again, and then they came to the hotel where Hugh lived and he turned to
go back to the station and wait for the midnight train that would carry
the letter away and that would, he felt, carry also his demand that a
fellow-human, who had slipped from the modern path of work and progress
should be given a new chance. He felt magnanimous and wonderfully gracious.
"It's all right, my boy," he said heartily. "No use talking to me. To-night
when you came to the station to ask the fare to that hole of a place in
Michigan I saw you were embarrassed. 'What's the matter with that fellow?'
I said to myself. I got to thinking. Then I came up town with you and right
away you bought me a drink. I wouldn't have thought anything about that if
I hadn't been there myself. You'll get on your feet. Bidwell, Ohio, is full
of good men. You get in with them and they'll help you and stick by you.
You'll like those people. They've got get-up to them. The place you'll work
at there is far out of town. It's away out about a mile at a little kind of
outside-like place called Pickleville. There used to be a saloon there and
a factory for putting up cucumber pickles, but they've both gone now. You
won't be tempted to slip in that place. You'll have a chance to get on your
feet. I'm glad I thought of sending you there."
* * * * *
The Wheeling and Lake Erie ran along a little wooded depression that cut
across the wide expanse of open farm lands north of the town of Bidwell. It
brought coal from the hill country of West Virginia and southeastern Ohio
to ports on Lake Erie, and did not pay much attention to the carrying of
passengers. In the morning a train consisting of a combined express and
baggage car and two passenger coaches went north and west toward the lake,
and in the evening the same train returned, bound southeast into the Hills,
The Bidwell station of the road was, in an odd way, detached from the
town's life. The invisible roof under which the life of the town and the
surrounding country was lived did not cover it. As the Indiana railroad
man had told Hugh, the station itself stood on a spot known locally as
Pickleville. Back of the station there was a small building for the storage
of freight and near at hand four or five houses facing Turner's Pike. The
pickle factory, now deserted and with its windows gone, stood across the
tracks from the station and beside a small stream that ran under a bridge
and across country through a grove of trees to the river. On hot summer
days a sour, pungent smell arose from the old factory, and at night its
presence lent a ghostly flavor to the tiny corner of the world in which
lived perhaps a dozen people.
All day and at night an intense persistent silence lay over Pickleville,
while in Bidwell a mile away the stir of new life began. In the evenings
and on rainy afternoons when men could not work in the fields, old Judge
Hanby went along Turner's Pike and across the wagon bridge into Bidwell and
sat in a chair at the back of Birdie Spink's drug store. He talked. Men
came in to listen to him and went out. New talk ran through the town. A new
force that was being born into American life and into life everywhere all
over the world was feeding on the old dying individualistic life. The new
force stirred and aroused the people. It met a need that was universal. It
was meant to seal men together, to wipe out national lines, to walk under
seas and fly through the air, to change the entire face of the world in
which men lived. Already the giant that was to be king in the place of old
kings was calling his servants and his armies to serve him. He used the
methods of old kings and promised his followers booty and gain. Everywhere
he went unchallenged, surveying the land, raising a new class of men to
positions of power. Railroads had already been pushed out across the
plains; great coal fields from which was to be taken food to warm the blood
in the body of the giant were being opened up; iron fields were being
discovered; the roar and clatter of the breathing of the terrible new
thing, half hideous, half beautiful in its possibilities, that was for
so long to drown the voices and confuse the thinking of men, was heard
not only in the towns but even in lonely farm houses, where its willing
servants, the newspapers and magazines, had begun to circulate in ever
increasing numbers. At the town of Gibsonville, near Bidwell, Ohio, and at
Lima and Finley, Ohio, oil and gas fields were discovered. At Cleveland,
Ohio, a precise, definite-minded man named Rockefeller bought and sold
oil. From the first he served the new thing well and he soon found others
to serve with him. The Morgans, Fricks, Goulds, Carnegies, Vanderbilts,
servants of the new king, princes of the new faith, merchants all, a new
kind of rulers of men, defied the world-old law of class that puts the
merchant below the craftsman, and added to the confusion of men by taking
on the air of creators. They were merchants glorified and dealt in giant
things, in the lives of men and in mines, forests, oil and gas fields,
factories, and railroads.
And all over the country, in the towns, the farm houses, and the growing
cities of the new country, people stirred and awakened. Thought and poetry
died or passed as a heritage to feeble fawning men who also became servants
of the new order. Serious young men in Bidwell and in other American towns,
whose fathers had walked together on moonlight nights along Turner's Pike
to talk of God, went away to technical schools. Their fathers had walked
and talked and thoughts had grown up in them. The impulse had reached back
to their father's fathers on moonlit roads of England, Germany, Ireland,
France, and Italy, and back of these to the moonlit hills of Judea where
shepherds talked and serious young men, John and Matthew and Jesus, caught
the drift of the talk and made poetry of it; but the serious-minded sons of
these men in the new land were swept away from thinking and dreaming. From
all sides the voice of the new age that was to do definite things shouted
at them. Eagerly they took up the cry and ran with it. Millions of voices
arose. The clamor became terrible, and confused the minds of all men. In
making way for the newer, broader brotherhood into which men are some day
to emerge, in extending the invisible roofs of the towns and cities to
cover the world, men cut and crushed their way through the bodies of men.
And while the voices became louder and more excited and the new giant
walked about making a preliminary survey of the land, Hugh spent his days
at the quiet, sleepy railroad station at Pickleville and tried to adjust
his mind to the realization of the fact that he was not to be accepted as
fellow by the citizens of the new place to which he had come. During the
day he sat in the tiny telegraph office or, pulling an express truck to the
open window near his telegraph instrument, lay on his back with a sheet
of paper propped on his bony knees and did sums. Farmers driving past on
Turner's Pike saw him there and talked of him in the stores in town. "He's
a queer silent fellow," they said. "What do you suppose he's up to?"
Hugh walked in the streets of Bidwell at night as he had walked in the
streets of towns in Indiana and Illinois. He approached groups of men
loafing on a street corner and then went hurriedly past them. On quiet
streets as he went along under the trees, he saw women sitting in the
lamplight in the houses and hungered to have a house and a woman of his
own. One afternoon a woman school teacher came to the station to make
inquiry regarding the fare to a town in West Virginia. As the station agent
was not about Hugh gave her the information she sought and she lingered for
a few moments to talk with him. He answered the questions she asked with
monosyllables and she soon went away, but he was delighted and looked upon
the incident as an adventure. At night he dreamed of the school teacher and
when he awoke, pretended she was with him in his bedroom. He put out his
hand and touched the pillow. It was soft and smooth as he imagined the
cheek of a woman would be. He did not know the school teacher's name but
invented one for her. "Be quiet, Elizabeth. Do not let me disturb your
sleep," he murmured into the darkness. One evening he went to the house
where the school teacher boarded and stood in the shadow of a tree until he
saw her come out and go toward Main Street. Then he went by a roundabout
way and walked past her on the sidewalk before the lighted stores. He did
not look at her, but in passing her dress touched his arm and he was so
excited later that he could not sleep and spent half the night walking
about and thinking of the wonderful thing that had happened to him.
The ticket, express, and freight agent for the Wheeling and Lake Erie at
Bidwell, a man named George Pike, lived in one of the houses near the
station, and besides attending to his duties for the railroad company,
owned and worked a small farm. He was a slender, alert, silent man with a
long drooping mustache. Both he and his wife worked as Hugh had never seen
a man and woman work before. Their arrangement of the division of labor
was not based on sex but on convenience. Sometimes Mrs. Pike came to the
station to sell tickets, load express boxes and trunks on the passenger
trains and deliver heavy boxes of freight to draymen and farmers, while her
husband worked in the fields back of his house or prepared the evening
meal, and sometimes the matter was reversed and Hugh did not see Mrs. Pike
for several days at a time.
During the day there was little for the station agent or his wife to do
at the station and they disappeared. George Pike had made an arrangement
of wires and pulleys connecting the station with a large bell hung on top
of his house, and when some one came to the station to receive or deliver
freight Hugh pulled at the wire and the bell began to ring. In a few
minutes either George Pike or his wife came running from the house or
fields, dispatched the business and went quickly away again.
Day after day Hugh sat in a chair by a desk in the station or went outside
and walked up and down the station platform. Engines pulling long caravans
of coal cars ground past. The brakemen waved their hands to him and then
the train disappeared into the grove of trees that grew beside the creek
along which the tracks of the road were laid. In Turner's Pike a creaking
farm wagon appeared and then disappeared along the tree-lined road that led
to Bidwell. The farmer turned on his wagon seat to stare at Hugh but unlike
the railroad men did not wave his hand. Adventurous boys came out along the
road from town and climbed, shouting and laughing, over the rafters in the
deserted pickle factory across the tracks or went to fish in the creek in
the shade of the factory walls. Their shrill voices added to the loneliness
of the spot. It became almost unbearable to Hugh. In desperation he turned
from the rather meaningless doing of sums and working out of problems
regarding the number of fence pickets that could be cut from a tree or
the number of steel rails or railroad ties consumed in building a mile of
railroad, the innumerable petty problems with which he had been keeping
his mind busy, and turned to more definite and practical problems. He
remembered an autumn he had put in cutting corn on a farm in Illinois and,
going into the station, waved his long arms about, imitating the movements
of a man in the act of cutting corn. He wondered if a machine might not be
made that would do the work, and tried to make drawings of the parts of
such a machine. Feeling his inability to handle so difficult a problem
he sent away for books and began the study of mechanics. He joined a
correspondence school started by a man in Pennsylvania, and worked for days
on the problems the man sent him to do. He asked questions and began a
little to understand the mystery of the application of power. Like the
other young men of Bidwell he began to put himself into touch with the
spirit of the age, but unlike them he did not dream of suddenly acquired
wealth. While they embraced new and futile dreams he worked to destroy the
tendency to dreams in himself.
Hugh came to Bidwell in the early spring and during May, June and July
the quiet station at Pickleville awoke for an hour or two each evening.
A certain percentage of the sudden and almost overwhelming increase in
express business that came with the ripening of the fruit and berry crop
came to the Wheeling, and every evening a dozen express trucks, piled high
with berry boxes, waited for the south bound train. When the train came
into the station a small crowd had assembled. George Pike and his stout
wife worked madly, throwing the boxes in at the door of the express car.
Idlers standing about became interested and lent a hand. The engineer
climbed out of his locomotive, stretched his legs and crossing a narrow
road got a drink from the pump in George Pike's yard.
Hugh walked to the door of his telegraph office and standing in the shadows
watched the busy scene. He wanted to take part in it, to laugh and talk
with the men standing about, to go to the engineer and ask questions
regarding the locomotive and its construction, to help George Pike and his
wife, and perhaps cut through their silence and his own enough to become
acquainted with them. He thought of all these things but stayed in the
shadow of the door that led to the telegraph office until, at a signal
given by the train conductor, the engineer climbed into his engine and the
train began to move away into the evening darkness. When Hugh came out of
his office the station platform was deserted again. In the grass across
the tracks and beside the ghostly looking old factory, crickets sang. Tom
Wilder, the Bidwell hack driver, had got a traveling man off the train and
the dust left by the heels of his team still hung in the air over Turner's
Pike. From the darkness that brooded over the trees that grew along the
creek beyond the factory came the hoarse croak of frogs. On Turner's Pike a
half dozen Bidwell young men accompanied by as many town girls walked along
the path beside the road under the trees. They had come to the station
to have somewhere to go, had made up a party to come, but now the half
unconscious purpose of their coming was apparent. The party split itself
up into couples and each strove to get as far away as possible from the
others. One of the couples came back along the path toward the station and
went to the pump in George Pike's yard. They stood by the pump, laughing
and pretending to drink out of a tin cup, and when they got again into
the road the others had disappeared. They became silent. Hugh went to the
end of the platform and watched as they walked slowly along. He became
furiously jealous of the young man who put his arm about the waist of his
companion and then, when he turned and saw Hugh staring at him, took it
away again.
The telegraph operator went quickly along the platform until he was out of
range of the young man's eyes, and, when he thought the gathering darkness
would hide him, returned and crept along the path beside the road after
him. Again a hungry desire to enter into the lives of the people about him
took possession of the Missourian. To be a young man dressed in a stiff
white collar, wearing neatly made clothes, and in the evening to walk about
with young girls seemed like getting on the road to happiness. He wanted
to run shouting along the path beside the road until he had overtaken the
young man and woman, to beg them to take him with them, to accept him
as one of themselves, but when the momentary impulse had passed and he
returned to the telegraph office and lighted a lamp, he looked at his
long awkward body and could not conceive of himself as ever by any chance
becoming the thing he wanted to be. Sadness swept over him and his gaunt
face, already cut and marked with deep lines, became longer and more
gaunt. The old boyhood notion, put into his mind by the words of his
foster-mother, Sarah Shepard, that a town and a people could remake him and
erase from his body the marks of what he thought of as his inferior birth,
began to fade. He tried to forget the people about him and turned with
renewed energy to the study of the problems in the books that now lay in
a pile upon his desk. His inclination to dreams, balked by the persistent
holding of his mind to definite things, began to reassert itself in a new
form, and his brain played no more with pictures of clouds and men in
agitated movement but took hold of steel, wood, and iron. Dumb masses of
materials taken out of the earth and the forests were molded by his mind
into fantastic shapes. As he sat in the telegraph office during the day or
walked alone through the streets of Bidwell at night, he saw in fancy a
thousand new machines, formed by his hands and brain, doing the work that
had been done by the hands of men. He had come to Bidwell, not only in
the hope that there he would at last find companionship, but also because
his mind was really aroused and he wanted leisure to begin trying to do
tangible things. When the citizens of Bidwell would not take him into their
town life but left him standing to one side, as the tiny dwelling place
for men called Pickleville where he lived stood aside out from under the
invisible roof of the town, he decided to try to forget men and to express
himself wholly in work.
CHAPTER V
Hugh's first inventive effort stirred the town of Bidwell deeply. When
word of it ran about, the men who had been listening to the talk of Judge
Horace Hanby and whose minds had turned toward the arrival of the new
forward-pushing impulse in American life thought they saw in Hugh the
instrument of its coming to Bidwell. From the day of his coming to live
among them, there had been much curiosity in the stores and houses
regarding the tall, gaunt, slow-speaking stranger at Pickleville. George
Pike had told Birdie Spinks the druggist how Hugh worked all day over
books, and how he made drawings for parts of mysterious machines and left
them on his desk in the telegraph office. Birdie Spinks told others and the
tale grew. When Hugh walked alone in the streets during the evening and
thought no one took account of his presence, hundreds of pairs of curious
eyes followed him about.
A tradition in regard to the telegraph operator began to grow up. The
tradition made Hugh a gigantic figure, one who walked always on a plane
above that on which other men lived. In the imagination of his fellow
citizens of the Ohio town, he went about always thinking great thoughts,
solving mysterious and intricate problems that had to do with the new
mechanical age Judge Hanby talked about to the eager listeners in the
drug-store. An alert, talkative people saw among them one who could not
talk and whose long face was habitually serious, and could not think of him
as having daily to face the same kind of minor problems as themselves.
The Bidwell young man who had come down to the Wheeling station with a
group of other young men, who had seen the evening train go away to the
south, who had met at the station one of the town girls and had, in order
to escape the others and be alone with her, taken her to the pump in George
Pike's yard on the pretense of wanting a drink, walked away with her into
the darkness of the summer evening with his mind fixed on Hugh. The young
man's name was Ed Hall and he was apprentice to Ben Peeler, the carpenter
who had sent his son to Cleveland to a technical school. He wanted to marry
the girl he had met at the station and did not see how he could manage it
on his salary as a carpenter's apprentice. When he looked back and saw Hugh
standing on the station platform, he took the arm he had put around the
girl's waist quickly away and began to talk. "I'll tell you what," he said
earnestly, "if things don't pretty soon get on the stir around here I'm
going to get out. I'll go over by Gibsonburg and get a job in the oil
fields, that's what I'll do. I got to have more money." He sighed heavily
and looked over the girl's head into the darkness. "They say that telegraph
fellow back there at the station is up to something," he ventured. "It's
all the talk. Birdie Spinks says he is an inventor; says George Pike told
him; says he is working all the time on new inventions to do things by
machinery; that his passing off as a telegraph operator is only a bluff.
Some think maybe he was sent here to see about starting a factory to make
one of his inventions, sent by rich men maybe in Cleveland or some other
place. Everybody says they'll bet there'll be factories here in Bidwell
before very long now. I wish I knew. I don't want to go away if I don't
have to, but I got to have more money. Ben Peeler won't never give me a
raise so I can get married or nothing. I wish I knew that fellow back there
so I could ask him what's up. They say he's smart. I suppose he wouldn't
tell me nothing. I wish I was smart enough to invent something and maybe
get rich. I wish I was the kind of fellow they say he is."
Ed Hall again put his arm about the girl's waist and walked away. He forgot
Hugh and thought of himself and of how he wanted to marry the girl whose
young body nestled close to his own--wanted her to be utterly his. For
a few hours he passed out of Hugh's growing sphere of influence on the
collective thought of the town, and lost himself in the immediate
deliciousness of kisses.
And as he passed out of Hugh's influence others came in. On Main Street in
the evening every one speculated on the Missourian's purpose in coming to
Bidwell. The forty dollars a month paid him by the Wheeling railroad could
not have tempted such a man. They were sure of that. Steve Hunter the
jeweler's son had returned to town from a course in a business college at
Buffalo, New York, and hearing the talk became interested. Steve had in him
the making of a live man of affairs, and he decided to investigate. It was
not, however, Steve's method to go at things directly, and he was impressed
by the notion, then abroad in Bidwell, that Hugh had been sent to town by
some one, perhaps by a group of capitalists who intended to start factories
there.
Steve thought he would go easy. In Buffalo, where he had gone to the
business college, he had met a girl whose father, E. P. Horn, owned a soap
factory; had become acquainted with her at church and had been introduced
to her father. The soap maker, an assertive positive man who manufactured
a product called Horn's Household Friend Soap, had his own notion of what
a young man should be and how he should make his way in the world, and had
taken pleasure in talking to Steve. He told the Bidwell jeweler's son of
how he had started his own factory with but little money and had succeeded
and gave Steve many practical hints on the organization of companies. He
talked a great deal of a thing called "control." "When you get ready to
start for yourself keep that in mind," he said. "You can sell stock and
borrow money at the bank, all you can get, but don't give up control. Hang
on to that. That's the way I made my success. I always kept the control."
Steve wanted to marry Ernestine Horn, but felt that he should show what he
could do as a business man before he attempted to thrust himself into so
wealthy and prominent a family. When he returned to his own town and heard
the talk regarding Hugh McVey and his inventive genius, he remembered the
soap maker's words regarding control, and repeated them to himself. One
evening he walked along Turner's Pike and stood in the darkness by the old
pickle factory. He saw Hugh at work under a lamp in the telegraph office
and was impressed. "I'll lay low and see what he's up to," he told himself.
"If he's got an invention, I'll get up a company. I'll get money in and
I'll start a factory. The people here'll tumble over each other to get into
a thing like that. I don't believe any one sent him here. I'll bet he's
just an inventor. That kind always are queer. I'll keep my mouth shut and
watch my chance. If there is anything starts, I'll start it and I'll get
into control, that's what I'll do, I'll get into control."
* * * * *
In the country stretching away north beyond the fringe of small berry farms
lying directly about town, were other and larger farms. The land that made
up these larger farms was also rich and raised big crops. Great stretches
of it were planted to cabbage for which a market had been built up in
Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati. Bidwell was often in derision called
Cabbageville by the citizens of nearby towns. One of the largest of the
cabbage farms belonged to a man named Ezra French, and was situated on
Turner's Pike, two miles from town and a mile beyond the Wheeling station.
On spring evenings when it was dark and silent about the station and when
the air was heavy with the smell of new growth and of land fresh-turned by
the plow, Hugh got out of his chair in the telegraph office and walked in
the soft darkness. He went along Turner's Pike to town, saw groups of men
standing on the sidewalks before the stores and young girls walking arm
in arm along the street, and then came back to the silent station. Into
his long and habitually cold body the warmth of desire began to creep.
The spring rains came and soft winds blew down from the hill country to
the south. One evening when the moon shone he went around the old pickle
factory to where the creek went chattering under leaning willow trees, and
as he stood in the heavy shadows by the factory wall, tried to imagine
himself as one who had become suddenly clean-limbed, graceful, and agile. A
bush grew beside the stream near the factory and he took hold of it with
his powerful hands and tore it out by the roots. For a moment the strength
in his shoulders and arms gave him an intense masculine satisfaction. He
thought of how powerfully he could hold the body of a woman against his
body and the spark of the fires of spring that had touched him became a
flame. He felt new-made and tried to leap lightly and gracefully across the
stream, but stumbled and fell in the water. Later he went soberly back to
the station and tried again to lose himself in the study of the problems he
had found in his books.
The Ezra French farm lay beside Turner's Pike a mile north of the Wheeling
station and contained two hundred acres of land of which a large part was
planted to cabbages. It was a profitable crop to raise and required no more
care than corn, but the planting was a terrible task. Thousands of plants
that had been raised from seeds planted in a seed-bed back of the barn had
to be laboriously transplanted. The plants were tender and it was necessary
to handle them carefully. The planter crawled slowly and painfully along,
and from the road looked like a wounded beast striving to make his way to
a hole in a distant wood. He crawled forward a little and then stopped and
hunched himself up into a ball-like mass. Taking the plant, dropped on the
ground by one of the plant droppers, he made a hole in the soft ground with
a small three-cornered hoe, and with his hands packed the earth about the
plant roots. Then he crawled on again.
Ezra the cabbage farmer had come west from one of the New England states
and had grown comfortably wealthy, but he would not employ extra labor for
the plant setting and the work was done by his sons and daughters. He was a
short, bearded man whose leg had been broken in his youth by a fall from
the loft of a barn. As it had not mended properly he could do little work
and limped painfully about. To the men of Bidwell he was known as something
of a wit, and in the winter he went to town every afternoon to stand in the
stores and tell the Rabelaisian stories for which he was famous; but when
spring came he became restlessly active, and in his own house and on the
farm, became a tyrant. During the time of the cabbage setting he drove his
sons and daughters like slaves. When in the evening the moon came up, he
made them go back to the fields immediately after supper and work until
midnight. They went in sullen silence, the girls to limp slowly along
dropping the plants out of baskets carried on their arms, and the boys to
crawl after them and set the plants. In the half darkness the little group
of humans went slowly up and down the long fields. Ezra hitched a horse to
a wagon and brought the plants from the seed-bed behind the barn. He went
here and there swearing and protesting against every delay in the work.
When his wife, a tired little old woman, had finished the evening's work
in the house, he made her come also to the fields. "Come, come," he said,
sharply, "we need every pair of hands we can get." Although he had several
thousand dollars in the Bidwell bank and owned mortgages on two or three
neighboring farms, Ezra was afraid of poverty, and to keep his family at
work pretended to be upon the point of losing all his possessions. "Now is
our chance to save ourselves," he declared. "We must get in a big crop. If
we do not work hard now we'll starve." When in the field his sons found
themselves unable to crawl longer without resting, and stood up to stretch
their tired bodies, he stood by the fence at the field's edge and swore.
"Well, look at the mouths I have to feed, you lazies!" he shouted. "Keep
at the work. Don't be idling around. In two weeks it'll be too late for
planting and then you can rest. Now every plant we set will help to save us
from ruin. Keep at the job. Don't be idling around."
In the spring of his second year in Bidwell, Hugh went often in the evening
to watch the plant setters at work in the moonlight on the French farm. He
did not make his presence known but hid himself in a fence corner behind
bushes and watched the workers. As he saw the stooped misshapen figures
crawling slowly along and heard the words of the old man driving them like
cattle, his heart was deeply touched and he wanted to protest. In the dim
light the slowly moving figures of women appeared, and after them came the
crouched crawling men. They came down the long row toward him, wriggling
into his line of sight like grotesquely misshapen animals driven by some
god of the night to the performance of a terrible task. An arm went up. It
came down again swiftly. The three-cornered hoe sank into the ground. The
slow rhythm of the crawler was broken. He reached with his disengaged hand
for the plant that lay on the ground before him and lowered it into the
hole the hoe had made. With his fingers he packed the earth about the roots
of the plant and then again began the slow crawl forward. There were four
of the French boys and the two older ones worked in silence. The younger
boys complained. The three girls and their mother, who were attending to
the plant dropping, came to the end of the row and turning, went away into
the darkness. "I'm going to quit this slavery," one of the younger boys
said. "I'll get a job over in town. I hope it's true what they say, that
factories are coming."
The four young men came to the end of the row and, as Ezra was not in
sight, stood a moment by the fence near where Hugh was concealed. "I'd
rather be a horse or a cow than what I am," the complaining voice went on.
"What's the good being alive if you have to work like this?"
For a moment as he listened to the voices of the complaining workers, Hugh
wanted to go to them and ask them to let him share in their labor. Then
another thought came. The crawling figures came sharply into his line of
vision. He no longer heard the voice of the youngest of the French boys
that seemed to come out of the ground. The machine-like swing of the bodies
of the plant setters suggested vaguely to his mind the possibility of
building a machine that would do the work they were doing. His mind took
eager hold of that thought and he was relieved. There had been something in
the crawling figures and in the moonlight out of which the voices came that
had begun to awaken in his mind the fluttering, dreamy state in which he
had spent so much of his boyhood. To think of the possibility of building
a plant-setting machine was safer. It fitted into what Sarah Shepard had
so often told him was the safe way of life. As he went back through the
darkness to the railroad station, he thought about the matter and decided
that to become an inventor would be the sure way of placing his feet at
last upon the path of progress he was trying to find.
Hugh became absorbed in the notion of inventing a machine that would do the
work he had seen the men doing in the field. All day he thought about it.
The notion once fixed in his mind gave him something tangible to work upon.
In the study of mechanics, taken up in a purely amateur spirit, he had
not gone far enough to feel himself capable of undertaking the actual
construction of such a machine, but thought the difficulty might be
overcome by patience and by experimenting with combinations of wheels,
gears and levers whittled out of pieces of wood. From Hunter's Jewelry
Store he got a cheap clock and spent days taking it apart and putting it
together again. He dropped the doing of mathematical problems and sent away
for books describing the construction of machines. Already the flood of new
inventions, that was so completely to change the methods of cultivating the
soil in America, had begun to spread over the country, and many new and
strange kinds of agricultural implements arrived at the Bidwell freight
house of the Wheeling railroad. There Hugh saw a harvesting machine
for cutting grain, a mowing machine for cutting hay and a long-nosed
strange-looking implement that was intended to root potatoes out of the
ground very much after the method pursued by energetic pigs. He studied
these carefully. For a time his mind turned away from the hunger for human
contact and he was content to remain an isolated figure, absorbed in the
workings of his own awakening mind.
An absurd and amusing thing happened. After the impulse to try to invent a
plant-setting machine came to him, he went every evening to conceal himself
in the fence corner and watch the French family at their labors. Absorbed
in watching the mechanical movements of the men who crawled across the
fields in the moonlight, he forgot they were human. After he had watched
them crawl into sight, turn at the end of the rows, and crawl away again
into the hazy light that had reminded him of the dim distances of his own
Mississippi River country, he was seized with a desire to crawl after
them and to try to imitate their movements. Certain intricate mechanical
problems, that had already come into his mind in connection with the
proposed machine, he thought could be better understood if he could get
the movements necessary to plant setting into his own body. His lips began
to mutter words and getting out of the fence corner where he had been
concealed he began to crawl across the field behind the French boys. "The
down stroke will go so," he muttered, and bringing up his arm swung it
above his head. His fist descended into the soft ground. He had forgotten
the rows of new set plants and crawled directly over them, crushing them
into the soft ground. He stopped crawling and waved his arm about. He tried
to relate his arms to the mechanical arms of the machine that was being
created in his mind. Holding one arm stiffly in front of him he moved it up
and down. "The stroke will be shorter than that. The machine must be built
close to the ground. The wheels and the horses will travel in paths between
the rows. The wheels must be broad to provide traction. I will gear from
the wheels to get power for the operation of the mechanism," he said aloud.
Hugh arose and stood in the moonlight in the cabbage field, his arms still
going stiffly up and down. The great length of his figure and his arms was
accentuated by the wavering uncertain light. The laborers, aware of some
strange presence, sprang to their feet and stood listening and looking.
Hugh advanced toward them, still muttering words and waving his arms.
Terror took hold of the workers. One of the woman plant droppers screamed
and ran away across the field, and the others ran crying at her heels.
"Don't do it. Go away," the older of the French boys shouted, and then he
with his brothers also ran.
Hearing the voices Hugh stopped and stared about. The field was empty.
Again he lost himself in his mechanical calculations. He went back along
the road to the Wheeling station and to the telegraph office where he
worked half the night on a rude drawing he was trying to make of the parts
of his plant setting machine, oblivious to the fact that he had created a
myth that would run through the whole countryside. The French boys and
their sisters stoutly declared that a ghost had come into the cabbage
fields and had threatened them with death if they did not go away and
quit working at night. In a trembling voice their mother backed up their
assertion. Ezra French, who had not seen the apparition and did not believe
the tale, scented a revolution. He swore. He threatened the entire family
with starvation. He declared that a lie had been invented to deceive and
betray him.
However, the work at night in the cabbage fields on the French farm was at
an end. The story was told in the town of Bidwell, and as the entire French
family except Ezra swore to its truth, was generally believed. Tom Foresby,
an old citizen who was a spiritualist, claimed to have heard his father say
that there had been in early days an Indian burying-ground on the Turner
Pike.
The cabbage field on the French farm became locally famous. Within a year
two other men declared they had seen the figure of a gigantic Indian
dancing and singing a funeral dirge in the moonlight. Farmer boys, who
had been for an evening in town and were returning late at night to
lonely farmhouses, whipped their horses into a run when they came to the
farm. When it was far behind them they breathed more freely. Although he
continued to swear and threaten, Ezra never again succeeded in getting his
family into the fields at night. In Bidwell he declared that the story of
the ghost invented by his lazy sons and daughters had ruined his chance for
making a decent living out of his farm.
CHAPTER VI
Steve Hunter decided that it was time something was done to wake up his
native town. The call of the spring wind awoke something in him as in Hugh.
It came up from the south bringing rain followed by warm fair days. Robins
hopped about on the lawns before the houses on the residence streets
of Bidwell, and the air was again sweet with the pregnant sweetness of
new-plowed ground. Like Hugh, Steve walked about alone through the dark,
dimly lighted residence streets during the spring evenings, but he did not
try awkwardly to leap over creeks in the darkness or pull bushes out of
the ground, nor did he waste his time dreaming of being physically young,
clean-limbed and beautiful.
Before the coming of his great achievements in the industrial field, Steve
had not been highly regarded in his home town. He had been a noisy boastful
youth and had been spoiled by his father. When he was twelve years old what
were called safety bicycles first came into use and for a long time he
owned the only one in town. In the evening he rode it up and down Main
Street, frightening the horses and arousing the envy of the town boys. He
learned to ride without putting his hands on the handle-bars and the other
boys began to call him Smarty Hunter and later, because he wore a stiff,
white collar that folded down over his shoulders, they gave him a girl's
name. "Hello, Susan," they shouted, "don't fall and muss your clothes."
In the spring that marked the beginning of his great industrial adventure,
Steve was stirred by the soft spring winds into dreaming his own kind of
dreams. As he walked about through the streets, avoiding the other young
men and women, he remembered Ernestine, the daughter of the Buffalo soap
maker, and thought a great deal about the magnificence of the big stone
house in which she lived with her father. His body ached for her, but that
was a matter he felt could be managed. How he could achieve a financial
position that would make it possible for him to ask for her hand was a more
difficult problem. Since he had come back from the business college to live
in his home town, he had secretly, and at the cost of two new five dollar
dresses, arranged a physical alliance with a girl named Louise Trucker
whose father was a farm laborer, and that left his mind free for other
things. He intended to become a manufacturer, the first one in Bidwell,
to make himself a leader in the new movement that was sweeping over the
country. He had thought out what he wanted to do and it only remained to
find something for him to manufacture to put his plans through. First of
all he had selected with great care certain men he intended to ask to go in
with him. There was John Clark the banker, his own father, E. H. Hunter the
town jeweler, Thomas Butterworth the rich farmer, and young Gordon Hart,
who had a job as assistant cashier in the bank. For a month he had been
dropping hints to these men of something mysterious and important about
to happen. With the exception of his father who had infinite faith in the
shrewdness and ability of his son, the men he wanted to impress were only
amused. One day Thomas Butterworth went into the bank and stood talking the
matter over with John Clark. "The young squirt was always a Smart-Aleck
and a blow-hard," he said. "What's he up to now? What's he nudging and
whispering about?"
As he walked in the main street of Bidwell, Steve began to acquire that
air of superiority that later made him so respected and feared. He hurried
along with a peculiarly intense absorbed look in his eyes. He saw his
fellow townsmen as through a haze, and sometimes did not see them at all.
As he went along he took papers from his pocket, read them hurriedly, and
then quickly put them away again. When he did speak--perhaps to a man who
had known him from boyhood--there was in his manner something gracious to
the edge of condescension. One morning in March he met Zebe Wilson the town
shoemaker on the sidewalk before the post-office. Steve stopped and smiled.
"Well, good morning, Mr. Wilson," he said, "and how is the quality of
leather you are getting from the tanneries now?"
Word regarding this strange salutation ran about among the merchants and
artisans. "What's he up to now?" they asked each other. "Mr. Wilson,
indeed! Now what's wrong between that young squirt and Zebe Wilson?"
In the afternoon, four clerks from the Main Street stores and Ed Hall the
carpenter's apprentice, who had a half day off because of rain, decided to
investigate. One by one they went along Hamilton Street to Zebe Wilson's
shop and stepped inside to repeat Steve Hunter's salutation. "Well, good
afternoon, Mr. Wilson," they said, "and how is the quality of leather you
are getting from the tanneries now?" Ed Hall, the last of the five who went
into the shop to repeat the formal and polite inquiry, barely escaped with
his life. Zebe Wilson threw a shoemaker's hammer at him and it went through
the glass in the upper part of the shop door.
Once when Tom Butterworth and John Clark the banker were talking of the new
air of importance he was assuming, and half indignantly speculated on what
he meant by his whispered suggestion of something significant about to
happen, Steve came along Main Street past the front door of the bank. John
Clark called him in. The three men confronted each other and the jeweler's
son sensed the fact that the banker and the rich farmer were amused by
his pretensions. At once he proved himself to be what all Bidwell later
acknowledged him to be, a man who could handle men and affairs. Having at
that time nothing to support his pretensions he decided to put up a bluff.
With a wave of his hand and an air of knowing just what he was about, he
led the two men into the back room of the bank and shut the door leading
into the large room to which the general public was admitted. "You would
have thought he owned the place," John Clark afterward said with a note of
admiration in his voice to young Gordon Hart when he described what took
place in the back room.
Steve plunged at once into what he had to say to the two solid moneyed
citizens of his town. "Well, now, look here, you two," he began earnestly.
"I'm going to tell you something, but you got to keep still." He went to
the window that looked out upon an alleyway and glanced about as though
fearful of being overheard, then sat down in the chair usually occupied by
John Clark on the rare occasions when the directors of the Bidwell bank
held a meeting. Steve looked over the heads of the two men who in spite
of themselves were beginning to be impressed. "Well," he began, "there is
a fellow out at Pickleville. You have maybe heard things said about him.
He's telegraph operator out there. Perhaps you have heard how he is always
making drawings of parts of machines. I guess everybody in town has been
wondering what he's up to."
Steve looked at the two men and then got nervously out of the chair and
walked about the room. "That fellow is my man. I put him there," he
declared. "I didn't want to tell any one yet."
The two men nodded and Steve became lost in the notion created in his
fancy. It did not occur to him that what he had just said was untrue. He
began to scold the two men. "Well, I suppose I'm on the wrong track there,"
he said. "My man has made an invention that will bring millions in profits
to those who get into it. In Cleveland and Buffalo I'm already in touch
with big bankers. There's to be a big factory built, but you see yourself
how it is, here I'm at home. I was raised as a boy here."
go back to the station and wait for the midnight train that would carry
the letter away and that would, he felt, carry also his demand that a
fellow-human, who had slipped from the modern path of work and progress
should be given a new chance. He felt magnanimous and wonderfully gracious.
"It's all right, my boy," he said heartily. "No use talking to me. To-night
when you came to the station to ask the fare to that hole of a place in
Michigan I saw you were embarrassed. 'What's the matter with that fellow?'
I said to myself. I got to thinking. Then I came up town with you and right
away you bought me a drink. I wouldn't have thought anything about that if
I hadn't been there myself. You'll get on your feet. Bidwell, Ohio, is full
of good men. You get in with them and they'll help you and stick by you.
You'll like those people. They've got get-up to them. The place you'll work
at there is far out of town. It's away out about a mile at a little kind of
outside-like place called Pickleville. There used to be a saloon there and
a factory for putting up cucumber pickles, but they've both gone now. You
won't be tempted to slip in that place. You'll have a chance to get on your
feet. I'm glad I thought of sending you there."
* * * * *
The Wheeling and Lake Erie ran along a little wooded depression that cut
across the wide expanse of open farm lands north of the town of Bidwell. It
brought coal from the hill country of West Virginia and southeastern Ohio
to ports on Lake Erie, and did not pay much attention to the carrying of
passengers. In the morning a train consisting of a combined express and
baggage car and two passenger coaches went north and west toward the lake,
and in the evening the same train returned, bound southeast into the Hills,
The Bidwell station of the road was, in an odd way, detached from the
town's life. The invisible roof under which the life of the town and the
surrounding country was lived did not cover it. As the Indiana railroad
man had told Hugh, the station itself stood on a spot known locally as
Pickleville. Back of the station there was a small building for the storage
of freight and near at hand four or five houses facing Turner's Pike. The
pickle factory, now deserted and with its windows gone, stood across the
tracks from the station and beside a small stream that ran under a bridge
and across country through a grove of trees to the river. On hot summer
days a sour, pungent smell arose from the old factory, and at night its
presence lent a ghostly flavor to the tiny corner of the world in which
lived perhaps a dozen people.
All day and at night an intense persistent silence lay over Pickleville,
while in Bidwell a mile away the stir of new life began. In the evenings
and on rainy afternoons when men could not work in the fields, old Judge
Hanby went along Turner's Pike and across the wagon bridge into Bidwell and
sat in a chair at the back of Birdie Spink's drug store. He talked. Men
came in to listen to him and went out. New talk ran through the town. A new
force that was being born into American life and into life everywhere all
over the world was feeding on the old dying individualistic life. The new
force stirred and aroused the people. It met a need that was universal. It
was meant to seal men together, to wipe out national lines, to walk under
seas and fly through the air, to change the entire face of the world in
which men lived. Already the giant that was to be king in the place of old
kings was calling his servants and his armies to serve him. He used the
methods of old kings and promised his followers booty and gain. Everywhere
he went unchallenged, surveying the land, raising a new class of men to
positions of power. Railroads had already been pushed out across the
plains; great coal fields from which was to be taken food to warm the blood
in the body of the giant were being opened up; iron fields were being
discovered; the roar and clatter of the breathing of the terrible new
thing, half hideous, half beautiful in its possibilities, that was for
so long to drown the voices and confuse the thinking of men, was heard
not only in the towns but even in lonely farm houses, where its willing
servants, the newspapers and magazines, had begun to circulate in ever
increasing numbers. At the town of Gibsonville, near Bidwell, Ohio, and at
Lima and Finley, Ohio, oil and gas fields were discovered. At Cleveland,
Ohio, a precise, definite-minded man named Rockefeller bought and sold
oil. From the first he served the new thing well and he soon found others
to serve with him. The Morgans, Fricks, Goulds, Carnegies, Vanderbilts,
servants of the new king, princes of the new faith, merchants all, a new
kind of rulers of men, defied the world-old law of class that puts the
merchant below the craftsman, and added to the confusion of men by taking
on the air of creators. They were merchants glorified and dealt in giant
things, in the lives of men and in mines, forests, oil and gas fields,
factories, and railroads.
And all over the country, in the towns, the farm houses, and the growing
cities of the new country, people stirred and awakened. Thought and poetry
died or passed as a heritage to feeble fawning men who also became servants
of the new order. Serious young men in Bidwell and in other American towns,
whose fathers had walked together on moonlight nights along Turner's Pike
to talk of God, went away to technical schools. Their fathers had walked
and talked and thoughts had grown up in them. The impulse had reached back
to their father's fathers on moonlit roads of England, Germany, Ireland,
France, and Italy, and back of these to the moonlit hills of Judea where
shepherds talked and serious young men, John and Matthew and Jesus, caught
the drift of the talk and made poetry of it; but the serious-minded sons of
these men in the new land were swept away from thinking and dreaming. From
all sides the voice of the new age that was to do definite things shouted
at them. Eagerly they took up the cry and ran with it. Millions of voices
arose. The clamor became terrible, and confused the minds of all men. In
making way for the newer, broader brotherhood into which men are some day
to emerge, in extending the invisible roofs of the towns and cities to
cover the world, men cut and crushed their way through the bodies of men.
And while the voices became louder and more excited and the new giant
walked about making a preliminary survey of the land, Hugh spent his days
at the quiet, sleepy railroad station at Pickleville and tried to adjust
his mind to the realization of the fact that he was not to be accepted as
fellow by the citizens of the new place to which he had come. During the
day he sat in the tiny telegraph office or, pulling an express truck to the
open window near his telegraph instrument, lay on his back with a sheet
of paper propped on his bony knees and did sums. Farmers driving past on
Turner's Pike saw him there and talked of him in the stores in town. "He's
a queer silent fellow," they said. "What do you suppose he's up to?"
Hugh walked in the streets of Bidwell at night as he had walked in the
streets of towns in Indiana and Illinois. He approached groups of men
loafing on a street corner and then went hurriedly past them. On quiet
streets as he went along under the trees, he saw women sitting in the
lamplight in the houses and hungered to have a house and a woman of his
own. One afternoon a woman school teacher came to the station to make
inquiry regarding the fare to a town in West Virginia. As the station agent
was not about Hugh gave her the information she sought and she lingered for
a few moments to talk with him. He answered the questions she asked with
monosyllables and she soon went away, but he was delighted and looked upon
the incident as an adventure. At night he dreamed of the school teacher and
when he awoke, pretended she was with him in his bedroom. He put out his
hand and touched the pillow. It was soft and smooth as he imagined the
cheek of a woman would be. He did not know the school teacher's name but
invented one for her. "Be quiet, Elizabeth. Do not let me disturb your
sleep," he murmured into the darkness. One evening he went to the house
where the school teacher boarded and stood in the shadow of a tree until he
saw her come out and go toward Main Street. Then he went by a roundabout
way and walked past her on the sidewalk before the lighted stores. He did
not look at her, but in passing her dress touched his arm and he was so
excited later that he could not sleep and spent half the night walking
about and thinking of the wonderful thing that had happened to him.
The ticket, express, and freight agent for the Wheeling and Lake Erie at
Bidwell, a man named George Pike, lived in one of the houses near the
station, and besides attending to his duties for the railroad company,
owned and worked a small farm. He was a slender, alert, silent man with a
long drooping mustache. Both he and his wife worked as Hugh had never seen
a man and woman work before. Their arrangement of the division of labor
was not based on sex but on convenience. Sometimes Mrs. Pike came to the
station to sell tickets, load express boxes and trunks on the passenger
trains and deliver heavy boxes of freight to draymen and farmers, while her
husband worked in the fields back of his house or prepared the evening
meal, and sometimes the matter was reversed and Hugh did not see Mrs. Pike
for several days at a time.
During the day there was little for the station agent or his wife to do
at the station and they disappeared. George Pike had made an arrangement
of wires and pulleys connecting the station with a large bell hung on top
of his house, and when some one came to the station to receive or deliver
freight Hugh pulled at the wire and the bell began to ring. In a few
minutes either George Pike or his wife came running from the house or
fields, dispatched the business and went quickly away again.
Day after day Hugh sat in a chair by a desk in the station or went outside
and walked up and down the station platform. Engines pulling long caravans
of coal cars ground past. The brakemen waved their hands to him and then
the train disappeared into the grove of trees that grew beside the creek
along which the tracks of the road were laid. In Turner's Pike a creaking
farm wagon appeared and then disappeared along the tree-lined road that led
to Bidwell. The farmer turned on his wagon seat to stare at Hugh but unlike
the railroad men did not wave his hand. Adventurous boys came out along the
road from town and climbed, shouting and laughing, over the rafters in the
deserted pickle factory across the tracks or went to fish in the creek in
the shade of the factory walls. Their shrill voices added to the loneliness
of the spot. It became almost unbearable to Hugh. In desperation he turned
from the rather meaningless doing of sums and working out of problems
regarding the number of fence pickets that could be cut from a tree or
the number of steel rails or railroad ties consumed in building a mile of
railroad, the innumerable petty problems with which he had been keeping
his mind busy, and turned to more definite and practical problems. He
remembered an autumn he had put in cutting corn on a farm in Illinois and,
going into the station, waved his long arms about, imitating the movements
of a man in the act of cutting corn. He wondered if a machine might not be
made that would do the work, and tried to make drawings of the parts of
such a machine. Feeling his inability to handle so difficult a problem
he sent away for books and began the study of mechanics. He joined a
correspondence school started by a man in Pennsylvania, and worked for days
on the problems the man sent him to do. He asked questions and began a
little to understand the mystery of the application of power. Like the
other young men of Bidwell he began to put himself into touch with the
spirit of the age, but unlike them he did not dream of suddenly acquired
wealth. While they embraced new and futile dreams he worked to destroy the
tendency to dreams in himself.
Hugh came to Bidwell in the early spring and during May, June and July
the quiet station at Pickleville awoke for an hour or two each evening.
A certain percentage of the sudden and almost overwhelming increase in
express business that came with the ripening of the fruit and berry crop
came to the Wheeling, and every evening a dozen express trucks, piled high
with berry boxes, waited for the south bound train. When the train came
into the station a small crowd had assembled. George Pike and his stout
wife worked madly, throwing the boxes in at the door of the express car.
Idlers standing about became interested and lent a hand. The engineer
climbed out of his locomotive, stretched his legs and crossing a narrow
road got a drink from the pump in George Pike's yard.
Hugh walked to the door of his telegraph office and standing in the shadows
watched the busy scene. He wanted to take part in it, to laugh and talk
with the men standing about, to go to the engineer and ask questions
regarding the locomotive and its construction, to help George Pike and his
wife, and perhaps cut through their silence and his own enough to become
acquainted with them. He thought of all these things but stayed in the
shadow of the door that led to the telegraph office until, at a signal
given by the train conductor, the engineer climbed into his engine and the
train began to move away into the evening darkness. When Hugh came out of
his office the station platform was deserted again. In the grass across
the tracks and beside the ghostly looking old factory, crickets sang. Tom
Wilder, the Bidwell hack driver, had got a traveling man off the train and
the dust left by the heels of his team still hung in the air over Turner's
Pike. From the darkness that brooded over the trees that grew along the
creek beyond the factory came the hoarse croak of frogs. On Turner's Pike a
half dozen Bidwell young men accompanied by as many town girls walked along
the path beside the road under the trees. They had come to the station
to have somewhere to go, had made up a party to come, but now the half
unconscious purpose of their coming was apparent. The party split itself
up into couples and each strove to get as far away as possible from the
others. One of the couples came back along the path toward the station and
went to the pump in George Pike's yard. They stood by the pump, laughing
and pretending to drink out of a tin cup, and when they got again into
the road the others had disappeared. They became silent. Hugh went to the
end of the platform and watched as they walked slowly along. He became
furiously jealous of the young man who put his arm about the waist of his
companion and then, when he turned and saw Hugh staring at him, took it
away again.
The telegraph operator went quickly along the platform until he was out of
range of the young man's eyes, and, when he thought the gathering darkness
would hide him, returned and crept along the path beside the road after
him. Again a hungry desire to enter into the lives of the people about him
took possession of the Missourian. To be a young man dressed in a stiff
white collar, wearing neatly made clothes, and in the evening to walk about
with young girls seemed like getting on the road to happiness. He wanted
to run shouting along the path beside the road until he had overtaken the
young man and woman, to beg them to take him with them, to accept him
as one of themselves, but when the momentary impulse had passed and he
returned to the telegraph office and lighted a lamp, he looked at his
long awkward body and could not conceive of himself as ever by any chance
becoming the thing he wanted to be. Sadness swept over him and his gaunt
face, already cut and marked with deep lines, became longer and more
gaunt. The old boyhood notion, put into his mind by the words of his
foster-mother, Sarah Shepard, that a town and a people could remake him and
erase from his body the marks of what he thought of as his inferior birth,
began to fade. He tried to forget the people about him and turned with
renewed energy to the study of the problems in the books that now lay in
a pile upon his desk. His inclination to dreams, balked by the persistent
holding of his mind to definite things, began to reassert itself in a new
form, and his brain played no more with pictures of clouds and men in
agitated movement but took hold of steel, wood, and iron. Dumb masses of
materials taken out of the earth and the forests were molded by his mind
into fantastic shapes. As he sat in the telegraph office during the day or
walked alone through the streets of Bidwell at night, he saw in fancy a
thousand new machines, formed by his hands and brain, doing the work that
had been done by the hands of men. He had come to Bidwell, not only in
the hope that there he would at last find companionship, but also because
his mind was really aroused and he wanted leisure to begin trying to do
tangible things. When the citizens of Bidwell would not take him into their
town life but left him standing to one side, as the tiny dwelling place
for men called Pickleville where he lived stood aside out from under the
invisible roof of the town, he decided to try to forget men and to express
himself wholly in work.
CHAPTER V
Hugh's first inventive effort stirred the town of Bidwell deeply. When
word of it ran about, the men who had been listening to the talk of Judge
Horace Hanby and whose minds had turned toward the arrival of the new
forward-pushing impulse in American life thought they saw in Hugh the
instrument of its coming to Bidwell. From the day of his coming to live
among them, there had been much curiosity in the stores and houses
regarding the tall, gaunt, slow-speaking stranger at Pickleville. George
Pike had told Birdie Spinks the druggist how Hugh worked all day over
books, and how he made drawings for parts of mysterious machines and left
them on his desk in the telegraph office. Birdie Spinks told others and the
tale grew. When Hugh walked alone in the streets during the evening and
thought no one took account of his presence, hundreds of pairs of curious
eyes followed him about.
A tradition in regard to the telegraph operator began to grow up. The
tradition made Hugh a gigantic figure, one who walked always on a plane
above that on which other men lived. In the imagination of his fellow
citizens of the Ohio town, he went about always thinking great thoughts,
solving mysterious and intricate problems that had to do with the new
mechanical age Judge Hanby talked about to the eager listeners in the
drug-store. An alert, talkative people saw among them one who could not
talk and whose long face was habitually serious, and could not think of him
as having daily to face the same kind of minor problems as themselves.
The Bidwell young man who had come down to the Wheeling station with a
group of other young men, who had seen the evening train go away to the
south, who had met at the station one of the town girls and had, in order
to escape the others and be alone with her, taken her to the pump in George
Pike's yard on the pretense of wanting a drink, walked away with her into
the darkness of the summer evening with his mind fixed on Hugh. The young
man's name was Ed Hall and he was apprentice to Ben Peeler, the carpenter
who had sent his son to Cleveland to a technical school. He wanted to marry
the girl he had met at the station and did not see how he could manage it
on his salary as a carpenter's apprentice. When he looked back and saw Hugh
standing on the station platform, he took the arm he had put around the
girl's waist quickly away and began to talk. "I'll tell you what," he said
earnestly, "if things don't pretty soon get on the stir around here I'm
going to get out. I'll go over by Gibsonburg and get a job in the oil
fields, that's what I'll do. I got to have more money." He sighed heavily
and looked over the girl's head into the darkness. "They say that telegraph
fellow back there at the station is up to something," he ventured. "It's
all the talk. Birdie Spinks says he is an inventor; says George Pike told
him; says he is working all the time on new inventions to do things by
machinery; that his passing off as a telegraph operator is only a bluff.
Some think maybe he was sent here to see about starting a factory to make
one of his inventions, sent by rich men maybe in Cleveland or some other
place. Everybody says they'll bet there'll be factories here in Bidwell
before very long now. I wish I knew. I don't want to go away if I don't
have to, but I got to have more money. Ben Peeler won't never give me a
raise so I can get married or nothing. I wish I knew that fellow back there
so I could ask him what's up. They say he's smart. I suppose he wouldn't
tell me nothing. I wish I was smart enough to invent something and maybe
get rich. I wish I was the kind of fellow they say he is."
Ed Hall again put his arm about the girl's waist and walked away. He forgot
Hugh and thought of himself and of how he wanted to marry the girl whose
young body nestled close to his own--wanted her to be utterly his. For
a few hours he passed out of Hugh's growing sphere of influence on the
collective thought of the town, and lost himself in the immediate
deliciousness of kisses.
And as he passed out of Hugh's influence others came in. On Main Street in
the evening every one speculated on the Missourian's purpose in coming to
Bidwell. The forty dollars a month paid him by the Wheeling railroad could
not have tempted such a man. They were sure of that. Steve Hunter the
jeweler's son had returned to town from a course in a business college at
Buffalo, New York, and hearing the talk became interested. Steve had in him
the making of a live man of affairs, and he decided to investigate. It was
not, however, Steve's method to go at things directly, and he was impressed
by the notion, then abroad in Bidwell, that Hugh had been sent to town by
some one, perhaps by a group of capitalists who intended to start factories
there.
Steve thought he would go easy. In Buffalo, where he had gone to the
business college, he had met a girl whose father, E. P. Horn, owned a soap
factory; had become acquainted with her at church and had been introduced
to her father. The soap maker, an assertive positive man who manufactured
a product called Horn's Household Friend Soap, had his own notion of what
a young man should be and how he should make his way in the world, and had
taken pleasure in talking to Steve. He told the Bidwell jeweler's son of
how he had started his own factory with but little money and had succeeded
and gave Steve many practical hints on the organization of companies. He
talked a great deal of a thing called "control." "When you get ready to
start for yourself keep that in mind," he said. "You can sell stock and
borrow money at the bank, all you can get, but don't give up control. Hang
on to that. That's the way I made my success. I always kept the control."
Steve wanted to marry Ernestine Horn, but felt that he should show what he
could do as a business man before he attempted to thrust himself into so
wealthy and prominent a family. When he returned to his own town and heard
the talk regarding Hugh McVey and his inventive genius, he remembered the
soap maker's words regarding control, and repeated them to himself. One
evening he walked along Turner's Pike and stood in the darkness by the old
pickle factory. He saw Hugh at work under a lamp in the telegraph office
and was impressed. "I'll lay low and see what he's up to," he told himself.
"If he's got an invention, I'll get up a company. I'll get money in and
I'll start a factory. The people here'll tumble over each other to get into
a thing like that. I don't believe any one sent him here. I'll bet he's
just an inventor. That kind always are queer. I'll keep my mouth shut and
watch my chance. If there is anything starts, I'll start it and I'll get
into control, that's what I'll do, I'll get into control."
* * * * *
In the country stretching away north beyond the fringe of small berry farms
lying directly about town, were other and larger farms. The land that made
up these larger farms was also rich and raised big crops. Great stretches
of it were planted to cabbage for which a market had been built up in
Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati. Bidwell was often in derision called
Cabbageville by the citizens of nearby towns. One of the largest of the
cabbage farms belonged to a man named Ezra French, and was situated on
Turner's Pike, two miles from town and a mile beyond the Wheeling station.
On spring evenings when it was dark and silent about the station and when
the air was heavy with the smell of new growth and of land fresh-turned by
the plow, Hugh got out of his chair in the telegraph office and walked in
the soft darkness. He went along Turner's Pike to town, saw groups of men
standing on the sidewalks before the stores and young girls walking arm
in arm along the street, and then came back to the silent station. Into
his long and habitually cold body the warmth of desire began to creep.
The spring rains came and soft winds blew down from the hill country to
the south. One evening when the moon shone he went around the old pickle
factory to where the creek went chattering under leaning willow trees, and
as he stood in the heavy shadows by the factory wall, tried to imagine
himself as one who had become suddenly clean-limbed, graceful, and agile. A
bush grew beside the stream near the factory and he took hold of it with
his powerful hands and tore it out by the roots. For a moment the strength
in his shoulders and arms gave him an intense masculine satisfaction. He
thought of how powerfully he could hold the body of a woman against his
body and the spark of the fires of spring that had touched him became a
flame. He felt new-made and tried to leap lightly and gracefully across the
stream, but stumbled and fell in the water. Later he went soberly back to
the station and tried again to lose himself in the study of the problems he
had found in his books.
The Ezra French farm lay beside Turner's Pike a mile north of the Wheeling
station and contained two hundred acres of land of which a large part was
planted to cabbages. It was a profitable crop to raise and required no more
care than corn, but the planting was a terrible task. Thousands of plants
that had been raised from seeds planted in a seed-bed back of the barn had
to be laboriously transplanted. The plants were tender and it was necessary
to handle them carefully. The planter crawled slowly and painfully along,
and from the road looked like a wounded beast striving to make his way to
a hole in a distant wood. He crawled forward a little and then stopped and
hunched himself up into a ball-like mass. Taking the plant, dropped on the
ground by one of the plant droppers, he made a hole in the soft ground with
a small three-cornered hoe, and with his hands packed the earth about the
plant roots. Then he crawled on again.
Ezra the cabbage farmer had come west from one of the New England states
and had grown comfortably wealthy, but he would not employ extra labor for
the plant setting and the work was done by his sons and daughters. He was a
short, bearded man whose leg had been broken in his youth by a fall from
the loft of a barn. As it had not mended properly he could do little work
and limped painfully about. To the men of Bidwell he was known as something
of a wit, and in the winter he went to town every afternoon to stand in the
stores and tell the Rabelaisian stories for which he was famous; but when
spring came he became restlessly active, and in his own house and on the
farm, became a tyrant. During the time of the cabbage setting he drove his
sons and daughters like slaves. When in the evening the moon came up, he
made them go back to the fields immediately after supper and work until
midnight. They went in sullen silence, the girls to limp slowly along
dropping the plants out of baskets carried on their arms, and the boys to
crawl after them and set the plants. In the half darkness the little group
of humans went slowly up and down the long fields. Ezra hitched a horse to
a wagon and brought the plants from the seed-bed behind the barn. He went
here and there swearing and protesting against every delay in the work.
When his wife, a tired little old woman, had finished the evening's work
in the house, he made her come also to the fields. "Come, come," he said,
sharply, "we need every pair of hands we can get." Although he had several
thousand dollars in the Bidwell bank and owned mortgages on two or three
neighboring farms, Ezra was afraid of poverty, and to keep his family at
work pretended to be upon the point of losing all his possessions. "Now is
our chance to save ourselves," he declared. "We must get in a big crop. If
we do not work hard now we'll starve." When in the field his sons found
themselves unable to crawl longer without resting, and stood up to stretch
their tired bodies, he stood by the fence at the field's edge and swore.
"Well, look at the mouths I have to feed, you lazies!" he shouted. "Keep
at the work. Don't be idling around. In two weeks it'll be too late for
planting and then you can rest. Now every plant we set will help to save us
from ruin. Keep at the job. Don't be idling around."
In the spring of his second year in Bidwell, Hugh went often in the evening
to watch the plant setters at work in the moonlight on the French farm. He
did not make his presence known but hid himself in a fence corner behind
bushes and watched the workers. As he saw the stooped misshapen figures
crawling slowly along and heard the words of the old man driving them like
cattle, his heart was deeply touched and he wanted to protest. In the dim
light the slowly moving figures of women appeared, and after them came the
crouched crawling men. They came down the long row toward him, wriggling
into his line of sight like grotesquely misshapen animals driven by some
god of the night to the performance of a terrible task. An arm went up. It
came down again swiftly. The three-cornered hoe sank into the ground. The
slow rhythm of the crawler was broken. He reached with his disengaged hand
for the plant that lay on the ground before him and lowered it into the
hole the hoe had made. With his fingers he packed the earth about the roots
of the plant and then again began the slow crawl forward. There were four
of the French boys and the two older ones worked in silence. The younger
boys complained. The three girls and their mother, who were attending to
the plant dropping, came to the end of the row and turning, went away into
the darkness. "I'm going to quit this slavery," one of the younger boys
said. "I'll get a job over in town. I hope it's true what they say, that
factories are coming."
The four young men came to the end of the row and, as Ezra was not in
sight, stood a moment by the fence near where Hugh was concealed. "I'd
rather be a horse or a cow than what I am," the complaining voice went on.
"What's the good being alive if you have to work like this?"
For a moment as he listened to the voices of the complaining workers, Hugh
wanted to go to them and ask them to let him share in their labor. Then
another thought came. The crawling figures came sharply into his line of
vision. He no longer heard the voice of the youngest of the French boys
that seemed to come out of the ground. The machine-like swing of the bodies
of the plant setters suggested vaguely to his mind the possibility of
building a machine that would do the work they were doing. His mind took
eager hold of that thought and he was relieved. There had been something in
the crawling figures and in the moonlight out of which the voices came that
had begun to awaken in his mind the fluttering, dreamy state in which he
had spent so much of his boyhood. To think of the possibility of building
a plant-setting machine was safer. It fitted into what Sarah Shepard had
so often told him was the safe way of life. As he went back through the
darkness to the railroad station, he thought about the matter and decided
that to become an inventor would be the sure way of placing his feet at
last upon the path of progress he was trying to find.
Hugh became absorbed in the notion of inventing a machine that would do the
work he had seen the men doing in the field. All day he thought about it.
The notion once fixed in his mind gave him something tangible to work upon.
In the study of mechanics, taken up in a purely amateur spirit, he had
not gone far enough to feel himself capable of undertaking the actual
construction of such a machine, but thought the difficulty might be
overcome by patience and by experimenting with combinations of wheels,
gears and levers whittled out of pieces of wood. From Hunter's Jewelry
Store he got a cheap clock and spent days taking it apart and putting it
together again. He dropped the doing of mathematical problems and sent away
for books describing the construction of machines. Already the flood of new
inventions, that was so completely to change the methods of cultivating the
soil in America, had begun to spread over the country, and many new and
strange kinds of agricultural implements arrived at the Bidwell freight
house of the Wheeling railroad. There Hugh saw a harvesting machine
for cutting grain, a mowing machine for cutting hay and a long-nosed
strange-looking implement that was intended to root potatoes out of the
ground very much after the method pursued by energetic pigs. He studied
these carefully. For a time his mind turned away from the hunger for human
contact and he was content to remain an isolated figure, absorbed in the
workings of his own awakening mind.
An absurd and amusing thing happened. After the impulse to try to invent a
plant-setting machine came to him, he went every evening to conceal himself
in the fence corner and watch the French family at their labors. Absorbed
in watching the mechanical movements of the men who crawled across the
fields in the moonlight, he forgot they were human. After he had watched
them crawl into sight, turn at the end of the rows, and crawl away again
into the hazy light that had reminded him of the dim distances of his own
Mississippi River country, he was seized with a desire to crawl after
them and to try to imitate their movements. Certain intricate mechanical
problems, that had already come into his mind in connection with the
proposed machine, he thought could be better understood if he could get
the movements necessary to plant setting into his own body. His lips began
to mutter words and getting out of the fence corner where he had been
concealed he began to crawl across the field behind the French boys. "The
down stroke will go so," he muttered, and bringing up his arm swung it
above his head. His fist descended into the soft ground. He had forgotten
the rows of new set plants and crawled directly over them, crushing them
into the soft ground. He stopped crawling and waved his arm about. He tried
to relate his arms to the mechanical arms of the machine that was being
created in his mind. Holding one arm stiffly in front of him he moved it up
and down. "The stroke will be shorter than that. The machine must be built
close to the ground. The wheels and the horses will travel in paths between
the rows. The wheels must be broad to provide traction. I will gear from
the wheels to get power for the operation of the mechanism," he said aloud.
Hugh arose and stood in the moonlight in the cabbage field, his arms still
going stiffly up and down. The great length of his figure and his arms was
accentuated by the wavering uncertain light. The laborers, aware of some
strange presence, sprang to their feet and stood listening and looking.
Hugh advanced toward them, still muttering words and waving his arms.
Terror took hold of the workers. One of the woman plant droppers screamed
and ran away across the field, and the others ran crying at her heels.
"Don't do it. Go away," the older of the French boys shouted, and then he
with his brothers also ran.
Hearing the voices Hugh stopped and stared about. The field was empty.
Again he lost himself in his mechanical calculations. He went back along
the road to the Wheeling station and to the telegraph office where he
worked half the night on a rude drawing he was trying to make of the parts
of his plant setting machine, oblivious to the fact that he had created a
myth that would run through the whole countryside. The French boys and
their sisters stoutly declared that a ghost had come into the cabbage
fields and had threatened them with death if they did not go away and
quit working at night. In a trembling voice their mother backed up their
assertion. Ezra French, who had not seen the apparition and did not believe
the tale, scented a revolution. He swore. He threatened the entire family
with starvation. He declared that a lie had been invented to deceive and
betray him.
However, the work at night in the cabbage fields on the French farm was at
an end. The story was told in the town of Bidwell, and as the entire French
family except Ezra swore to its truth, was generally believed. Tom Foresby,
an old citizen who was a spiritualist, claimed to have heard his father say
that there had been in early days an Indian burying-ground on the Turner
Pike.
The cabbage field on the French farm became locally famous. Within a year
two other men declared they had seen the figure of a gigantic Indian
dancing and singing a funeral dirge in the moonlight. Farmer boys, who
had been for an evening in town and were returning late at night to
lonely farmhouses, whipped their horses into a run when they came to the
farm. When it was far behind them they breathed more freely. Although he
continued to swear and threaten, Ezra never again succeeded in getting his
family into the fields at night. In Bidwell he declared that the story of
the ghost invented by his lazy sons and daughters had ruined his chance for
making a decent living out of his farm.
CHAPTER VI
Steve Hunter decided that it was time something was done to wake up his
native town. The call of the spring wind awoke something in him as in Hugh.
It came up from the south bringing rain followed by warm fair days. Robins
hopped about on the lawns before the houses on the residence streets
of Bidwell, and the air was again sweet with the pregnant sweetness of
new-plowed ground. Like Hugh, Steve walked about alone through the dark,
dimly lighted residence streets during the spring evenings, but he did not
try awkwardly to leap over creeks in the darkness or pull bushes out of
the ground, nor did he waste his time dreaming of being physically young,
clean-limbed and beautiful.
Before the coming of his great achievements in the industrial field, Steve
had not been highly regarded in his home town. He had been a noisy boastful
youth and had been spoiled by his father. When he was twelve years old what
were called safety bicycles first came into use and for a long time he
owned the only one in town. In the evening he rode it up and down Main
Street, frightening the horses and arousing the envy of the town boys. He
learned to ride without putting his hands on the handle-bars and the other
boys began to call him Smarty Hunter and later, because he wore a stiff,
white collar that folded down over his shoulders, they gave him a girl's
name. "Hello, Susan," they shouted, "don't fall and muss your clothes."
In the spring that marked the beginning of his great industrial adventure,
Steve was stirred by the soft spring winds into dreaming his own kind of
dreams. As he walked about through the streets, avoiding the other young
men and women, he remembered Ernestine, the daughter of the Buffalo soap
maker, and thought a great deal about the magnificence of the big stone
house in which she lived with her father. His body ached for her, but that
was a matter he felt could be managed. How he could achieve a financial
position that would make it possible for him to ask for her hand was a more
difficult problem. Since he had come back from the business college to live
in his home town, he had secretly, and at the cost of two new five dollar
dresses, arranged a physical alliance with a girl named Louise Trucker
whose father was a farm laborer, and that left his mind free for other
things. He intended to become a manufacturer, the first one in Bidwell,
to make himself a leader in the new movement that was sweeping over the
country. He had thought out what he wanted to do and it only remained to
find something for him to manufacture to put his plans through. First of
all he had selected with great care certain men he intended to ask to go in
with him. There was John Clark the banker, his own father, E. H. Hunter the
town jeweler, Thomas Butterworth the rich farmer, and young Gordon Hart,
who had a job as assistant cashier in the bank. For a month he had been
dropping hints to these men of something mysterious and important about
to happen. With the exception of his father who had infinite faith in the
shrewdness and ability of his son, the men he wanted to impress were only
amused. One day Thomas Butterworth went into the bank and stood talking the
matter over with John Clark. "The young squirt was always a Smart-Aleck
and a blow-hard," he said. "What's he up to now? What's he nudging and
whispering about?"
As he walked in the main street of Bidwell, Steve began to acquire that
air of superiority that later made him so respected and feared. He hurried
along with a peculiarly intense absorbed look in his eyes. He saw his
fellow townsmen as through a haze, and sometimes did not see them at all.
As he went along he took papers from his pocket, read them hurriedly, and
then quickly put them away again. When he did speak--perhaps to a man who
had known him from boyhood--there was in his manner something gracious to
the edge of condescension. One morning in March he met Zebe Wilson the town
shoemaker on the sidewalk before the post-office. Steve stopped and smiled.
"Well, good morning, Mr. Wilson," he said, "and how is the quality of
leather you are getting from the tanneries now?"
Word regarding this strange salutation ran about among the merchants and
artisans. "What's he up to now?" they asked each other. "Mr. Wilson,
indeed! Now what's wrong between that young squirt and Zebe Wilson?"
In the afternoon, four clerks from the Main Street stores and Ed Hall the
carpenter's apprentice, who had a half day off because of rain, decided to
investigate. One by one they went along Hamilton Street to Zebe Wilson's
shop and stepped inside to repeat Steve Hunter's salutation. "Well, good
afternoon, Mr. Wilson," they said, "and how is the quality of leather you
are getting from the tanneries now?" Ed Hall, the last of the five who went
into the shop to repeat the formal and polite inquiry, barely escaped with
his life. Zebe Wilson threw a shoemaker's hammer at him and it went through
the glass in the upper part of the shop door.
Once when Tom Butterworth and John Clark the banker were talking of the new
air of importance he was assuming, and half indignantly speculated on what
he meant by his whispered suggestion of something significant about to
happen, Steve came along Main Street past the front door of the bank. John
Clark called him in. The three men confronted each other and the jeweler's
son sensed the fact that the banker and the rich farmer were amused by
his pretensions. At once he proved himself to be what all Bidwell later
acknowledged him to be, a man who could handle men and affairs. Having at
that time nothing to support his pretensions he decided to put up a bluff.
With a wave of his hand and an air of knowing just what he was about, he
led the two men into the back room of the bank and shut the door leading
into the large room to which the general public was admitted. "You would
have thought he owned the place," John Clark afterward said with a note of
admiration in his voice to young Gordon Hart when he described what took
place in the back room.
Steve plunged at once into what he had to say to the two solid moneyed
citizens of his town. "Well, now, look here, you two," he began earnestly.
"I'm going to tell you something, but you got to keep still." He went to
the window that looked out upon an alleyway and glanced about as though
fearful of being overheard, then sat down in the chair usually occupied by
John Clark on the rare occasions when the directors of the Bidwell bank
held a meeting. Steve looked over the heads of the two men who in spite
of themselves were beginning to be impressed. "Well," he began, "there is
a fellow out at Pickleville. You have maybe heard things said about him.
He's telegraph operator out there. Perhaps you have heard how he is always
making drawings of parts of machines. I guess everybody in town has been
wondering what he's up to."
Steve looked at the two men and then got nervously out of the chair and
walked about the room. "That fellow is my man. I put him there," he
declared. "I didn't want to tell any one yet."
The two men nodded and Steve became lost in the notion created in his
fancy. It did not occur to him that what he had just said was untrue. He
began to scold the two men. "Well, I suppose I'm on the wrong track there,"
he said. "My man has made an invention that will bring millions in profits
to those who get into it. In Cleveland and Buffalo I'm already in touch
with big bankers. There's to be a big factory built, but you see yourself
how it is, here I'm at home. I was raised as a boy here."