delicate colors of soils. The leaves are themselves riotous with color.
As the season advances they change from light to dark greens, a thousand
shades of purples, blues and reds appear and disappear.
In silence the cabbage fields slept beside the roads in Ohio. Not
yet had the motor cars come to tear along the roads, their flashing
lights--beautiful too, when seen by one afoot on the roads on a summer
night--had not yet made the roads an extension of the cities. Akron, the
terrible town, had not yet begun to roll forth its countless millions of
rubber hoops, filled each with its portion of God's air compressed and in
prison at last like the farm hands who have gone to the cities. Detroit and
Toledo had not begun to send forth their hundreds of thousands of motor
cars to shriek and scream the nights away on country roads. Willis was
still a mechanic in an Indiana town, and Ford still worked in a bicycle
repair shop in Detroit.
It was a summer night in the Ohio country and the moon shone. A country
doctor's horse went at a humdrum pace along the roads. Softly and at long
intervals men afoot stumbled along. A farm hand whose horse was lame walked
toward town. An umbrella mender, benighted on the roads, hurried toward the
lights of the distant town. In Bidwell, the place that had been on other
summer nights a sleepy town filled with gossiping berry pickers, things
were astir.
Change, and the thing men call growth, was in the air. Perhaps in its own
way revolution was in the air, the silent, the real revolution that grew
with the growth of the towns. In the stirring, bustling town of Bidwell
that quiet summer night something happened that startled men. Something
happened, and then in a few minutes it happened again. Heads wagged,
special editions of daily newspapers were printed, the great hive of men
was disturbed, under the invisible roof of the town that had so suddenly
become a city, the seeds of self-consciousness were planted in new soil, in
American soil.
Before all this began, however, something else happened. The first motor
car ran through the streets of Bidwell and out upon the moonlit roads. The
motor car was driven by Tom Butterworth and in it sat his daughter Clara
with her husband Hugh McVey. During the week before, Tom had brought the
car from Cleveland, and the mechanic who rode with him had taught him the
art of driving. Now he drove alone and boldly. Early in the evening he had
run out to the farmhouse to take his daughter and son-in-law for their
first ride. Hugh sat in the seat beside him and after they had started and
were clear of the town, Tom turned to him. "Now watch me step on her tail,"
he said proudly, using for the first time the motor slang he had picked up
from the Cleveland mechanic.
As Tom sent the car hurling over the roads, Clara sat alone in the back
seat unimpressed by her father's new acquisition. For three years she
had been married and she felt that she did not yet know the man she had
married. Always the story had been the same, moments of light and then
darkness again. A new machine that went along roads at a startlingly
increased rate of speed might change the whole face of the world, as her
father declared it would, but it did not change certain facts of her life.
"Am I a failure as a wife, or is Hugh impossible as a husband?" she asked
herself for perhaps the thousandth time as the car, having got into a long
stretch of clear, straight road, seemed to leap and sail through the air
like a bird. "At any rate I have married me a husband and yet I have no
husband, I have been in a man's arms but I have no lover, I have taken hold
of life, but life has slipped through my fingers."
Like her father, Hugh seemed to Clara absorbed in only the things outside
himself, the outer crust of life. He was like and yet unlike her father.
She was baffled by him. There was something in the man she wanted and could
not find. "The fault must be in me," she told herself. "He's all right, but
what's the matter with me?"
After that night when he ran away from her bridal bed, Clara had more than
once thought the miracle had happened. It did sometimes. On that night when
he came to her out of the rain it had happened. There was a wall a blow
could shatter, and she raised her hand to strike the blow. The wall was
shattered and then builded itself again. Even as she lay at night in her
husband's arms the wall reared itself up in the darkness of the sleeping
room.
Over the farmhouse on such nights dense silence brooded and she and Hugh,
as had become their habit together, were silent. In the darkness she put up
her hand to touch her husband's face and hair. He lay still and she had the
impression of some great force holding him back, holding her back. A sharp
sense of struggle filled the room. The air was heavy with it.
When words came they did not break the silence. The wall remained.
The words that came were empty, meaningless words. Hugh suddenly broke
forth into speech. He spoke of his work at the shop and of his progress
toward the solution of some difficult, mechanical problem. If it were
evening when the thing happened the two people got out of the lighted house
where they had been sitting together, each feeling darkness would help the
effort they were both making to tear away the wall. They walked along a
lane, past the barns and over the little wooden bridge across the stream
that ran down through the barnyard. Hugh did not want to talk of the work
at the shop, but could find words for no other talk. They came to a fence
where the lane turned and from where they could look down the hillside and
into the town. He did not look at Clara but stared down the hillside and
the words, in regard to the mechanical difficulties that had occupied his
mind all day, ran on and on. When later they went back to the house he felt
a little relieved. "I've said words. There is something achieved," he
thought.
* * * * *
And now after the three years as a married woman Clara sat in the motor
with her father and husband and with them was sent whirling swiftly through
the summer night. The car ran down the hill road from the Butterworth farm,
through a dozen residence streets in town and then out upon the long,
straight roads in the rich, flat country to the north. It had skirted
the town as a hungry wolf might have encircled silently and swiftly the
fire-lit camp of a hunter. To Clara the machine seemed like a wolf, bold
and cunning and yet afraid. Its great nose pushed through the troubled
air of the quiet roads, frightening horses, breaking the silence with its
persistent purring, drowning the song of insects. The headlights also
disturbed the slumbers of the night. They flashed into barnyards where
fowls slept on the lower branches of trees, played on the sides of barns
sent the cattle in fields galloping away into darkness, and frightened
horribly the wild things, the red squirrels and chipmunks that live in
wayside fences in the Ohio country. Clara hated the machine and began to
hate all machines. Thinking of machinery and the making of machines had,
she decided, been at the bottom of her husband's inability to talk with
her. Revolt against the whole mechanical impulse of her generation began to
take possession of her.
And as she rode another and more terrible kind of revolt against the
machine began in the town of Bidwell. It began in fact before Tom with his
new motor left the Butterworth farm, it began before the summer moon came
up, before the gray mantle of night had been laid over the shoulders of the
hills south of the farmhouse.
Jim Gibson, the journeyman harness maker who worked in Joe Wainsworth's
shop, was beside himself on that night. He had just won a great victory
over his employer and felt like celebrating. For several days he had been
telling the story of his anticipated victory in the saloons and store, and
now it had happened. After dining at his boarding-house he went to a saloon
and had a drink. Then he went to other saloons and had other drinks, after
which he swaggered through the streets to the door of the shop. Although
he was in his nature a spiritual bully, Jim did not lack energy, and his
employer's shop was filled with work demanding attention. For a week both
he and Joe had been returning to their work benches every evening. Jim
wanted to come because some driving influence within made him love the
thought of keeping the work always on the move, and Joe because Jim made
him come.
Many things were on the move in the striving, hustling town on that
evening. The system of checking on piece work, introduced by the
superintendent Ed Hall in the corn-cutting machine plant, had brought
on Bidwell's first industrial strike. The discontented workmen were not
organized, and the strike was foredoomed to failure, but it had stirred
the town deeply. One day, a week before, quite suddenly some fifty or
sixty men had decided to quit. "We won't work for a fellow like Ed Hall,"
they declared. "He sets a scale of prices and then, when we have driven
ourselves to the limit to make a decent day's pay, he cuts the scale."
Leaving the shop the men went in a body to Main Street and two or three of
them, developing unexpected eloquence, began delivering speeches on street
corners. On the next day the strike spread and for several days the shop
had been closed. Then a labor organizer came from Cleveland and on the day
of his arrival the story ran through the street that strike breakers were
to be brought in.
And on that evening of many adventures another element was introduced into
the already disturbed life of the community. At the corner of Main and
McKinley Streets and just beyond the place where three old buildings were
being torn down to make room for the building of a new hotel, appeared a
man who climbed upon a box and attacked, not the piece work prices at the
corn-cutting machine plant, but the whole system that built and maintained
factories where the wage scale of the workmen could be fixed by the whim or
necessity of one man or a group of men. As the man on the box talked, the
workmen in the crowd who were of American birth began to shake their heads.
They went to one side and gathering in groups discussed the stranger's
words. "I tell you what," said a little old workman, pulling nervously at
his graying mustache, "I'm on strike and I'm for sticking out until Steve
Hunter and Tom Butterworth fire Ed Hall, but I don't like this kind of
talk. I'll tell you what that man's doing. He's attacking our Government,
that's what he's doing." The workmen went off to their homes grumbling. The
Government was to them a sacred thing, and they did not fancy having their
demands for a better wage scale confused by the talk of anarchists and
socialists. Many of the laborers of Bidwell were sons and grandsons of
pioneers who had opened up the country where the great sprawling towns were
now growing into cities. They or their fathers had fought in the great
Civil War. During boyhood they had breathed a reverence for government
out of the very air of the towns. The great men of whom the school-books
talked had all been connected with the Government. In Ohio there had been
Garfield, Sherman, McPherson the fighter and others. From Illinois had come
Lincoln and Grant. For a time the very ground of the mid-American country
had seemed to spurt forth great men as now it was spurting forth gas and
oil. Government had justified itself in the men it had produced.
And now there had come among them men who had no reverence for government.
What a speaker for the first time dared say openly on the streets of
Bidwell, had already been talked in the shops. The new men, the foreigners
coming from many lands, had brought with them strange doctrines. They
began to make acquaintances among the American workmen. "Well," they said,
"you've had great men here; no doubt you have; but you're getting a new
kind of great men now. These new men are not born out of people. They're
being born out of capital. What is a great man? He's one who has the
power. Isn't that a fact? Well, you fellows here have got to find out that
nowadays power comes with the possession of money. Who are the big men of
this town?--not some lawyer or politician who can make a good speech, but
the men who own the factories where you have to work. Your Steve Hunter and
Tom Butterworth are the great men of this town."
The socialist, who had come to speak on the streets of Bidwell, was a
Swede, and his wife had come with him. As he talked his wife made figures
on a blackboard. The old story of the trick by which the citizens of the
town had lost their money in the plant-setting machine company was revived
and told over and over. The Swede, a big man with heavy fists, spoke of the
prominent citizens of the town as thieves who by a trick had robbed their
fellows. As he stood on the box beside his wife, and raising his fists
shouted crude sentences condemning the capitalist class, men who had gone
away angry came back to listen. The speaker declared himself a workman like
themselves and, unlike the religious salvationists who occasionally spoke
on the streets, did not beg for money. "I'm a workman like yourselves," he
shouted. "Both my wife and myself work until we've saved a little money.
Then we come out to some town like this and fight capital until we're
busted. We've been fighting for years now and we'll keep on fighting as
long as we live."
As the orator shouted out his sentences he raised his fist as though to
strike, and looked not unlike one of his ancestors, the Norsemen, who
in old times had sailed far and wide over unknown seas in search of the
fighting they loved. The men of Bidwell began to respect him. "After all,
what he says sounds like mighty good sense," they declared, shaking their
heads. "Maybe Ed Hall isn't any worse than any one else. We got to break
up the system. That's a fact. Some of these days we got to break up the
system."
* * * * *
Jim Gibson got to the door of Joe's shop at half-past seven o'clock.
Several men stood on the sidewalk and he stopped and stood before them,
intending to tell again the story of his triumph over his employer. Inside
the shop Joe was already at his bench and at work. The men, two of them
strikers from the corn-cutting machine plant, complained bitterly of the
difficulty of supporting their families, and a third man, a fellow with a
big black mustache who smoked a pipe, began to repeat some of the axioms
in regard to industrialism and the class war he had picked up from the
socialist orator. Jim listened for a moment and then, turning, put his
thumb on his buttocks and wriggled his fingers. "Oh, hell," he sneered,
"what are you fools talking about? You're going to get up a union or get
into the socialist party. What're you talking about? A union or a party
can't help a man who can't look out for himself."
The blustering and half intoxicated harness maker stood in the open shop
door and told again and in detail the story of his triumph over his
employer. Then another thought came and he spoke of the twelve hundred
dollars Joe had lost in the stock, of the plant-setting machine company.
"He lost his money and you fellows are going to get licked in this fight,"
he declared. "You're all wrong, you fellows, when you talk about unions or
joining the socialist party. What counts is what a man can do for himself.
Character counts. Yes, sir, character makes a man what he is."
Jim pounded on his chest and glared about him.
"Look at me," he said. "I was a drunkard and down and out when I came to
this town; a drunkard, that's what I was and that's what I am. I came here
to this shop to work, and now, if you want to know, ask any one in town who
runs this place. The socialist says money is power. Well, there's a man
inside here who has the money, but you bet I've got the power."
Slapping his knees with his hands Jim laughed heartily. A week before, a
traveling man had come to the shop to sell machine-made harness. Joe had
ordered the man out and Jim had called him back. He had placed an order for
eighteen sets of the harness and had made Joe sign the order. The harness
had arrived that afternoon and was now hung in the shop. "It's hanging in
the shop now," Jim cried. "Go see for yourself."
Triumphantly Jim walked up and down before the men on the sidewalk, and
his voice rang through the shop where Joe sat on his harness-maker's horse
under a swinging lamp hard at work. "I tell you, character's the thing
that counts," the roaring voice cried. "You see I'm a workingman like you
fellows, but I don't join a union or a socialist party. I get my way. My
boss Joe in there's a sentimental old fool, that's what he is. All his life
he's made harnesses by hand and he thinks that's the only way. He claims he
has pride in his work, that's what he claims."
Jim laughed again. "Do you know what he did the other day when that
traveler had gone out of the shop and after I had made him sign that
order?" he asked. "Cried, that's what he did. By God, he did,--sat there
and cried."
Again Jim laughed, but the workmen on the sidewalk did not join in his
merriment. Going to one of them, the one who had declared his intention of
joining the union, Jim began to berate him. "You think you can lick Ed Hall
with Steve Hunter and Tom Butterworth back of him, eh?" he asked sharply.
"Well, I'll tell you what--you can't. All the unions in the world won't
help you. You'll get licked--for why?
"For why? Because Ed Hall is like me, that's for why. He's got character,
that's what he's got."
Growing weary of his boasting and the silence of his audience, Jim started
to walk in at the door, but when one of the workmen, a pale man of fifty
with a graying mustache, spoke, he turned to listen. "You're a suck, a suck
and a lickspittle, that's what you are," said the pale man, his voice
trembling with passion.
Jim ran through the crowd of men and knocked the speaker to the sidewalk
with a blow of his fist. Two of the other workmen seemed about to take up
the cause of their fallen brother, but when in spite of their threats Jim
stood his ground, they hesitated. They went to help the pale workman to his
feet, and Jim went into the shop and closed the door. Climbing onto his
horse he went to work, and the men went off along the sidewalk, still
threatening to do what they had not done when the opportunity offered.
Joe worked in silence beside his employee and night began to settle down
over the disturbed town. Above the clatter of many voices in the street
outside could be heard the loud voice of the socialist orator who had taken
up his stand for the evening at a nearby corner. When it had become quite
dark outside, the old harness maker climbed down from his horse and going
to the front door opened it softly and looked up and down the street. Then
he closed it again and walked toward the rear of the shop. In his hand
he held his harness-maker's knife, shaped like a half moon and with an
extraordinarily sharp circular edge. The harness maker's wife had died
during the year before and since that time he had not slept well at night.
Often for a week at a time he did not sleep at all, but lay all night with
wide-open eyes, thinking strange, new thoughts. In the daytime and when Jim
was not about, he sometimes spent hours sharpening the moon-shaped knife on
a piece of leather; and on the day after the incident of the placing of the
order for the factory-made harness he had gone into a hardware store and
bought a cheap revolver. He had been sharpening the knife as Jim talked to
the workmen outside. When Jim began to tell the story of his humiliation he
had stopped sewing at the broken harness in his vise and, getting up, had
taken the knife from its hiding-place under a pile of leather on a bench to
give its edge a few last caressing strokes.
Holding the knife in his hand Joe went with shambling steps toward the
place where Jim sat absorbed in his work. A brooding silence seemed to lie
over the shop and even outside in the street all noises suddenly ceased.
Old Joe's gait changed. As he passed behind the horse on which Jim sat,
life came into his figure and he walked with a soft, cat-like tread. Joy
shone in his eyes. As though warned of something impending, Jim turned and
opened his mouth to growl at his employer, but his words never found their
way to his lips. The old man made a peculiar half step, half leap past the
horse, and the knife whipped through the air. At one stroke he had
succeeded in practically severing Jim Gibson's head from his body.
There was no sound in the shop. Joe threw the knife into a corner and ran
quickly past the horse where the body of Jim Gibson sat upright. Then the
body fell to the floor with a thump and there was the sharp rattle of
heels on the board floor. The old man locked the front door and listened
impatiently. When all was again quiet he went to search for the knife he
had thrown away, but could not find it. Taking Jim's knife from a bench
under the hanging lamp, he stepped over the body and climbed upon his horse
to turn out the lights.
For an hour Joe stayed in the shop with the dead man. The eighteen sets of
harness shipped from a Cleveland factory had been received that morning,
and Jim had insisted they be unpacked and hung on hooks along the shop
walls. He had bullied Joe into helping hang the harnesses, and now Joe took
them down alone. One by one they were laid on the floor and with Jim's
knife the old man cut each strap into little pieces that made a pile of
litter on the floor reaching to his waist. When that was done he went again
to the rear of the shop, again stepping almost carelessly over the dead
man, and took the revolver out of the pocket of an overcoat that hung by
the door.
Joe went out of the shop by the back door, and having locked it carefully,
crept through an alleyway and into the lighted street where people walked
up and down. The next place to his own was a barber shop, and as he hurried
along the sidewalk, two young men came out and called to him. "Hey," they
called, "do you believe in factory-made harness now-days, Joe Wainsworth?
Hey, what do you say? Do you sell factory-made harness?"
Joe did not answer, but stepping off the sidewalk, walked in the road. A
group of Italian laborers passed, talking rapidly and making gestures with
their hands. As he went more deeply into the heart of the growing city,
past the socialist orator and a labor organizer who was addressing a crowd
of men on another corner, his step became cat-like as it had been in the
moment before the knife flashed at the throat of Jim Gibson. The crowds of
people frightened him. He imagined himself set upon by a crowd and hanged
to a lamp-post. The voice of the labor orator arose above the murmur of
voices in the street. "We've got to take power into our hands. We've got to
carry on our own battle for power," the voice declared.
The harness maker turned a corner into a quiet street, his hand caressing
affectionately the revolver in the side pocket of his coat. He intended to
kill himself, but had not wanted to die in the same room with Jim Gibson.
In his own way he had always been a very sensitive man and his only fear
was that rough hands fall upon him before he had completed the evening's
work. He was quite sure that had his wife been alive she would have
understood what had happened. She had always understood everything he did
or said. He remembered his courtship. His wife had been a country girl and
on Sundays, after their marriage, they had gone together to spend the day
in the wood. After Joe had brought his wife to Bidwell they continued the
practice. One of his customers, a well-to-do farmer, lived five miles north
of town, and on his farm there was a grove of beech trees. Almost every
Sunday for several years he got a horse from the livery stable and took his
wife there. After dinner at the farmhouse, he and the farmer gossiped for
an hour, while the women washed the dishes, and then he took his wife and
went into the beech forest. No underbrush grew under the spreading branches
of the trees, and when the two people had remained silent for a time,
hundreds of squirrels and chipmunks came to chatter and play about them.
Joe had brought nuts in his pocket and threw them about. The quivering
little animals drew near and then with a flip of their tails scampered
away. One day a boy from a neighboring farm came to the wood and shot
one of the squirrels. It happened just as Joe and his wife came from the
farmhouse and he saw the wounded squirrel hang from the branch of a tree,
and then fall. It lay at his feet and his wife grew ill and leaned against
him for support. He said nothing, but stared at the quivering thing on the
ground. When it lay still the boy came and picked it up. Still Joe said
nothing. Taking his wife's arm he walked to where they were in the habit of
sitting, and reached in his pocket for the nuts to scatter on the ground.
The farm boy, who had felt the reproach in the eyes of the man and woman,
had gone out of the wood. Suddenly Joe began to cry. He was ashamed and did
not want his wife to see, and she pretended she had not seen.
On the night when he had killed Jim, Joe decided he would walk to the farm
and the beech forest and there kill himself. He hurried past a long row of
dark stores and warehouses in the newly built section of town and came to
a residence street. He saw a man coming toward him and stepped into the
stairway of a store building. The man stopped under a street lamp to light
a cigar, and the harness maker recognized him. It was Steve Hunter, who
had induced him to invest the twelve hundred dollars in the stock of the
plant-setting machine company, the man who had brought the new times
to Bidwell, the man who was at the bottom of all such innovations as
machine-made harnesses. Joe had killed his employee, Jim Gibson, in cold
anger, but now a new kind of anger took possession of him. Something danced
before his eyes and his hands trembled so that he was afraid the gun he had
taken out of his pocket would fall to the sidewalk. It wavered as he raised
it and fired, but chance came to his assistance. Steve Hunter pitched
forward to the sidewalk.
Without stopping to pick up the revolver that had fallen out of his hand,
Joe now ran up a stairway and got into a dark, empty hall. He felt his
way along a wall and came presently to another stairway, leading down.
It brought him into an alleyway, and going along this he came out near
the bridge that led over the river and into what in the old days had been
Turner's Pike, the road out which he had driven with his wife to the farm
and the beech forest.
But one thing now puzzled Joe Wainsworth. He had lost his revolver and did
not know how he was to manage his own death. "I must do it some way," he
thought, when at last, after nearly three hours steady plodding and hiding
in fields to avoid the teams going along the road he got to the beech
forest. He went to sit under a tree near the place where he had so often
sat through quiet Sunday afternoons with his wife beside him. "I'll rest a
little and then I'll think how I can do it," he thought wearily, holding
his head in his hands. "I mustn't go to sleep. If they find me they'll hurt
me. They'll hurt me before I have a chance to kill myself. They'll hurt me
before I have a chance to kill myself," he repeated, over and over, holding
his head in his hands and rocking gently back and forth.
CHAPTER XXII
The car driven by Tom Butterworth stopped at a town, and Tom got out to
fill his pockets with cigars and incidentally to enjoy the wonder and
admiration of the citizens. He was in an exalted mood and words flowed from
him. As the motor under its hood purred, so the brain under the graying old
head purred and threw forth words. He talked to the idlers before the drug
stores in the towns and, when the car started again and they were out in
the open country, his voice, pitched in a high key to make itself heard
above the purring engine, became shrill. Having struck the shrill tone of
the new age the voice went on and on.
But the voice and the swift-moving car did not stir Clara. She tried not
to hear the voice, and fixing her eyes on the soft landscape flowing past
under the moon, tried to think of other times and places. She thought of
nights when she had walked with Kate Chanceller through the streets of
Columbus, and of the silent ride she had taken with Hugh that night they
were married. Her mind went back into her childhood and she remembered the
long days she had spent riding with her father in this same valley, going
from farm to farm to haggle and dicker for the purchase of calves and pigs.
Her father had not talked then but sometimes, when they had driven far and
were homeward bound in the failing light of evening, words did come to him.
She remembered one evening in the summer after her mother died and when
her father often took her with him on his drives. They had stopped for the
evening meal at the house of a farmer and when they got on the road again,
the moon came out. Something present in the spirit of the night stirred
Tom, and he spoke of his life as a boy in the new country and of his
fathers and brothers. "We worked hard, Clara," he said. "The whole country
was new and every acre we planted had to be cleared." The mind of the
prosperous farmer fell into a reminiscent mood and he spoke of little
things concerning his life as a boy and young man; the days of cutting wood
alone in the silent, white forest when winter came and it was time for
getting out firewood and logs for new farm buildings, the log rollings to
which neighboring farmers came, when great piles of logs were made and set
afire that space might be cleared for planting. In the winter the boy went
to school in the village of Bidwell and as he was even then an energetic,
pushing youth, already intent on getting on in the world, he set traps in
the forest and on the banks of streams and walked the trap line on his way
to and from school. In the spring he sent his pelts to the growing town of
Cleveland where they were sold. He spoke of the money he got and of how he
had finally saved enough to buy a horse of his own.
Tom had talked of many other things on that night, of the spelling-downs at
the schoolhouse in town, of huskings and dances held in the barns and of
the evening when he went skating on the river and first met his wife. "We
took to each other at once," he said softly. "There was a fire built on the
bank of the river and after I had skated with her we went and sat down to
warm ourselves.
"We wanted to get married to each other right away," he told Clara. "I
walked home with her after we got tired of skating, and after that I
thought of nothing but how to get my own farm and have a home of my own."
As the daughter sat in the motor listening to the shrill voice of the
father, who now talked only of the making of machines and money, that other
man talking softly in the moonlight as the horse jogged slowly along
the dark road seemed very far away. All such men seemed very far away.
"Everything worth while is very far away," she thought bitterly. "The
machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the
old sweet things."
The motor flew along the roads and Tom thought of his old longing to own
and drive fast racing horses. "I used to be half crazy to own fast horses,"
he shouted to his son-in-law. "I didn't do it, because owning fast horses
meant a waste of money, but it was in my mind all the time. I wanted to go
fast: faster than any one else." In a kind of ecstasy he gave the motor
more gas and shot the speed up to fifty miles an hour. The hot, summer air,
fanned into a violent wind, whistled past his head. "Where would the damned
race horses be now," he called, "where would your Maud S. or your J.I.C.
be, trying to catch up with me in this car?"
Yellow wheat fields and fields of young corn, tall now and in the light
breeze that was blowing whispering in the moonlight, flashed past, looking
like squares on a checker board made for the amusement of the child of some
giant. The car ran through miles of the low farming country, through the
main streets of towns, where the people ran out of the stores to stand
on the sidewalks and look at the new wonder, through sleeping bits of
woodlands--remnants of the great forests in which Tom had worked as a
boy--and across wooden bridges over small streams, beside which grew
tangled masses of elderberries, now yellow and fragrant with blossoms.
At eleven o'clock having already achieved some ninety miles Tom turned the
car back. Running more sedately he again talked of the mechanical triumphs
of the age in which he had lived. "I've brought you whizzing along, you and
Clara," he said proudly. "I tell you what, Hugh, Steve Hunter and I have
brought you along fast in more ways that one. You've got to give Steve
credit for seeing something in you, and you've got to give me credit for
putting my money back of your brains. I don't want to take no credit from
Steve. There's credit enough for all. All I got to say for myself is that I
saw the hole in the doughnut. Yes, sir, I wasn't so blind. I saw the hole
in the doughnut."
Tom stopped to light a cigar and then drove on again. "I'll tell your what,
Hugh," he said, "I wouldn't say so to any one not of my family, but the
truth is, I'm the man that's been putting over the big things there in
Bidwell. The town is going to be a city now and a mighty big city. Towns
in this State like Columbus, Toledo and Dayton, had better look out for
themselves. I'm the man has always kept Steve Hunter steady and going
straight ahead down the track, as this car goes with my hand at the
steering wheel.
"You don't know anything about it, and I don't want you should talk, but
there are new things coming to Bidwell," he added. "When I was in Chicago
last month I met a man who has been making rubber buggy and bicycle
tires. I'm going in with him and we're going to start a plant for making
automobile-tires right in Bidwell. The tire business is bound to be one
of the greatest on earth and they ain't no reason why Bidwell shouldn't
be the biggest tire center ever known in the world." Although the car
now ran quietly, Tom's voice again became shrill. "There'll be hundreds
of thousands of cars like this tearing over every road in America," he
declared. "Yes, sir, they will; and if I calculate right Bidwell'll be the
great tire town of the world."
For a long time Tom drove in silence, and when he again began to talk it
was a new mood. He told a tale of life in Bidwell that stirred both Hugh
and Clara deeply. He was angry and had Clara not been in the car would have
become violently profane.
"I'd like to hang the men who are making trouble in the shops in town," he
broke forth. "You know who I mean, I mean the labor men who are trying to
make trouble for Steve Hunter and me. There's a socialist talking every
night on the street over there. I'll tell you, Hugh, the laws of this
country are wrong." For ten minutes he talked of the labor difficulties in
the shops.
"They better look out," he declared, and was so angry that his voice rose
to something like a suppressed scream. "We're inventing new machines pretty
fast now-days," he cried. "Pretty soon we'll do all the work by machines.
Then what'll we do? We'll kick all the workers out and let 'em strike till
they're sick, that's what we'll do. They can talk their fool socialism all
they want, but we'll show 'em, the fools."
His angry mood passed, and as the car turned into the last fifteen-mile
stretch of road that led to Bidwell, he told the tale that so deeply
stirred his passengers. Chuckling softly he told of the struggle of the
Bidwell harness maker, Joe Wainsworth, to prevent the sale of machine-made
harness in the community, and of his experience with his employee, Jim
Gibson. Tom had heard the tale in the bar-room of the Bidwell House and
it had made a profound impression on his mind. "I'll tell you what," he
declared, "I'm going to get in touch with Jim Gibson. That's the kind of
man to handle workers. I only heard about him to-night, but I'm going to
see him to-morrow."
Leaning back in his seat Tom laughed heartily as he told of the traveling
man who had visited Joe Wainsworth's shop and the placing of the order for
the factory-made harness. In some intangible way he felt that when Jim
Gibson laid the order for the harness on the bench in the shop and by the
force of his personality compelled Joe Wainsworth to sign, he justified
all such men as himself. In imagination he lived in that moment with Jim,
and like Jim the incident aroused his inclination to boast. "Why, a lot
of cheap laboring skates can't down such men as myself any more than Joe
Wainsworth could down that Jim Gibson," he declared. "They ain't got the
character, you see, that's what the matter, they ain't got the character."
Tom touched some mechanism connected with the engine of the car and it shot
suddenly forward. "Suppose one of them labor leaders were standing in the
road there," he cried. Instinctively Hugh leaned forward and peered into
the darkness through which the lights of the car cut like a great scythe,
and on the back seat Clara half rose to her feet. Tom shouted with delight
and as the car plunged along the road his voice rose in triumph. "The damn
fools!" he cried. "They think they can stop the machines. Let 'em try. They
want to go on in their old hand-made way. Let 'em look out. Let 'em look
out for such men as Jim Gibson and me."
Down a slight incline in the road shot the car and swept around a wide
curve, and then the jumping, dancing light, running far ahead, revealed a
sight that made Tom thrust out his foot and jam on the brakes.
In the road and in the very center of the circle of light, as though
performing a scene on the stage, three men were struggling. As the car
came to a stop, so sudden that it pitched both Clara and Hugh out of their
seats, the struggle came to an end. One of the struggling figures, a small
man without coat or hat, had jerked himself away from the others and
started to run toward the fence at the side of the road and separating it
from a grove of trees. A large, broad-shouldered man sprang forward and
catching the tail of the fleeing man's coat pulled him back into the circle
of light. His fist shot out and caught the small man directly on the mouth.
He fell like a dead thing, face downward in the dust of the road.
Tom ran the car slowly forward and its headlight continued to play over the
three figures. From a little pocket at the side of his driver's seat he
took a revolver. He ran the car quickly to a position near the group in the
road and stopped.
"What's up?" he asked sharply.
Ed Hall the factory superintendent, the man who had struck the blow that
had felled the little man, stepped forward and explained the tragic
happenings of the evening in town. The factory superintendent had
remembered that as a boy he had once worked for a few weeks on the farm of
which the wood beside the road was a part, and that on Sunday afternoons
the harness maker had come to the farm with his wife and the two people had
gone to walk in the very place where he had just been found. "I had a hunch
he would be out here," he boasted. "I figured it out. Crowds started out of
town in all directions, but I cut out alone. Then I happened to see this
fellow and just for company I brought him along." He put up his hand and,
looking at Tom, tapped his forehead. "Cracked," he declared, "he always
was. A fellow I knew saw him once in that woods," he said pointing.
"Somebody had shot a squirrel and he took on about it as though he had lost
a child. I said then he was crazy, and he has sure proved I was right."
At a word from her father Clara went to sit on the front seat on Hugh's
knees. Her body trembled and she was cold with fear. As her father had
told the story of Jim Gibson's triumph over Joe Wainsworth she had wanted
passionately to kill that blustering fellow. Now the thing was done. In
her mind the harness maker had come to stand for all the men and women in
the world who were in secret revolt against the absorption of the age in
machines and the products of machines. He had stood as a protesting figure
against what her father had become and what she thought her husband had
become. She had wanted Jim Gibson killed and it had been done. As a child
she had gone often to Wainsworth's shop with her father or some farm hand,
and she now remembered sharply the peace and quiet of the place. At the
thought of the same place, now become the scene of a desperate killing, her
body shook so that she clutched at Hugh's arms, striving to steady herself.
Ed Hall took the senseless figure of the old man in the road into his arms
and half threw it into the back seat of the car. To Clara it was as though
his rough, misunderstanding hands were on her own body. The car started
swiftly along the road and Ed told again the story of the night's
happenings. "I tell you, Mr. Hunter is in mighty bad shape, he may die,"
he said. Clara turned to look at her husband and thought him totally
unaffected by what had happened. His face was quiet like her father's face.
The factory superintendent's voice went on explaining his part in the
adventures of the evening. Ignoring the pale workman who sat lost in the
shadows in a corner of the rear seat, he spoke as though he had undertaken
and accomplished the capture of the murderer single-handed. As he
afterwards explained to his wife, Ed felt he had been a fool not to come
alone. "I knew I could handle him all right," he explained. "I wasn't
afraid, but I had figured it all out he was crazy. That made me feel shaky.
When they were getting up a crowd to go out on the hunt, I says to myself,
I'll go alone. I says to myself, I'll bet he's gone out to that woods on
the Riggly farm where he and his wife used to go on Sundays. I started and
then I saw this other man standing on a corner and I made him come with me.
He didn't want to come and I wish I'd gone alone. I could have handled him
and I'd got all the credit."
In the car Ed told the story of the night in the streets of Bidwell. Some
one had seen Steve Hunter shot down in the street and had declared the
harness maker had done it and had then run away. A crowd had gone to the
harness shop and had found the body of Jim Gibson. On the floor of the shop
were the factory-made harnesses cut into bits. "He must have been in there
and at work for an hour or two, stayed right in there with the man he had
killed. It's the craziest thing any man ever done."
The harness maker, lying on the floor of the car where Ed had thrown him,
stirred and sat up. Clara turned to look at him and shivered. His shirt was
torn so that the thin, old neck and shoulders could be plainly seen in the
uncertain light, and his face was covered with blood that had dried and was
now black with dust. Ed Hall went on with the tale of his triumph. "I found
him where I said to myself I would. Yes, sir, I found him where I said to
myself I would."
The car came to the first of the houses of the town, long rows of cheaply
built frame houses standing in what had once been Ezra French's cabbage
patch, where Hugh had crawled on the ground in the moonlight, working
out the mechanical problems that confronted him in the building of his
plant-setting machine. Suddenly the distraught and frightened man crouched
on the floor of the car, raised himself on his hands and lurched forward,
trying to spring over the side. Ed Hall caught him by the arm and jerked
him back. He drew back his arm to strike again but Clara's voice, cold and
intense with passion, stopped him. "If you touch him, I'll kill you," she
said. "No matter what he does, don't you dare strike him again."
Tom drove the car slowly through the streets of Bidwell to the door of
a police station. Word of the return of the murderer had run ahead, and
a crowd had gathered. Although it was past two o'clock the lights still
burned in stores and saloons, and crowds stood at every corner. With the
aid of a policeman, Ed Hall, with one eye fixed cautiously on the front
seat where Clara sat, started to lead Joe Wainsworth away. "Come on now, we
won't hurt you," he said reassuringly, and had got his man free of the car
when he broke away. Springing back into the rear seat the crazed man turned
to look at the crowd. A sob broke from his lips. For a moment he stood
trembling with fright, and then turning, he for the first time saw Hugh,
the man in whose footsteps he had once crept in the darkness in Turner's
Pike, the man who had invented the machine by which the earnings of a
lifetime had been swept away. "It wasn't me. You did it. You killed Jim
Gibson," he screamed, and springing forward sank his fingers and teeth into
Hugh's neck.
CHAPTER XXIII
One day in the month of October, four years after the time of his first
motor ride with Clara and Tom, Hugh went on a business trip to the city
of Pittsburgh. He left Bidwell in the morning and got to the steel city
at noon. At three o'clock his business was finished and he was ready to
return.
Although he had not yet realized it, Hugh's career as a successful inventor
had received a sharp check. The trick of driving directly at the point, of
becoming utterly absorbed in the thing before him, had been lost. He went
to Pittsburgh to see about the casting of new parts for the hay-loading
machine, but what he did in Pittsburgh was of no importance to the men who
would manufacture and sell that worthy, labor-saving tool. Although he did
not know it, a young man from Cleveland, in the employ of Tom and Steve,
had already done what Hugh was striving half-heartedly to do. The machine
had been finished and ready to market in October three years before, and
As the season advances they change from light to dark greens, a thousand
shades of purples, blues and reds appear and disappear.
In silence the cabbage fields slept beside the roads in Ohio. Not
yet had the motor cars come to tear along the roads, their flashing
lights--beautiful too, when seen by one afoot on the roads on a summer
night--had not yet made the roads an extension of the cities. Akron, the
terrible town, had not yet begun to roll forth its countless millions of
rubber hoops, filled each with its portion of God's air compressed and in
prison at last like the farm hands who have gone to the cities. Detroit and
Toledo had not begun to send forth their hundreds of thousands of motor
cars to shriek and scream the nights away on country roads. Willis was
still a mechanic in an Indiana town, and Ford still worked in a bicycle
repair shop in Detroit.
It was a summer night in the Ohio country and the moon shone. A country
doctor's horse went at a humdrum pace along the roads. Softly and at long
intervals men afoot stumbled along. A farm hand whose horse was lame walked
toward town. An umbrella mender, benighted on the roads, hurried toward the
lights of the distant town. In Bidwell, the place that had been on other
summer nights a sleepy town filled with gossiping berry pickers, things
were astir.
Change, and the thing men call growth, was in the air. Perhaps in its own
way revolution was in the air, the silent, the real revolution that grew
with the growth of the towns. In the stirring, bustling town of Bidwell
that quiet summer night something happened that startled men. Something
happened, and then in a few minutes it happened again. Heads wagged,
special editions of daily newspapers were printed, the great hive of men
was disturbed, under the invisible roof of the town that had so suddenly
become a city, the seeds of self-consciousness were planted in new soil, in
American soil.
Before all this began, however, something else happened. The first motor
car ran through the streets of Bidwell and out upon the moonlit roads. The
motor car was driven by Tom Butterworth and in it sat his daughter Clara
with her husband Hugh McVey. During the week before, Tom had brought the
car from Cleveland, and the mechanic who rode with him had taught him the
art of driving. Now he drove alone and boldly. Early in the evening he had
run out to the farmhouse to take his daughter and son-in-law for their
first ride. Hugh sat in the seat beside him and after they had started and
were clear of the town, Tom turned to him. "Now watch me step on her tail,"
he said proudly, using for the first time the motor slang he had picked up
from the Cleveland mechanic.
As Tom sent the car hurling over the roads, Clara sat alone in the back
seat unimpressed by her father's new acquisition. For three years she
had been married and she felt that she did not yet know the man she had
married. Always the story had been the same, moments of light and then
darkness again. A new machine that went along roads at a startlingly
increased rate of speed might change the whole face of the world, as her
father declared it would, but it did not change certain facts of her life.
"Am I a failure as a wife, or is Hugh impossible as a husband?" she asked
herself for perhaps the thousandth time as the car, having got into a long
stretch of clear, straight road, seemed to leap and sail through the air
like a bird. "At any rate I have married me a husband and yet I have no
husband, I have been in a man's arms but I have no lover, I have taken hold
of life, but life has slipped through my fingers."
Like her father, Hugh seemed to Clara absorbed in only the things outside
himself, the outer crust of life. He was like and yet unlike her father.
She was baffled by him. There was something in the man she wanted and could
not find. "The fault must be in me," she told herself. "He's all right, but
what's the matter with me?"
After that night when he ran away from her bridal bed, Clara had more than
once thought the miracle had happened. It did sometimes. On that night when
he came to her out of the rain it had happened. There was a wall a blow
could shatter, and she raised her hand to strike the blow. The wall was
shattered and then builded itself again. Even as she lay at night in her
husband's arms the wall reared itself up in the darkness of the sleeping
room.
Over the farmhouse on such nights dense silence brooded and she and Hugh,
as had become their habit together, were silent. In the darkness she put up
her hand to touch her husband's face and hair. He lay still and she had the
impression of some great force holding him back, holding her back. A sharp
sense of struggle filled the room. The air was heavy with it.
When words came they did not break the silence. The wall remained.
The words that came were empty, meaningless words. Hugh suddenly broke
forth into speech. He spoke of his work at the shop and of his progress
toward the solution of some difficult, mechanical problem. If it were
evening when the thing happened the two people got out of the lighted house
where they had been sitting together, each feeling darkness would help the
effort they were both making to tear away the wall. They walked along a
lane, past the barns and over the little wooden bridge across the stream
that ran down through the barnyard. Hugh did not want to talk of the work
at the shop, but could find words for no other talk. They came to a fence
where the lane turned and from where they could look down the hillside and
into the town. He did not look at Clara but stared down the hillside and
the words, in regard to the mechanical difficulties that had occupied his
mind all day, ran on and on. When later they went back to the house he felt
a little relieved. "I've said words. There is something achieved," he
thought.
* * * * *
And now after the three years as a married woman Clara sat in the motor
with her father and husband and with them was sent whirling swiftly through
the summer night. The car ran down the hill road from the Butterworth farm,
through a dozen residence streets in town and then out upon the long,
straight roads in the rich, flat country to the north. It had skirted
the town as a hungry wolf might have encircled silently and swiftly the
fire-lit camp of a hunter. To Clara the machine seemed like a wolf, bold
and cunning and yet afraid. Its great nose pushed through the troubled
air of the quiet roads, frightening horses, breaking the silence with its
persistent purring, drowning the song of insects. The headlights also
disturbed the slumbers of the night. They flashed into barnyards where
fowls slept on the lower branches of trees, played on the sides of barns
sent the cattle in fields galloping away into darkness, and frightened
horribly the wild things, the red squirrels and chipmunks that live in
wayside fences in the Ohio country. Clara hated the machine and began to
hate all machines. Thinking of machinery and the making of machines had,
she decided, been at the bottom of her husband's inability to talk with
her. Revolt against the whole mechanical impulse of her generation began to
take possession of her.
And as she rode another and more terrible kind of revolt against the
machine began in the town of Bidwell. It began in fact before Tom with his
new motor left the Butterworth farm, it began before the summer moon came
up, before the gray mantle of night had been laid over the shoulders of the
hills south of the farmhouse.
Jim Gibson, the journeyman harness maker who worked in Joe Wainsworth's
shop, was beside himself on that night. He had just won a great victory
over his employer and felt like celebrating. For several days he had been
telling the story of his anticipated victory in the saloons and store, and
now it had happened. After dining at his boarding-house he went to a saloon
and had a drink. Then he went to other saloons and had other drinks, after
which he swaggered through the streets to the door of the shop. Although
he was in his nature a spiritual bully, Jim did not lack energy, and his
employer's shop was filled with work demanding attention. For a week both
he and Joe had been returning to their work benches every evening. Jim
wanted to come because some driving influence within made him love the
thought of keeping the work always on the move, and Joe because Jim made
him come.
Many things were on the move in the striving, hustling town on that
evening. The system of checking on piece work, introduced by the
superintendent Ed Hall in the corn-cutting machine plant, had brought
on Bidwell's first industrial strike. The discontented workmen were not
organized, and the strike was foredoomed to failure, but it had stirred
the town deeply. One day, a week before, quite suddenly some fifty or
sixty men had decided to quit. "We won't work for a fellow like Ed Hall,"
they declared. "He sets a scale of prices and then, when we have driven
ourselves to the limit to make a decent day's pay, he cuts the scale."
Leaving the shop the men went in a body to Main Street and two or three of
them, developing unexpected eloquence, began delivering speeches on street
corners. On the next day the strike spread and for several days the shop
had been closed. Then a labor organizer came from Cleveland and on the day
of his arrival the story ran through the street that strike breakers were
to be brought in.
And on that evening of many adventures another element was introduced into
the already disturbed life of the community. At the corner of Main and
McKinley Streets and just beyond the place where three old buildings were
being torn down to make room for the building of a new hotel, appeared a
man who climbed upon a box and attacked, not the piece work prices at the
corn-cutting machine plant, but the whole system that built and maintained
factories where the wage scale of the workmen could be fixed by the whim or
necessity of one man or a group of men. As the man on the box talked, the
workmen in the crowd who were of American birth began to shake their heads.
They went to one side and gathering in groups discussed the stranger's
words. "I tell you what," said a little old workman, pulling nervously at
his graying mustache, "I'm on strike and I'm for sticking out until Steve
Hunter and Tom Butterworth fire Ed Hall, but I don't like this kind of
talk. I'll tell you what that man's doing. He's attacking our Government,
that's what he's doing." The workmen went off to their homes grumbling. The
Government was to them a sacred thing, and they did not fancy having their
demands for a better wage scale confused by the talk of anarchists and
socialists. Many of the laborers of Bidwell were sons and grandsons of
pioneers who had opened up the country where the great sprawling towns were
now growing into cities. They or their fathers had fought in the great
Civil War. During boyhood they had breathed a reverence for government
out of the very air of the towns. The great men of whom the school-books
talked had all been connected with the Government. In Ohio there had been
Garfield, Sherman, McPherson the fighter and others. From Illinois had come
Lincoln and Grant. For a time the very ground of the mid-American country
had seemed to spurt forth great men as now it was spurting forth gas and
oil. Government had justified itself in the men it had produced.
And now there had come among them men who had no reverence for government.
What a speaker for the first time dared say openly on the streets of
Bidwell, had already been talked in the shops. The new men, the foreigners
coming from many lands, had brought with them strange doctrines. They
began to make acquaintances among the American workmen. "Well," they said,
"you've had great men here; no doubt you have; but you're getting a new
kind of great men now. These new men are not born out of people. They're
being born out of capital. What is a great man? He's one who has the
power. Isn't that a fact? Well, you fellows here have got to find out that
nowadays power comes with the possession of money. Who are the big men of
this town?--not some lawyer or politician who can make a good speech, but
the men who own the factories where you have to work. Your Steve Hunter and
Tom Butterworth are the great men of this town."
The socialist, who had come to speak on the streets of Bidwell, was a
Swede, and his wife had come with him. As he talked his wife made figures
on a blackboard. The old story of the trick by which the citizens of the
town had lost their money in the plant-setting machine company was revived
and told over and over. The Swede, a big man with heavy fists, spoke of the
prominent citizens of the town as thieves who by a trick had robbed their
fellows. As he stood on the box beside his wife, and raising his fists
shouted crude sentences condemning the capitalist class, men who had gone
away angry came back to listen. The speaker declared himself a workman like
themselves and, unlike the religious salvationists who occasionally spoke
on the streets, did not beg for money. "I'm a workman like yourselves," he
shouted. "Both my wife and myself work until we've saved a little money.
Then we come out to some town like this and fight capital until we're
busted. We've been fighting for years now and we'll keep on fighting as
long as we live."
As the orator shouted out his sentences he raised his fist as though to
strike, and looked not unlike one of his ancestors, the Norsemen, who
in old times had sailed far and wide over unknown seas in search of the
fighting they loved. The men of Bidwell began to respect him. "After all,
what he says sounds like mighty good sense," they declared, shaking their
heads. "Maybe Ed Hall isn't any worse than any one else. We got to break
up the system. That's a fact. Some of these days we got to break up the
system."
* * * * *
Jim Gibson got to the door of Joe's shop at half-past seven o'clock.
Several men stood on the sidewalk and he stopped and stood before them,
intending to tell again the story of his triumph over his employer. Inside
the shop Joe was already at his bench and at work. The men, two of them
strikers from the corn-cutting machine plant, complained bitterly of the
difficulty of supporting their families, and a third man, a fellow with a
big black mustache who smoked a pipe, began to repeat some of the axioms
in regard to industrialism and the class war he had picked up from the
socialist orator. Jim listened for a moment and then, turning, put his
thumb on his buttocks and wriggled his fingers. "Oh, hell," he sneered,
"what are you fools talking about? You're going to get up a union or get
into the socialist party. What're you talking about? A union or a party
can't help a man who can't look out for himself."
The blustering and half intoxicated harness maker stood in the open shop
door and told again and in detail the story of his triumph over his
employer. Then another thought came and he spoke of the twelve hundred
dollars Joe had lost in the stock, of the plant-setting machine company.
"He lost his money and you fellows are going to get licked in this fight,"
he declared. "You're all wrong, you fellows, when you talk about unions or
joining the socialist party. What counts is what a man can do for himself.
Character counts. Yes, sir, character makes a man what he is."
Jim pounded on his chest and glared about him.
"Look at me," he said. "I was a drunkard and down and out when I came to
this town; a drunkard, that's what I was and that's what I am. I came here
to this shop to work, and now, if you want to know, ask any one in town who
runs this place. The socialist says money is power. Well, there's a man
inside here who has the money, but you bet I've got the power."
Slapping his knees with his hands Jim laughed heartily. A week before, a
traveling man had come to the shop to sell machine-made harness. Joe had
ordered the man out and Jim had called him back. He had placed an order for
eighteen sets of the harness and had made Joe sign the order. The harness
had arrived that afternoon and was now hung in the shop. "It's hanging in
the shop now," Jim cried. "Go see for yourself."
Triumphantly Jim walked up and down before the men on the sidewalk, and
his voice rang through the shop where Joe sat on his harness-maker's horse
under a swinging lamp hard at work. "I tell you, character's the thing
that counts," the roaring voice cried. "You see I'm a workingman like you
fellows, but I don't join a union or a socialist party. I get my way. My
boss Joe in there's a sentimental old fool, that's what he is. All his life
he's made harnesses by hand and he thinks that's the only way. He claims he
has pride in his work, that's what he claims."
Jim laughed again. "Do you know what he did the other day when that
traveler had gone out of the shop and after I had made him sign that
order?" he asked. "Cried, that's what he did. By God, he did,--sat there
and cried."
Again Jim laughed, but the workmen on the sidewalk did not join in his
merriment. Going to one of them, the one who had declared his intention of
joining the union, Jim began to berate him. "You think you can lick Ed Hall
with Steve Hunter and Tom Butterworth back of him, eh?" he asked sharply.
"Well, I'll tell you what--you can't. All the unions in the world won't
help you. You'll get licked--for why?
"For why? Because Ed Hall is like me, that's for why. He's got character,
that's what he's got."
Growing weary of his boasting and the silence of his audience, Jim started
to walk in at the door, but when one of the workmen, a pale man of fifty
with a graying mustache, spoke, he turned to listen. "You're a suck, a suck
and a lickspittle, that's what you are," said the pale man, his voice
trembling with passion.
Jim ran through the crowd of men and knocked the speaker to the sidewalk
with a blow of his fist. Two of the other workmen seemed about to take up
the cause of their fallen brother, but when in spite of their threats Jim
stood his ground, they hesitated. They went to help the pale workman to his
feet, and Jim went into the shop and closed the door. Climbing onto his
horse he went to work, and the men went off along the sidewalk, still
threatening to do what they had not done when the opportunity offered.
Joe worked in silence beside his employee and night began to settle down
over the disturbed town. Above the clatter of many voices in the street
outside could be heard the loud voice of the socialist orator who had taken
up his stand for the evening at a nearby corner. When it had become quite
dark outside, the old harness maker climbed down from his horse and going
to the front door opened it softly and looked up and down the street. Then
he closed it again and walked toward the rear of the shop. In his hand
he held his harness-maker's knife, shaped like a half moon and with an
extraordinarily sharp circular edge. The harness maker's wife had died
during the year before and since that time he had not slept well at night.
Often for a week at a time he did not sleep at all, but lay all night with
wide-open eyes, thinking strange, new thoughts. In the daytime and when Jim
was not about, he sometimes spent hours sharpening the moon-shaped knife on
a piece of leather; and on the day after the incident of the placing of the
order for the factory-made harness he had gone into a hardware store and
bought a cheap revolver. He had been sharpening the knife as Jim talked to
the workmen outside. When Jim began to tell the story of his humiliation he
had stopped sewing at the broken harness in his vise and, getting up, had
taken the knife from its hiding-place under a pile of leather on a bench to
give its edge a few last caressing strokes.
Holding the knife in his hand Joe went with shambling steps toward the
place where Jim sat absorbed in his work. A brooding silence seemed to lie
over the shop and even outside in the street all noises suddenly ceased.
Old Joe's gait changed. As he passed behind the horse on which Jim sat,
life came into his figure and he walked with a soft, cat-like tread. Joy
shone in his eyes. As though warned of something impending, Jim turned and
opened his mouth to growl at his employer, but his words never found their
way to his lips. The old man made a peculiar half step, half leap past the
horse, and the knife whipped through the air. At one stroke he had
succeeded in practically severing Jim Gibson's head from his body.
There was no sound in the shop. Joe threw the knife into a corner and ran
quickly past the horse where the body of Jim Gibson sat upright. Then the
body fell to the floor with a thump and there was the sharp rattle of
heels on the board floor. The old man locked the front door and listened
impatiently. When all was again quiet he went to search for the knife he
had thrown away, but could not find it. Taking Jim's knife from a bench
under the hanging lamp, he stepped over the body and climbed upon his horse
to turn out the lights.
For an hour Joe stayed in the shop with the dead man. The eighteen sets of
harness shipped from a Cleveland factory had been received that morning,
and Jim had insisted they be unpacked and hung on hooks along the shop
walls. He had bullied Joe into helping hang the harnesses, and now Joe took
them down alone. One by one they were laid on the floor and with Jim's
knife the old man cut each strap into little pieces that made a pile of
litter on the floor reaching to his waist. When that was done he went again
to the rear of the shop, again stepping almost carelessly over the dead
man, and took the revolver out of the pocket of an overcoat that hung by
the door.
Joe went out of the shop by the back door, and having locked it carefully,
crept through an alleyway and into the lighted street where people walked
up and down. The next place to his own was a barber shop, and as he hurried
along the sidewalk, two young men came out and called to him. "Hey," they
called, "do you believe in factory-made harness now-days, Joe Wainsworth?
Hey, what do you say? Do you sell factory-made harness?"
Joe did not answer, but stepping off the sidewalk, walked in the road. A
group of Italian laborers passed, talking rapidly and making gestures with
their hands. As he went more deeply into the heart of the growing city,
past the socialist orator and a labor organizer who was addressing a crowd
of men on another corner, his step became cat-like as it had been in the
moment before the knife flashed at the throat of Jim Gibson. The crowds of
people frightened him. He imagined himself set upon by a crowd and hanged
to a lamp-post. The voice of the labor orator arose above the murmur of
voices in the street. "We've got to take power into our hands. We've got to
carry on our own battle for power," the voice declared.
The harness maker turned a corner into a quiet street, his hand caressing
affectionately the revolver in the side pocket of his coat. He intended to
kill himself, but had not wanted to die in the same room with Jim Gibson.
In his own way he had always been a very sensitive man and his only fear
was that rough hands fall upon him before he had completed the evening's
work. He was quite sure that had his wife been alive she would have
understood what had happened. She had always understood everything he did
or said. He remembered his courtship. His wife had been a country girl and
on Sundays, after their marriage, they had gone together to spend the day
in the wood. After Joe had brought his wife to Bidwell they continued the
practice. One of his customers, a well-to-do farmer, lived five miles north
of town, and on his farm there was a grove of beech trees. Almost every
Sunday for several years he got a horse from the livery stable and took his
wife there. After dinner at the farmhouse, he and the farmer gossiped for
an hour, while the women washed the dishes, and then he took his wife and
went into the beech forest. No underbrush grew under the spreading branches
of the trees, and when the two people had remained silent for a time,
hundreds of squirrels and chipmunks came to chatter and play about them.
Joe had brought nuts in his pocket and threw them about. The quivering
little animals drew near and then with a flip of their tails scampered
away. One day a boy from a neighboring farm came to the wood and shot
one of the squirrels. It happened just as Joe and his wife came from the
farmhouse and he saw the wounded squirrel hang from the branch of a tree,
and then fall. It lay at his feet and his wife grew ill and leaned against
him for support. He said nothing, but stared at the quivering thing on the
ground. When it lay still the boy came and picked it up. Still Joe said
nothing. Taking his wife's arm he walked to where they were in the habit of
sitting, and reached in his pocket for the nuts to scatter on the ground.
The farm boy, who had felt the reproach in the eyes of the man and woman,
had gone out of the wood. Suddenly Joe began to cry. He was ashamed and did
not want his wife to see, and she pretended she had not seen.
On the night when he had killed Jim, Joe decided he would walk to the farm
and the beech forest and there kill himself. He hurried past a long row of
dark stores and warehouses in the newly built section of town and came to
a residence street. He saw a man coming toward him and stepped into the
stairway of a store building. The man stopped under a street lamp to light
a cigar, and the harness maker recognized him. It was Steve Hunter, who
had induced him to invest the twelve hundred dollars in the stock of the
plant-setting machine company, the man who had brought the new times
to Bidwell, the man who was at the bottom of all such innovations as
machine-made harnesses. Joe had killed his employee, Jim Gibson, in cold
anger, but now a new kind of anger took possession of him. Something danced
before his eyes and his hands trembled so that he was afraid the gun he had
taken out of his pocket would fall to the sidewalk. It wavered as he raised
it and fired, but chance came to his assistance. Steve Hunter pitched
forward to the sidewalk.
Without stopping to pick up the revolver that had fallen out of his hand,
Joe now ran up a stairway and got into a dark, empty hall. He felt his
way along a wall and came presently to another stairway, leading down.
It brought him into an alleyway, and going along this he came out near
the bridge that led over the river and into what in the old days had been
Turner's Pike, the road out which he had driven with his wife to the farm
and the beech forest.
But one thing now puzzled Joe Wainsworth. He had lost his revolver and did
not know how he was to manage his own death. "I must do it some way," he
thought, when at last, after nearly three hours steady plodding and hiding
in fields to avoid the teams going along the road he got to the beech
forest. He went to sit under a tree near the place where he had so often
sat through quiet Sunday afternoons with his wife beside him. "I'll rest a
little and then I'll think how I can do it," he thought wearily, holding
his head in his hands. "I mustn't go to sleep. If they find me they'll hurt
me. They'll hurt me before I have a chance to kill myself. They'll hurt me
before I have a chance to kill myself," he repeated, over and over, holding
his head in his hands and rocking gently back and forth.
CHAPTER XXII
The car driven by Tom Butterworth stopped at a town, and Tom got out to
fill his pockets with cigars and incidentally to enjoy the wonder and
admiration of the citizens. He was in an exalted mood and words flowed from
him. As the motor under its hood purred, so the brain under the graying old
head purred and threw forth words. He talked to the idlers before the drug
stores in the towns and, when the car started again and they were out in
the open country, his voice, pitched in a high key to make itself heard
above the purring engine, became shrill. Having struck the shrill tone of
the new age the voice went on and on.
But the voice and the swift-moving car did not stir Clara. She tried not
to hear the voice, and fixing her eyes on the soft landscape flowing past
under the moon, tried to think of other times and places. She thought of
nights when she had walked with Kate Chanceller through the streets of
Columbus, and of the silent ride she had taken with Hugh that night they
were married. Her mind went back into her childhood and she remembered the
long days she had spent riding with her father in this same valley, going
from farm to farm to haggle and dicker for the purchase of calves and pigs.
Her father had not talked then but sometimes, when they had driven far and
were homeward bound in the failing light of evening, words did come to him.
She remembered one evening in the summer after her mother died and when
her father often took her with him on his drives. They had stopped for the
evening meal at the house of a farmer and when they got on the road again,
the moon came out. Something present in the spirit of the night stirred
Tom, and he spoke of his life as a boy in the new country and of his
fathers and brothers. "We worked hard, Clara," he said. "The whole country
was new and every acre we planted had to be cleared." The mind of the
prosperous farmer fell into a reminiscent mood and he spoke of little
things concerning his life as a boy and young man; the days of cutting wood
alone in the silent, white forest when winter came and it was time for
getting out firewood and logs for new farm buildings, the log rollings to
which neighboring farmers came, when great piles of logs were made and set
afire that space might be cleared for planting. In the winter the boy went
to school in the village of Bidwell and as he was even then an energetic,
pushing youth, already intent on getting on in the world, he set traps in
the forest and on the banks of streams and walked the trap line on his way
to and from school. In the spring he sent his pelts to the growing town of
Cleveland where they were sold. He spoke of the money he got and of how he
had finally saved enough to buy a horse of his own.
Tom had talked of many other things on that night, of the spelling-downs at
the schoolhouse in town, of huskings and dances held in the barns and of
the evening when he went skating on the river and first met his wife. "We
took to each other at once," he said softly. "There was a fire built on the
bank of the river and after I had skated with her we went and sat down to
warm ourselves.
"We wanted to get married to each other right away," he told Clara. "I
walked home with her after we got tired of skating, and after that I
thought of nothing but how to get my own farm and have a home of my own."
As the daughter sat in the motor listening to the shrill voice of the
father, who now talked only of the making of machines and money, that other
man talking softly in the moonlight as the horse jogged slowly along
the dark road seemed very far away. All such men seemed very far away.
"Everything worth while is very far away," she thought bitterly. "The
machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the
old sweet things."
The motor flew along the roads and Tom thought of his old longing to own
and drive fast racing horses. "I used to be half crazy to own fast horses,"
he shouted to his son-in-law. "I didn't do it, because owning fast horses
meant a waste of money, but it was in my mind all the time. I wanted to go
fast: faster than any one else." In a kind of ecstasy he gave the motor
more gas and shot the speed up to fifty miles an hour. The hot, summer air,
fanned into a violent wind, whistled past his head. "Where would the damned
race horses be now," he called, "where would your Maud S. or your J.I.C.
be, trying to catch up with me in this car?"
Yellow wheat fields and fields of young corn, tall now and in the light
breeze that was blowing whispering in the moonlight, flashed past, looking
like squares on a checker board made for the amusement of the child of some
giant. The car ran through miles of the low farming country, through the
main streets of towns, where the people ran out of the stores to stand
on the sidewalks and look at the new wonder, through sleeping bits of
woodlands--remnants of the great forests in which Tom had worked as a
boy--and across wooden bridges over small streams, beside which grew
tangled masses of elderberries, now yellow and fragrant with blossoms.
At eleven o'clock having already achieved some ninety miles Tom turned the
car back. Running more sedately he again talked of the mechanical triumphs
of the age in which he had lived. "I've brought you whizzing along, you and
Clara," he said proudly. "I tell you what, Hugh, Steve Hunter and I have
brought you along fast in more ways that one. You've got to give Steve
credit for seeing something in you, and you've got to give me credit for
putting my money back of your brains. I don't want to take no credit from
Steve. There's credit enough for all. All I got to say for myself is that I
saw the hole in the doughnut. Yes, sir, I wasn't so blind. I saw the hole
in the doughnut."
Tom stopped to light a cigar and then drove on again. "I'll tell your what,
Hugh," he said, "I wouldn't say so to any one not of my family, but the
truth is, I'm the man that's been putting over the big things there in
Bidwell. The town is going to be a city now and a mighty big city. Towns
in this State like Columbus, Toledo and Dayton, had better look out for
themselves. I'm the man has always kept Steve Hunter steady and going
straight ahead down the track, as this car goes with my hand at the
steering wheel.
"You don't know anything about it, and I don't want you should talk, but
there are new things coming to Bidwell," he added. "When I was in Chicago
last month I met a man who has been making rubber buggy and bicycle
tires. I'm going in with him and we're going to start a plant for making
automobile-tires right in Bidwell. The tire business is bound to be one
of the greatest on earth and they ain't no reason why Bidwell shouldn't
be the biggest tire center ever known in the world." Although the car
now ran quietly, Tom's voice again became shrill. "There'll be hundreds
of thousands of cars like this tearing over every road in America," he
declared. "Yes, sir, they will; and if I calculate right Bidwell'll be the
great tire town of the world."
For a long time Tom drove in silence, and when he again began to talk it
was a new mood. He told a tale of life in Bidwell that stirred both Hugh
and Clara deeply. He was angry and had Clara not been in the car would have
become violently profane.
"I'd like to hang the men who are making trouble in the shops in town," he
broke forth. "You know who I mean, I mean the labor men who are trying to
make trouble for Steve Hunter and me. There's a socialist talking every
night on the street over there. I'll tell you, Hugh, the laws of this
country are wrong." For ten minutes he talked of the labor difficulties in
the shops.
"They better look out," he declared, and was so angry that his voice rose
to something like a suppressed scream. "We're inventing new machines pretty
fast now-days," he cried. "Pretty soon we'll do all the work by machines.
Then what'll we do? We'll kick all the workers out and let 'em strike till
they're sick, that's what we'll do. They can talk their fool socialism all
they want, but we'll show 'em, the fools."
His angry mood passed, and as the car turned into the last fifteen-mile
stretch of road that led to Bidwell, he told the tale that so deeply
stirred his passengers. Chuckling softly he told of the struggle of the
Bidwell harness maker, Joe Wainsworth, to prevent the sale of machine-made
harness in the community, and of his experience with his employee, Jim
Gibson. Tom had heard the tale in the bar-room of the Bidwell House and
it had made a profound impression on his mind. "I'll tell you what," he
declared, "I'm going to get in touch with Jim Gibson. That's the kind of
man to handle workers. I only heard about him to-night, but I'm going to
see him to-morrow."
Leaning back in his seat Tom laughed heartily as he told of the traveling
man who had visited Joe Wainsworth's shop and the placing of the order for
the factory-made harness. In some intangible way he felt that when Jim
Gibson laid the order for the harness on the bench in the shop and by the
force of his personality compelled Joe Wainsworth to sign, he justified
all such men as himself. In imagination he lived in that moment with Jim,
and like Jim the incident aroused his inclination to boast. "Why, a lot
of cheap laboring skates can't down such men as myself any more than Joe
Wainsworth could down that Jim Gibson," he declared. "They ain't got the
character, you see, that's what the matter, they ain't got the character."
Tom touched some mechanism connected with the engine of the car and it shot
suddenly forward. "Suppose one of them labor leaders were standing in the
road there," he cried. Instinctively Hugh leaned forward and peered into
the darkness through which the lights of the car cut like a great scythe,
and on the back seat Clara half rose to her feet. Tom shouted with delight
and as the car plunged along the road his voice rose in triumph. "The damn
fools!" he cried. "They think they can stop the machines. Let 'em try. They
want to go on in their old hand-made way. Let 'em look out. Let 'em look
out for such men as Jim Gibson and me."
Down a slight incline in the road shot the car and swept around a wide
curve, and then the jumping, dancing light, running far ahead, revealed a
sight that made Tom thrust out his foot and jam on the brakes.
In the road and in the very center of the circle of light, as though
performing a scene on the stage, three men were struggling. As the car
came to a stop, so sudden that it pitched both Clara and Hugh out of their
seats, the struggle came to an end. One of the struggling figures, a small
man without coat or hat, had jerked himself away from the others and
started to run toward the fence at the side of the road and separating it
from a grove of trees. A large, broad-shouldered man sprang forward and
catching the tail of the fleeing man's coat pulled him back into the circle
of light. His fist shot out and caught the small man directly on the mouth.
He fell like a dead thing, face downward in the dust of the road.
Tom ran the car slowly forward and its headlight continued to play over the
three figures. From a little pocket at the side of his driver's seat he
took a revolver. He ran the car quickly to a position near the group in the
road and stopped.
"What's up?" he asked sharply.
Ed Hall the factory superintendent, the man who had struck the blow that
had felled the little man, stepped forward and explained the tragic
happenings of the evening in town. The factory superintendent had
remembered that as a boy he had once worked for a few weeks on the farm of
which the wood beside the road was a part, and that on Sunday afternoons
the harness maker had come to the farm with his wife and the two people had
gone to walk in the very place where he had just been found. "I had a hunch
he would be out here," he boasted. "I figured it out. Crowds started out of
town in all directions, but I cut out alone. Then I happened to see this
fellow and just for company I brought him along." He put up his hand and,
looking at Tom, tapped his forehead. "Cracked," he declared, "he always
was. A fellow I knew saw him once in that woods," he said pointing.
"Somebody had shot a squirrel and he took on about it as though he had lost
a child. I said then he was crazy, and he has sure proved I was right."
At a word from her father Clara went to sit on the front seat on Hugh's
knees. Her body trembled and she was cold with fear. As her father had
told the story of Jim Gibson's triumph over Joe Wainsworth she had wanted
passionately to kill that blustering fellow. Now the thing was done. In
her mind the harness maker had come to stand for all the men and women in
the world who were in secret revolt against the absorption of the age in
machines and the products of machines. He had stood as a protesting figure
against what her father had become and what she thought her husband had
become. She had wanted Jim Gibson killed and it had been done. As a child
she had gone often to Wainsworth's shop with her father or some farm hand,
and she now remembered sharply the peace and quiet of the place. At the
thought of the same place, now become the scene of a desperate killing, her
body shook so that she clutched at Hugh's arms, striving to steady herself.
Ed Hall took the senseless figure of the old man in the road into his arms
and half threw it into the back seat of the car. To Clara it was as though
his rough, misunderstanding hands were on her own body. The car started
swiftly along the road and Ed told again the story of the night's
happenings. "I tell you, Mr. Hunter is in mighty bad shape, he may die,"
he said. Clara turned to look at her husband and thought him totally
unaffected by what had happened. His face was quiet like her father's face.
The factory superintendent's voice went on explaining his part in the
adventures of the evening. Ignoring the pale workman who sat lost in the
shadows in a corner of the rear seat, he spoke as though he had undertaken
and accomplished the capture of the murderer single-handed. As he
afterwards explained to his wife, Ed felt he had been a fool not to come
alone. "I knew I could handle him all right," he explained. "I wasn't
afraid, but I had figured it all out he was crazy. That made me feel shaky.
When they were getting up a crowd to go out on the hunt, I says to myself,
I'll go alone. I says to myself, I'll bet he's gone out to that woods on
the Riggly farm where he and his wife used to go on Sundays. I started and
then I saw this other man standing on a corner and I made him come with me.
He didn't want to come and I wish I'd gone alone. I could have handled him
and I'd got all the credit."
In the car Ed told the story of the night in the streets of Bidwell. Some
one had seen Steve Hunter shot down in the street and had declared the
harness maker had done it and had then run away. A crowd had gone to the
harness shop and had found the body of Jim Gibson. On the floor of the shop
were the factory-made harnesses cut into bits. "He must have been in there
and at work for an hour or two, stayed right in there with the man he had
killed. It's the craziest thing any man ever done."
The harness maker, lying on the floor of the car where Ed had thrown him,
stirred and sat up. Clara turned to look at him and shivered. His shirt was
torn so that the thin, old neck and shoulders could be plainly seen in the
uncertain light, and his face was covered with blood that had dried and was
now black with dust. Ed Hall went on with the tale of his triumph. "I found
him where I said to myself I would. Yes, sir, I found him where I said to
myself I would."
The car came to the first of the houses of the town, long rows of cheaply
built frame houses standing in what had once been Ezra French's cabbage
patch, where Hugh had crawled on the ground in the moonlight, working
out the mechanical problems that confronted him in the building of his
plant-setting machine. Suddenly the distraught and frightened man crouched
on the floor of the car, raised himself on his hands and lurched forward,
trying to spring over the side. Ed Hall caught him by the arm and jerked
him back. He drew back his arm to strike again but Clara's voice, cold and
intense with passion, stopped him. "If you touch him, I'll kill you," she
said. "No matter what he does, don't you dare strike him again."
Tom drove the car slowly through the streets of Bidwell to the door of
a police station. Word of the return of the murderer had run ahead, and
a crowd had gathered. Although it was past two o'clock the lights still
burned in stores and saloons, and crowds stood at every corner. With the
aid of a policeman, Ed Hall, with one eye fixed cautiously on the front
seat where Clara sat, started to lead Joe Wainsworth away. "Come on now, we
won't hurt you," he said reassuringly, and had got his man free of the car
when he broke away. Springing back into the rear seat the crazed man turned
to look at the crowd. A sob broke from his lips. For a moment he stood
trembling with fright, and then turning, he for the first time saw Hugh,
the man in whose footsteps he had once crept in the darkness in Turner's
Pike, the man who had invented the machine by which the earnings of a
lifetime had been swept away. "It wasn't me. You did it. You killed Jim
Gibson," he screamed, and springing forward sank his fingers and teeth into
Hugh's neck.
CHAPTER XXIII
One day in the month of October, four years after the time of his first
motor ride with Clara and Tom, Hugh went on a business trip to the city
of Pittsburgh. He left Bidwell in the morning and got to the steel city
at noon. At three o'clock his business was finished and he was ready to
return.
Although he had not yet realized it, Hugh's career as a successful inventor
had received a sharp check. The trick of driving directly at the point, of
becoming utterly absorbed in the thing before him, had been lost. He went
to Pittsburgh to see about the casting of new parts for the hay-loading
machine, but what he did in Pittsburgh was of no importance to the men who
would manufacture and sell that worthy, labor-saving tool. Although he did
not know it, a young man from Cleveland, in the employ of Tom and Steve,
had already done what Hugh was striving half-heartedly to do. The machine
had been finished and ready to market in October three years before, and