed newly planted in fertile soil. She had herself managed that she be taken to the factory and had also managed that she be left with Hugh while the two men went to look at the half-completed hay-loader at the back of the shop. She had begun talking to Hugh while the four people stood on the little grass plot before the shop. They went inside and her father and Buckley went through a door toward the rear. She stopped by a bench and as she continued talking Hugh was compelled to stop and stand beside her. She asked questions, paid him vague compliments, and as he struggled, trying to make conversation, she studied him. To cover his confusion he half turned away and looked out through a window into Turner's Pike. His eyes, she decided, were nice. They were somewhat small, but there was something gray and cloudy in them, and the gray cloudiness gave her confidence in the person behind the eyes. She could, she felt, trust him. There was something in his eyes that was like the things most grateful to her own nature, the sky seen across an open stretch of country or over a river that ran straight away into the distance. Hugh's hair was coarse like the mane of a horse, and his nose was like the nose of a horse. He was, she decided, very like a horse; an honest, powerful horse, a horse that was humanized by the mysterious, hungering thing that expressed itself through his eyes. "If I have to live with an animal; if, as Kate Chanceller once said, we women have to decide what other animal we are to live with before we can begin being humans, I would rather live with a strong, kindly horse than a wolf or a wolfhound," she found herself thinking. CHAPTER XIV Hugh had no suspicion that Clara had him under consideration as a possible husband. He knew nothing about her, but after she went away he began to think. She was a woman and good to look upon and at once took Rose McCoy's place in his mind. All unloved men and many who are loved play in a half subconscious way with the figures of many women as women's minds play with the figures of men, seeing them in many situations, vaguely caressing them, dreaming of closer contacts. With Hugh the impulse toward women had started late, but it was becoming every day more active. When he talked to Clara and while she stayed in his presence, he was more embarrassed than he had ever been before, because he was more conscious of her than he had ever been of any other woman. In secret he was not the modest man he thought himself. The success of his corn-cutting machine and his car-dumping apparatus and the respect, amounting almost to worship, he sometimes saw in the eyes of the people of the Ohio town had fed his vanity. It was a time when all America was obsessed with one idea, and to the people of Bidwell nothing could be more important, necessary and vital to progress than the things Hugh had done. He did not walk and talk like the other people of the town, and his body was over-large and loosely put together, but in secret he did not want to be different even in a physical way. Now and then there came an opportunity for a test of physical strength: an iron bar was to be lifted or a part of some heavy machine swung into place in the shop. In such a test he had found he could lift almost twice the load another could handle. Two men grunted and strained, trying to lift a heavy bar off the floor and put it on a bench. He came along and did the job alone and without apparent effort. In his room at night or in the late afternoon or evening in the summer when he walked on country roads, he sometimes felt keen hunger for recognition of his merits from his fellows, and having no one to praise him, he praised himself. When the Governor of the State spoke in praise of him before a crowd and when he made Rose McCoy come away because it seemed immodest for him to stay and hear such words, he found himself unable to sleep. After tossing in his bed for two or three hours he got up and crept quietly out of the house. He was like a man who, having an unmusical voice, sings to himself in a bath-room while the water is making a loud, splashing noise. On that night Hugh wanted to be an orator. As he stumbled in the darkness along Turner's Pike he imagined himself Governor of a State addressing a multitude of people. A mile north of Pickleville a dense thicket grew beside the road, and Hugh stopped and addressed the young trees and bushes. In the darkness the mass of bushes looked not unlike a crowd standing at attention, listening. The wind blew and played in the thick, dry growth and there was a sound as of many voices whispering words of encouragement. Hugh said many foolish things. Expressions he had heard from the lips of Steve Hunter and Tom Butterworth came into his mind and were repeated by his lips. He spoke of the swift growth that had come to the town of Bidwell as though it were an unmixed blessing, the factories, the homes of happy, contented people, the coming of industrial development as something akin to a visit of the gods. Rising to the height of egotism he shouted, "I have done it. I have done it." Hugh heard a buggy coming along the road and fled into the thicket. A farmer, who had gone to town for the evening and who had stayed after the political meeting to talk with other farmers in Ben Head's saloon, went homeward, asleep in his buggy. His head nodded up and down, heavy with the vapors rising from many glasses of beer. Hugh came out of the thicket feeling somewhat ashamed. The next day he wrote a letter to Sarah Shepherd and told her of his progress. "If you or Henry want any money, I can let you have all you want," he wrote, and did not resist the temptation to tell her something of what the Governor had said of his work and his mind. "Anyway they must think I amount to something whether I do or not," he said wistfully. Having awakened to his own importance in the life about him, Hugh wanted direct, human appreciation. After the failure of the effort both he and Rose had made to break through the wall of embarrassment and reserve that kept them apart, he knew pretty definitely that he wanted a woman, and the idea, once fixed in his mind, grew to gigantic proportions. All women became interesting, and he looked with hungry eyes at the wives of the workmen who sometimes came to the shop door to pass a word with their husbands, at young farm girls who drove along Turner's Pike on summer afternoons, town girls who walked in the Bidwell Main Street in the evening, at fair women and dark women. As he wanted a woman more consciously and determinedly he became more afraid of individual women. His success and his association with the workmen in his shop had made him less self-conscious in the presence of men, but the women were different. In their presence he was ashamed of his secret thoughts of them. On the day when he was left alone with Clara, Tom Butterworth and Alfred Buckley stayed at the back of the shop for nearly twenty minutes. It was a hot day and beads of sweat stood on Hugh's face. His sleeves were rolled to his elbows and his hands and hairy arms were covered with shop grime. He put up his hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead, leaving a long, black mark. Then he became aware of the fact that as she talked the woman looked at him in an absorbed, almost calculating way. It was as though he were a horse and she were a buyer examining him to be sure he was sound and of a kindly disposition. While she stood beside him her eyes were shining and her cheeks were flushed. The awakening, assertive male thing in him whispered that the flush on her cheeks and the shining eyes were indicative of something. His mind had been taught that lesson by the slight and wholly unsatisfactory experience with the school teacher at his boarding-house. Clara drove away from the shop with her father and Alfred Buckley. Tom drove and Alfred Buckley leaned forward and talked. "You must find out whether or not Steve has an option on the new tool. It would be foolish to ask outright and give ourselves away. That inventor is stupid and vain. Those fellows always are. They appear to be quiet and shrewd, but they always let the cat out of the bag. The thing to do is to flatter him in some way. A woman could find out all he knows in ten minutes." He turned to Clara and smiled. There was something infinitely impertinent in the fixed, animal-like stare of his eyes. "We do take you into our plans, your father and me, eh?" he said. "You must be careful not to give us away when you talk to that inventor." From his shop window Hugh stared at the backs of the heads of the three people. The top of Tom Butterworth's buggy had been let down, and when he talked Alfred Buckley leaned forward and his head disappeared. Hugh thought Clara must look like the kind of woman men meant when they spoke of a lady. The farmer's daughter had an instinct for clothes, and Hugh's mind got the idea of gentility by way of the medium of clothes. He thought the dress she had worn the most stylish thing he had ever seen. Clara's friend Kate Chanceller, while mannish in her dress, had an instinct for style and had taught Clara some valuable lessons. "Any woman can dress well if she knows how," Kate had declared. She had taught Clara how to study and emphasize by dress the good points of her body. Beside Clara, Rose McCoy looked dowdy and commonplace. Hugh went to the rear of his shop to where there was a water-tap and washed his hands. Then he went to a bench and tried to take up the work he had been doing. Within five minutes he went to wash his hands again. He went out of the shop and stood beside the small stream that rippled along beneath willow bushes and disappeared under the bridge beneath Turner's Pike, and then went back for his coat and quit work for the day. An instinct led him to go past the creek again and he knelt on the grass at the edge and again washed his hands. Hugh's growing vanity was fed by the thought that Clara was interested in him, but it was not yet strong enough to sustain the thought. He took a long walk, going north from the shop along Turner's Pike for two or three miles and then by a cross road between corn and cabbage fields to where he could, by crossing a meadow, get into a wood. For an hour he sat on a log at the wood's edge and looked south. Away in the distance, over the roofs of the houses of the town, he could see a white speck against a background of green--the Butterworth farm house. Almost at once he decided that the thing he had seen in Clara's eyes and that was sister to something he had seen in Rose McCoy's eyes had nothing to do with him. The mantle of vanity he had been wearing dropped off and left him naked and sad. "What would she be wanting of me?" he asked himself, and got up from the log to look with critical eyes at his long, bony body. For the first time in two or three years he thought of the words so often repeated in his presence by Sarah Shepard in the first few months after he left his father's shack by the shore of the Mississippi River and came to work at the railroad station. She had called his people lazy louts and poor white trash and had railed against his inclination to dreams. By struggle and work he had conquered the dreams but could not conquer his ancestry, nor change the fact that he was at bottom poor white trash. With a shudder of disgust he saw himself again a boy in ragged clothes that smelled of fish, lying stupid and half asleep in the grass beside the Mississippi River. He forgot the majesty of the dreams that sometimes came to him, and only remembered the swarms of flies that, attracted by the filth of their clothes, hovered over him and over the drunken father who lay sleeping beside him. A lump arose in his throat and for a moment he was consumed with self-pity. Then he went out of the wood, crossed the field, and with his peculiar, long, shambling gait that got him over the ground with surprising rapidity, went again along the road. Had there been a stream nearby he would have been tempted to tear off his clothes and plunge in. The notion that he could ever become a man who would in any way be attractive to a woman like Clara Butterworth seemed the greatest folly in the world. "She's a lady. What would she be wanting of me? I ain't fitten for her. I ain't fitten for her," he said aloud, unconsciously falling into the dialect of his father. Hugh walked the entire afternoon away and in the evening went back to his shop and worked until midnight. So energetically did he work that several knotty problems in the construction of the hay-loading apparatus were cleared away. On the second evening after the encounter with Clara, Hugh went for a walk in the streets of Bidwell. He thought of the work on which he had been engaged all day and then of the woman he had made up his mind he could under no circumstances win. As darkness came on he went into the country, and at nine returned along the railroad tracks past the corn-cutter factory. The factory was working day and night, and the new plant, also beside the tracks and but a short distance away, was almost completed. Behind the new plant was a field Tom Butterworth and Steve Hunter had bought and laid out in streets of workingmen's houses. The houses were cheaply constructed and ugly, and in all directions there was a vast disorder; but Hugh did not see the disorder or the ugliness of the buildings. The sight th