Inside the drug store by the empty stove, Judge Hanby talked persistently of the time when factories would come. He seemed to those who listened a sort of John the Baptist crying out of the coming of the new day. One evening in May of that year, when a goodly crowd was assembled, Steve Hunter came in and bought a cigar. Every one became silent. Birdie Spinks was for some mysterious reason a little upset. In the store something happened that, had there been some one there to record it, might later have been remembered as the moment that marked the coming of the new age to Bidwell. The druggist, after he had handed out the cigar, looked at the young man whose name had so suddenly come upon every one's lips and whom he had known from babyhood, and then addressed him as no young man of his age had ever before been addressed by an older citizen of the town. "Well, good evening, Mr. Hunter," he said respectfully. "And how do you find yourself this evening?"

To the men who met him in the bank, Steve described the plant-setting machine and the work it was intended to do. "It's the most perfect thing of its kind I've ever seen," he said with the air of one who has spent his life as an expert examiner of machinery. Then, to the amazement of every one, he produced sheets covered with figures estimating the cost of manufacturing the machine. To the men present it seemed as though the question as to the practicability of the machine had already been settled. The sheets covered with figures made the actual beginning of manufacturing seem near at hand. Without raising his voice and quite as a matter of course, Steve proposed that the men present subscribe each three thousand dollars to the stock of a promotion company, the money to be used to perfect the machine and put it actually to work in the fields, while a larger company for the building of a factory was being organized. For the three thousand dollars each of the men would receive later six thousand dollars in stock in the larger company. They would make one hundred per cent. on their first investment. As for himself he owned the invention and it was very valuable. He had already received many offers from other men in other places. He wanted to stick to his own town and to the men who had known him since he was a boy. He would retain a controlling interest in the larger company and that would enable him to take care of his friends. John Clark he proposed to make treasurer of the promotion company. Every one could see he would be the right man. Gordon Hart should be manager. Tom Butterworth could, if he could find time to give it, help him in the actual organization of the larger company. He did not propose to do anything in a small way. Much stock would have to be sold to farmers, as well as to townspeople, and he could see no reason why a certain commission for the selling of stock should not be paid.

The four men came out of the back room of the bank just as the storm that had all day been threatening broke on Main Street. They stood together by the front window and watched the people skurry along past the stores homeward-bound from the circus. Farmers jumping into their wagons started their horses away on the trot. The whole street was populous with people shouting and running. To an observing person standing at the bank window, Bidwell, Ohio, might have seemed no longer a quiet town filled with people who lived quiet lives and thought quiet thoughts, but a tiny section of some giant modern city. The sky was extraordinarily black as from the smoke of a mill. The hurrying people might have been workmen escaping from the mill at the end of the day. Clouds of dust swept through the street. Steve Hunter's imagination was aroused. For some reason the black clouds of dust and the running people gave him a tremendous sense of power. It almost seemed to him that he had filled the sky with clouds and that something latent in him had startled the people. He was anxious to get away from the men who had just agreed to join him in his first great industrial adventure. He felt that they were after all mere puppets, creatures he could use, men who were being swept along by him as the people running along the streets were being swept along by the storm. He and the storm were in a way akin to each other. He had an impulse to be alone with the storm, to walk dignified and upright in the face of it as he felt that in the future he would walk dignified and upright in the face of men.

Steve went out of the bank and into the street. The men inside shouted at him, telling him he would get wet, but he paid no attention to their warning. When he had gone and when his father had run quickly across the street to his jewelry store, the three men who were left in the bank looked at each other and laughed. Like the loiterers before Birdie Spinks' drug-store, they wanted to belittle him and had an inclination to begin calling him names; but for some reason they could not do it. Something had happened to them. They looked at each other with a question in their eyes. Each man waited for the others to speak. "Well, whatever happens we can't lose much of anything," John Clark finally observed.

And over the bridge and out into Turner's Pike walked Steve Hunter, the embryo industrial magnate. Across the great stretches of fields that lay beside the road the wind ran furiously, tearing leaves off trees, carrying great volumes of dust before it. The hurrying black clouds in the sky were, he fancied, like clouds of smoke pouring out of the chimneys of factories owned by himself. In fancy also he saw his town become a city, bathed in the smoke of his enterprises. As he looked abroad over the fields swept by the storm of wind, he realized that the road along which he walked would in time become a city street. "Pretty soon I'll get an option on this land," he said meditatively. An exalted mood took possession of him and when he got to Pickleville he did not go into the shop where Hugh and Allie Mulberry were at work, but turning, walked back toward town in the mud and the driving rain.

It was a time when Steve wanted to be by himself, to feel himself the one great man of the community. He had intended to go into the old pickle factory and escape the rain, but when he got to the railroad tracks, had turned back because he realized suddenly that in the presence of the silent, intent inventor he had never been able to feel big. He wanted to feel big on that evening and so, unmindful of the rain and of his hat, that was caught up by the wind and blown away into a field, he went along the deserted road thinking great thoughts. At a place where there were no houses he stopped for a moment and lifted his tiny hands to the skies. "I'm a man. I tell you what, I'm a man. Whatever any one says, I tell you what, I'm a man," he shouted into the void.



CHAPTER VII

Modern men and women who live in industrial cities are like mice that have come out of the fields to live in houses that do not belong to them. They live within the dark walls of the houses where only a dim light penetrates, and so many have come that they grow thin and haggard with the constant toil of getting food and warmth. Behind the walls the mice scamper about in droves, and there is much squealing and chattering. Now and then a bold mouse stands upon his hind legs and addresses the others. He declares he will force his way through the walls and conquer the gods who have built the house. "I will kill them," he declares. "The mice shall rule. You shall live in the light and the warmth. There shall be food for all and no one shall go hungry."

The little mice, gathered in the darkness out of sight in the great houses, squeal with delight. After a time when nothing happens they become sad and depressed. Their minds go back to the time when they lived in the fields, but they do not go out of the walls of the houses, because long living in droves has made them afraid of the silence of long nights and the emptiness of skies. In the houses giant children are being reared. When the children fight and scream in the houses and in the streets, the dark spaces between the walls rumble with strange and appalling noises.

The mice are terribly afraid. Now and then a single mouse for a moment escapes the general fear. A mood comes over such a one and a light comes into his eyes. When the noises run through the houses he makes up stories about them. "The horses of the sun are hauling wagon loads of days over the tops of trees," he says and looks quickly about to see if he has been heard. When he discovers a female mouse looking at him he runs away with a flip of his tail and the female follows. While other mice are repeating his saying and getting some little comfort from it, he and the female mouse find a warm dark corner and lie close together. It is because of them that mice continue to be born to dwell within the walls of the houses.

When the first small model of Hugh McVey's plant-setting machine had been whittled out by the half-wit Allie Mulberry, it replaced the famous ship, floating in the bottle, that for two or three years had been lying in the window of Hunter's jewelry store. Allie was inordinately proud of the new specimen of his handiwork. As he worked under Hugh's directions at a bench in a corner of the deserted pickle factory, he was like a strange dog that has at last found a master. He paid no attention to Steve Hunter who, with the air of one bearing in his breast some gigantic secret, came in and went out at the door twenty times a day, but kept his eyes on the silent Hugh who sat at a desk and made drawings on sheets of paper. Allie tried valiantly to follow the instructions given him and to understand what his master was trying to do, and Hugh, finding himself unembarrassed by the presence of the half-wit, sometimes spent hours trying to explain the workings of some intricate part of the proposed machine. Hugh made each part crudely out of great pieces of board and Allie reproduced the part in miniature. Intelligence began to come into the eyes of the man who all his life had whittled meaningless wooden chains, baskets formed out of peach stones, and ships intended to float in bottles. Love and understanding began a little to do for him what words could not have done. One day when a part Hugh had fashioned would not work the half-wit himself made the model of a part that worked perfectly. When Hugh incorporated it in the machine, he was so happy that he could not sit still, and walked up and down cooing with delight.

When the model of the machine appeared in the jeweler's window, a fever of excitement took hold of the minds of the people. Every one declared himself either for or against it. Something like a revolution took place. Parties were formed. Men who had no interest in the success of the invention, and in the nature of things could not have, were ready to fight any one who dared to doubt its success. Among the farmers who drove into town to see the new wonder were many who said the machine would not, could not, work. "It isn't practical," they said. Going off by themselves and forming groups, they whispered warnings. A hundred objections sprang to their lips. "See all the little wheels and cogs the thing has," they said. "You see it won't work. You take now in a field where there are stones and old tree roots, maybe, sticking in the ground. There you'll see. Fools'll buy the machine, yes. They'll spend their money. They'll put in plants. The plants'll die. The money'll be wasted. There'll be no crop." Old men, who had been cabbage farmers in the country north of Bidwell all their lives, and whose bodies were all twisted out of shape by the terrible labor of the cabbage fields, came hobbling into town to look at the model of the new machine. Their opinions were anxiously sought by the merchant, the carpenter, the artisan, the doctor—by all the townspeople. Almost without exception, they shook their heads in doubt. Standing on the sidewalk before the jeweler's window, they stared at the machine and then, turning to the crowd that had gathered about, they shook their heads in doubt. "Huh," they exclaimed, "a thing of wheels and cogs, eh? Well, so young Hunter expects that thing to take the place of a man. He's a fool. I always said that boy was a fool." The merchants and townspeople, their ardor a little dampened by the adverse decision of the men who knew plant-setting, went off by themselves. They went into Birdie Spinks' drugstore, but did not listen to the talk of Judge Hanby. "If the machine works, the town'll wake up," some one declared. "It means factories, new people coming in, houses to be built, goods to be bought." Visions of suddenly acquired wealth began to float in their minds. Young Ed Hall, apprentice to Ben Peeler the carpenter, grew angry. "Hell," he exclaimed, "why listen to a lot of damned old calamity howlers? It's the town's duty to get out and plug for that machine. We got to wake up here. We got to forget what we used to think about Steve Hunter. Anyway, he saw a chance, didn't he? and he took it. I wish I was him. I only wish I was him. And what about that fellow we thought was maybe just a telegraph operator? He fooled us all slick, now didn't he? I tell you we ought to be proud to have such men as him and Steve Hunter living in Bidwell. That's what I say. I tell you it's the town's duty to get out and plug for them and for that machine. If we don't, I know what'll happen. Steve Hunter's a live one. I been thinking maybe he was. He'll take that invention and that inventor of his to some other town or to a city. That's what he'll do. Damn it, I tell you we got to get out and back them fellows up. That's what I say."

On the whole the town of Bidwell agreed with young Hall. The excitement did not die, but grew every day more intense. Steve Hunter had a carpenter come to his father's store and build in the show window facing Main Street, a long shallow box formed in the shape of a field. This he filled with pulverized earth and then by an arrangement of strings and pulleys connected with a clockwork device the machine was pulled across the field. In a receptacle at the top of the machine had been placed some dozens of tiny plants no larger than pins. When the clockwork was started and the strings pulled to imitate applied horse power, the machine crept slowly forward, an arm came down and made a hole in the ground, the plant dropped into the hole and spoon-like hands appeared and packed the earth about the plant roots. At the top of the machine there was a tank filled with water, and when the plant was set, a portion of water, nicely calculated as to quantity, ran down a pipe and was deposited at the plant roots.

Evening after evening the machine crawled forward across the tiny field, setting the plants in perfect order. Steve Hunter busied himself with it; he did nothing else; and rumors of a great company to be formed in Bidwell to manufacture the device were whispered about. Every evening a new tale was told. Steve went to Cleveland for a day and it was said that Bidwell was to lose its chance, that big moneyed men had induced Steve to take his factory project to the city. Hearing Ed Hall berate a farmer who doubted the practicability of the machine, Steve took him aside and talked to him. "We're going to need live young men who know how to handle other men for jobs as superintendent and things like that," he said. "I make no promises. I only want to tell you that I like live young fellows who can see the hole in a bushel basket. I like that kind. I like to see them get up in the world."

Steve heard the farmers continually expressing their skepticism about making the plants that had been set by the machine grow into maturity, and had the carpenter build another tiny field in a side window of the store. He had the machine moved and plants set in the new field. He let these grow. When some of the plants showed signs of dying he came secretly at night and replaced them with sturdier shoots so that the miniature field showed always a brave, vigorous front to the world.

Bidwell became convinced that the most rigorous of all forms of human labor practiced by its people was at an end. Steve made and had hung in the store window a large sheet showing the relative cost of planting an acre of cabbage with the machine, and by what was already called "the old way," by hand. Then he formally announced that a stock company would be formed in Bidwell and that every one would have a chance to get into it. He printed an article in the weekly paper in which he said that many offers had come to him to take his project to the city or to other and larger towns. "Mr. McVey, the celebrated inventor, and I both want to stick to our own people," he said, regardless of the fact that Hugh knew nothing of the article and had never been taken into the lives of the people addressed. A day was set for the beginning of the taking of stock subscriptions, and in private conversations Steve whispered of huge profits to be made. The matter was talked over in every household and plans were made for raising money to buy stock. John Clark agreed to lend a certain percentage on the value of the town property and Steve secured a long-time option on all the land facing Turner's Pike clear down to Pickleville. When the town heard of this it was filled with wonder. "Gee," the loiterers before the store exclaimed, "old Bidwell is going to grow up. Now look at that, will you? There are going to be houses clear down to Pickleville." Hugh went to Cleveland to see about having one of his new machines made in steel and wood and in a size that would permit its actual use in the field. He returned, a hero in the town's eyes. His silence made it possible for the people, who could not entirely forget their former lack of faith in Steve, to let their minds take hold of something they thought was truly heroic.

In the evening, after going again to see the machine in the window of the jewelry store, crowds of young and old men wandered down along Turner's Pike to the Wheeling Station where a new man had come to replace Hugh. They hardly saw the evening train when it came in. Like devotees before a shrine they gazed with something like worship in their eyes at the old pickle factory, and when by chance Hugh came among them, unconscious of the sensation he was creating, they became embarrassed as he was always embarrassed by their presence. Every one dreamed of becoming suddenly rich by the power of the man's mind. They thought of him as thinking always great thoughts. To be sure, Steve Hunter might be more than half bluff and blow and pretense, but there was no bluff and blow about Hugh. He didn't waste his time in words. He thought, and out of his thought sprang almost unbelievable wonders.

In every part of the town of Bidwell, the new impulse toward progress was felt. Old men, who had become settled in their ways and who had begun to pass their days in a sort of sleepy submission to the idea of the gradual passing away of their lives, awoke and went into Main Street in the evening to argue with skeptical farmers. Beside Ed Hall, who had become a Demosthenes on the subject of progress and the duty of the town to awake and stick to Steve Hunter and the machine, a dozen other men held forth on the street corners. Oratorical ability awoke in the most unexpected places. Rumors flew from lip to lip. It was said that within a year Bidwell was to have a brick factory covering acres of ground, that there would be paved streets and electric lights.

Oddly enough the most persistent decrier of the new spirit in Bidwell was the man who, if the machine turned out to be a success, would profit most from its use. Ezra French, the profane, refused to be convinced. When pressed by Ed Hall, Dr. Robinson, and other enthusiasts, he fell back upon the word of that God whose name had been so much upon his lips. The decrier of God became the defender of God. "The thing, you see, can't be done. It ain't all right. Something awful'll happen. The rains won't come and the plants'll dry up and die. It'll be like it was in Egypt in the Bible times," he declared. The old farmer with the twisted leg stood before the crowd in the drug-store and proclaimed the truth of God's word. "Don't it say in the Bible men shall work and labor by the sweat of their brows?" he asked sharply. "Can a machine like that sweat? You know it can't. And it can't do the work either. No, siree. Men've got to do it. That's the way things have been since Cain killed Abel in the Garden of Eden. God intended it so and there can't no telegraph operator or no smart young squirt like Steve Hunter—fellows in a town like this—set themselves up before me to change the workings of God's laws. It can't be done, and if it could be done it would be wicked and ungodly to try. I'll have nothing to do with it. It ain't right. That's what I say and all your smart talk ain't a-going to change me."

It was in the year 1892 that Steve Hunter organized the first industrial enterprise that came to Bidwell. It was called the Bidwell Plant-Setting Machine Company, and in the end it turned out to be a failure. A large factory was built on the river bank facing the New York Central tracks. It is now occupied by an enterprise called the Hunter Bicycle Company and is what in industrial parlance is called a live, going concern.

For two years Hugh worked faithfully trying to perfect the first of his inventions. After the working models of the plant-setter were brought from Cleveland, two trained mechanics were employed to come to Bidwell and work with him. In the old pickle factory an engine was installed and lathes and other tool-making machines were set up. For a long time Steve, John Clark, Tom Butterworth, and the other enthusiastic promoters of the enterprise had no doubt as to the final outcome. Hugh wanted to perfect the machine, had his heart set on doing the job he had set out to do, but he had then and, for that matter, he continued during his whole life to have but little conception of the import in the lives of the people about him of the things he did. Day after day, with two city mechanics and Allie Mulberry to drive the team of horses Steve had provided, he went into a rented field north of the factory. Weak places developed in the complicated mechanism, and new and stronger parts were made. For a time the machine worked perfectly. Then other defects appeared and other parts had to be strengthened and changed. The machine became too heavy to be handled by one team. It would not work when the soil was either too wet or too dry. It worked perfectly in both wet and dry sand but would do nothing in clay. During the second year and when the factory was nearing completion and much machinery had been installed, Hugh went to Steve and told him of what he thought were the limitations of the machine. He was depressed by his failure, but in working with the machine, he felt he had succeeded in educating himself as he never could have done by studying books. Steve decided that the factory should be started and some of the machines made and sold. "You keep the two men you have and don't talk," he said. "The machine may yet turn out to be better than you think. One can never tell. I have made it worth their while to keep still." On the afternoon of the day on which he had his talk with Hugh, Steve called the four men who were associated with him in the promotion of the enterprise into the back room of the bank and told them of the situation. "We're up against something here," he said. "If we let word of the failure of this machine get out, where'll we be? It is a case of the survival of the fittest."

Steve explained his plan to the men in the room. After all, he said, there was no occasion for any of them to get excited. He had taken them into the thing and he proposed to get them out. "I'm that kind of a man," he said pompously. In a way, he declared, he was glad things had turned out as they had. The four men had little actual money invested. They had all tried honestly to do something for the town and he would see to it that everything came out all right. "We'll be honest with every one," he said. "The stock in the company has all been sold. We'll make some of the machines and sell them. If they're failures, as this inventor thinks, it will not be our fault. The plant, you see, will have to be sold cheap. When that times comes we five will have to save ourselves and the future of the town. The machinery we have bought, is, you see, iron and wood working machinery, the very latest kind. It can be used to make some other thing. If the plant-setting machine is a failure we'll simply buy up the plant at a low price and make something else. Perhaps it'll be better for the town to have the entire stock control in our hands. You see we few men have got to run things here. It's going to be on our shoulders to see that labor is employed. A lot of small stock-holders are a nuisance. As man to man I'm going to ask each of you not to sell his stock, but if any one comes to you and asks about its value, I expect you to be loyal to our enterprise. I'll begin looking about for something to replace the plant-setting machine, and when the shop closes we'll start right up again. It isn't every day men get a chance to sell themselves a fine plant full of new machinery as we can do in a year or so now."

Steve went out of the bank and left the four men staring at each other. Then his father got up and went out. The other men, all connected with the bank, arose and wandered out. "Well," said John Clark, somewhat heavily, "he's a smart man. I suppose after all it is up to us to stick with him and with the town. As he says, labor has got to be employed. I can't see that it does a carpenter or a farmer any good to own a little stock in a factory. It only takes their minds off their work. They have foolish dreams of getting rich and don't attend to their own affairs. It would be an actual benefit to the town if a few men owned the factory." The banker lighted a cigar and going to a window stared out into the main street of Bidwell. Already the town had changed. Three new brick buildings were being erected on Main Street within sight of the bank window. Workmen employed in the building of the factory had come to town to live, and many new houses were being built. Everywhere things were astir. The stock of the company had been oversubscribed, and almost every day men came into the bank and spoke of wanting to buy more. Only the day before a farmer had come in with two thousand dollars. The banker's mind began to secrete the poison of his age. "After all, it's men like Steve Hunter, Tom Butterworth, Gordon Hart, and myself that have to take care of things, and to be in shape to do it we have to look out for ourselves," he soliloquized. Again he stared into Main Street. Tom Butterworth went out at the front door. He wanted to be by himself and think his own thoughts. Gordon Hart returned to the empty back room and standing by a window looked out into an alleyway. His thoughts ran in the same channel as those that played through the mind of the bank president. He also thought of men who wanted to buy stock in the company that was doomed to failure. He began to doubt the judgment of Hugh McVey in the matter of failure. "Such fellows are always pessimists," he told himself. From the window at the back of the bank, he could see over the roofs of a row of small sheds and down a residence street to where two new workingmen's houses were being built. His thoughts only differed from the thoughts of John Clark because he was a younger man. "A few men of the younger generation, like Steve and myself will have to take hold of things," he muttered aloud. "We'll have to have money to work with. We'll have to take the responsibility of the ownership of money."

At the front of the bank John Clark puffed at his cigar. He felt like a soldier weighing the chances of battle. Vaguely he thought of himself as a general, a kind of U. S. Grant of industry. The lives and happiness of many people, he told himself, depended on the clear working of his brain. "Well," he thought, "when factories start coming to a town and it begins to grow as this town is growing no man can stop it. The fellow who thinks of individual men, little fellows with their savings invested, who may be hurt by an industrial failure, is just a weakling. Men have to face the duties life brings. The few men who see clearly have to think first of themselves. They have to save themselves in order that they may save others."

* * * * *

Things kept on the stir in Bidwell and the gods of chance played into the hands of Steve Hunter. Hugh invented an apparatus for lifting a loaded coal-car off the railroad tracks, carrying it high up into the air and dumping its contents into a chute. By its use an entire car of coal could be emptied with a roaring rush into the hold of a ship or the engine room of a factory. A model of the new invention was made and a patent secured. Then Steve Hunter carried it off to New York. He received two hundred thousand dollars in cash for it, half of which went to Hugh. Steve's faith in the inventive genius of the Missourian was renewed and strengthened. He looked forward with a feeling almost approaching pleasure to the time when the town would be forced to face the fact that the plant-setting machine was a failure, and the factory with its new machinery would have to be thrown on the market. He knew that his associates in the promotion of the enterprise were secretly selling their stock. One day he went to Cleveland and had a long talk with a banker there. Hugh was at work on a corn-cutting machine and already he had secured an option on it. "Perhaps when the time comes to sell the factory there'll be more than one bidder," he told Ernestine, the soap maker's daughter, who had married him within a month after the sale of the car-unloading device. He grew indignant when he told her of the disloyalty of the two men in the bank, and the rich farmer, Tom Butterworth. "They're selling their shares and letting the small stock-holders lose their money," he declared. "I told 'em not to do it. Now if anything happens to spoil their plans they'll not have me to blame."

Nearly a year had been spent in stirring up the people of Bidwell to the point of becoming investors. Then things began to stir. The ground was broken for the erection of the factory. No one knew of the difficulties that had been encountered in attempting to perfect the machine and word was passed about that in actual tests in the fields it had proven itself entirely practical. The skeptical farmers who came into town on Saturdays were laughed at by the town enthusiasts. A field, that had been planted during one of the brief periods when the machine finding ideal soil conditions had worked perfectly, was left to grow. As when he operated the tiny model in the store window, Steve took no chances. He engaged Ed Hall to go at night and replace the plants that did not live. "It's fair enough," he explained to Ed. "A hundred things can cause the plants to die, but if they die it'll be blamed on the machine. What will become of the town if we don't believe in the thing we're going to manufacture here?"

The crowds of people, who in the evenings walked out along Turner's Pike to look at the field with its long rows of sturdy young cabbages, moved restlessly about and talked of the new days. From the field they went along the railroad tracks to the site of the factory. The brick walls began to mount up into the sky. Machinery began to arrive and was housed under temporary sheds against the time when it could be installed. An advance horde of workmen came to town and new faces appeared on Main Street in the evening. The thing that was happening in Bidwell happened in towns all over the Middle West. Out through the coal and iron regions of Pennsylvania, into Ohio and Indiana, and on westward into the States bordering on the Mississippi River, industry crept. Gas and oil were discovered in Ohio and Indiana. Over night, towns grew into cities. A madness took hold of the minds of the people. Villages like Lima and Findlay, Ohio, and like Muncie and Anderson in Indiana, became small cities within a few weeks. To some of these places, so anxious were the people to get to them and to invest their money, excursion trains were run. Town lots that a few weeks before the discovery of oil or gas could have been bought for a few dollars sold for thousands. Wealth seemed to be spurting out of the very earth. On farms in Indiana and Ohio giant gas wells blew the drilling machinery out of the ground, and the fuel so essential to modern industrial development rushed into the open. A wit, standing in the presence of one of the roaring gas wells exclaimed, "Papa, Earth has indigestion; he has gas on his stomach. His face will be covered with pimples."

Having, before the factories came, no market for the gas, the wells were lighted and at night great torches of flame lit the skies. Pipes were laid on the surface of the ground and by a day's work a laborer earned enough to heat his house at tropical heat through an entire winter. Farmers owning oil-producing land went to bed in the evening poor and owing money at the bank, and awoke in the morning rich. They moved into the towns and invested their money in the factories that sprang up everywhere. In one county in southern Michigan, over five hundred patents for woven wire farm fencing were taken out in one year, and almost every patent was a magnet about which a company for the manufacture of fence formed itself. A vast energy seemed to come out of the breast of earth and infect the people. Thousands of the most energetic men of the middle States wore themselves out in forming companies, and when the companies failed, immediately formed others. In the fast-growing towns, men who were engaged in organizing companies representing a capital of millions lived in houses thrown hurriedly together by carpenters who, before the time of the great awakening, were engaged in building barns. It was a time of hideous architecture, a time when thought and learning paused. Without music, without poetry, without beauty in their lives or impulses, a whole people, full of the native energy and strength of lives lived in a new land, rushed pell-mell into a new age. A man in Ohio, who had been a dealer in horses, made a million dollars out of a patent churn he had bought for the price of a farm horse, took his wife to visit Europe and in Paris bought a painting for fifty thousand dollars. In another State of the Middle West, a man who sold patent medicine from door to door through the country began dealing in oil leases, became fabulously rich, bought himself three daily newspapers, and before he had reached the age of thirty-five succeeded in having himself elected Governor of his State. In the glorification of his energy his unfitness as a statesman was forgotten.

In the days before the coming of industry, before the time of the mad awakening, the towns of the Middle West were sleepy places devoted to the practice of the old trades, to agriculture and to merchandising. In the morning the men of the towns went forth to work in the fields or to the practice of the trade of carpentry, horse-shoeing, wagon making, harness repairing, and the making of shoes and clothing. They read books and believed in a God born in the brains of men who came out of a civilization much like their own. On the farms and in the houses in the towns the men and women worked together toward the same ends in life. They lived in small frame houses set on the plains like boxes, but very substantially built. The carpenter who built a farmer's house differentiated it from the barn by putting what he called scroll work up under the eaves and by building at the front a porch with carved posts. After one of the poor little houses had been lived in for a long time, after children had been born and men had died, after men and women had suffered and had moments of joy together in the tiny rooms under the low roofs, a subtle change took place. The houses became almost beautiful in their old humanness. Each of the houses began vaguely to shadow forth the personality of the people who lived within its walls.

In the farmhouses and in the houses on the side streets in the villages, life awoke at dawn. Back of each of the houses there was a barn for the horses and cows, and sheds for pigs and chickens. At daylight a chorus of neighs, squeals, and cries broke the silence. Boys and men came out of the houses. They stood in the open spaces before the barns and stretched their bodies like sleepy animals. The arms extended upward seemed to be supplicating the gods for fair days, and the fair days came. The men and boys went to a pump beside the house and washed their faces and hands in the cold water. In the kitchens there was the smell and sound of the cooking of food. The women also were astir. The men went into the barns to feed the animals and then hurried to the houses to be themselves fed. A continual grunting sound came from the sheds where pigs were eating corn, and over the houses a contented silence brooded.

After the morning meal men and animals went together to the fields and to the doing of their tasks, and in the houses the women mended clothes, put fruit in cans against the coming of winter and talked of woman's affairs. On the streets of the towns on fair days lawyers, doctors, the officials of the county courts, and the merchants walked about in their shirt sleeves. The house painter went along with his ladder on his shoulder. In the stillness there could be heard the hammers of the carpenters building a new house for the son of a merchant who had married the daughter of a blacksmith. A sense of quiet growth awoke in sleeping minds. It was the time for art and beauty to awake in the land.

Instead, the giant, Industry, awoke. Boys, who in the schools had read of Lincoln, walking for miles through the forest to borrow his first book, and of Garfield, the towpath lad who became president, began to read in the newspapers and magazines of men who by developing their faculty for getting and keeping money had become suddenly and overwhelmingly rich. Hired writers called these men great, and there was no maturity of mind in the people with which to combat the force of the statement, often repeated. Like children the people believed what they were told.

While the new factory was being built with the carefully saved dollars of the people, young men from Bidwell went out to work in other places. After oil and gas were discovered in neighboring states, they went to the fast-growing towns and came home telling wonder tales. In the boom towns men earned four, five and even six dollars a day. In secret and when none of the older people were about, they told of adventures on which they had gone in the new places; of how, attracted by the flood of money, women came from the cities; and the times they had been with these women. Young Harley Parsons, whose father was a shoemaker and who had learned the blacksmith trade, went to work in one of the new oil fields. He came home wearing a fancy silk vest and astonished his fellows by buying and smoking ten-cent cigars. His pockets were bulging with money. "I'm not going to stay long in this town, you can bet on that," he declared one evening as he stood, surrounded by a group of admirers before Fanny Twist's Millinery Shop on lower Main Street. "I have been with a Chinese woman, and an Italian, and with one from South America." He took a puff of his cigar and spat on the sidewalk. "I'm out to get what I can out of life," he declared. "I'm going back and I'm going to make a record. Before I get through I'm going to be with a woman of every nationality on earth, that's what I'm going to do."

Joseph Wainsworth the harness maker, who had been the first man in Bidwell to feel the touch of the heavy finger of industrialism, could not get over the effect of the conversation had with Butterworth, the farmer who had asked him to repair harnesses made by machines in a factory. He became a silent disgruntled man and muttered as he went about his work in the shop. When Will Sellinger his apprentice threw up his place and went to Cleveland he did not get another boy but for a time worked alone in the shop. He got the name of being disagreeable, and on winter afternoons the farmers no longer came into his place to loaf. Being a sensitive man, Joe felt like a pigmy, a tiny thing walking always in the presence of a giant that might at any moment and by a whim destroy him. All his life he had been somewhat off-hand with his customers. "If they don't like my work, let 'em go to the devil," he said to his apprentices. "I know my trade and I don't have to bow down to any one here."

When Steve Hunter organized the Bidwell Plant-Setting Machine Company, the harness maker put his savings, twelve hundred dollars, into the stock of the company. One day, during the time when the factory was building, he heard that Steve had paid twelve hundred dollars for a new lathe that had just arrived by freight and had been set on the floor of the uncompleted building. The promoter had told a farmer that the lathe would do the work of a hundred men, and the farmer had come into Joe's shop and repeated the statement. It stuck in Joe's mind and he came to believe that the twelve hundred dollars he had invested in stock had been used for the purchase of the lathe. It was money he had earned in a long lifetime of effort and it had now bought a machine that would do the work of a hundred men. Already his money had increased by a hundred fold and he wondered why he could not be happy about the matter. On some days he was happy, and then his happiness was followed by an odd fit of depression. Suppose, after all, the plant-setting machine wouldn't work? What then could be done with the lathe, with the machine bought with his money?

One evening after dark and without saying anything to his wife, he went down along Turner's Pike to the old factory at Pickleville where Hugh with the half-wit Allie Mulberry, and the two mechanics from the city, were striving to correct the faults in the plant-setting machine. Joe wanted to look at the tall gaunt man from the West, and had some notion of trying to get into conversation with him and of asking his opinion of the possibilities of the success of the new machine. The man of the age of flesh and blood wanted to walk in the presence of the man who belonged to the new age of iron and steel. When he got to the factory it was dark and on an express truck in front of the Wheeling Station the two city workmen sat smoking their evening pipes. Joe walked past them to the station door and then returned along the platform and got again into Turner's Pike. He stumbled along the path beside the road and presently saw Hugh McVey coming toward him. It was one of the evenings when Hugh, overcome with loneliness, and puzzled that his new position in the town's life did not bring him any closer to people, had gone to town to walk through Main Street, half hoping some one would break through his embarrassment and enter into conversation with him.

When the harness maker saw Hugh walking in the path, he crept into a fence corner, and crouching down, watched the man as Hugh had watched the French boys at work in the cabbage fields. Strange thoughts came into his head. He thought the extraordinarily tall figure before him in some way terrible. He became childishly angry and for a moment thought that if he had a stone in his hand he would throw it at the man, the workings of whose brain had so upset his own life. Then as the figure of Hugh went away along the path another mood came. "I have worked all my life for twelve hundred dollars, for money that will buy one machine that this man thinks nothing about," he muttered aloud. "Perhaps I'll get more money than I invested: Steve Hunter says maybe I will. If machines kill the harness-making trade what's the difference? I'll be all right. The thing to do is to get in with the new times, to wake up, that's the ticket. With me it's like with every one else: nothing venture nothing gain."

Joe crawled out of the fence corner and went stealthily along the road behind Hugh. A fervor seized him and he thought he would like to creep close and touch with his finger the hem of Hugh's coat. Afraid to try anything so bold his mind took a new turn. He ran in the darkness along the road toward town and, when he had crossed the bridge and come to the New York Central tracks, turned west and went along the tracks until he came to the new factory. In the darkness the half completed walls stuck up into the sky, and all about were piles of building materials. The night had been dark and cloudy, but now the moon began to push its way through the clouds. Joe crawled over a pile of bricks and through a window into the building. He felt his way along the walls until he came to a mass of iron covered by a rubber blanket. He was sure it must be the lathe his money had bought, the machine that was to do the work of a hundred men and that was to make him comfortably rich in his old age. No one had spoken of any other machine having been brought in on the factory floor. Joe knelt on the floor and put his hands about the heavy iron legs of the machine. "What a strong thing it is! It will not break easily," he thought. He had an impulse to do something he knew would be foolish, to kiss the iron legs of the machine or to say a prayer as he knelt before it. Instead he got to his feet and crawling out again through the window, went home. He felt renewed and full of new courage because of the experiences of the night, but when he got to his own house and stood at the door outside, he heard his neighbor, David Chapman, a wheelwright who worked in Charlie Collins' wagon shop, praying in his bedroom before an open window. Joe listened for a moment and, for some reason he couldn't understand, his new-found faith was destroyed by what he heard. David Chapman, a devout Methodist, was praying for Hugh McVey and for the success of his invention. Joe knew his neighbor had also invested his savings in the stock of the new company. He had thought that he alone was doubtful of success, but it was apparent that doubt had come also into the mind of the wheelwright. The pleading voice of the praying man, as it broke the stillness of the night, cut across and for the moment utterly destroyed his confidence. "O God, help the man Hugh McVey to remove every obstacle that stands in his way," David Chapman prayed. "Make the plant-setting machine a success. Bring light into the dark places. O Lord, help Hugh McVey, thy servant, to build successfully the plant-setting machine."



BOOK THREE



CHAPTER VIII

When Clara Butterworth, the daughter of Tom Butterworth, was eighteen years old she graduated from the town high school. Until the summer of her seventeenth year, she was a tall, strong, hard-muscled girl, shy in the presence of strangers and bold with people she knew well. Her eyes were extraordinarily gentle.

The Butterworth house on Medina Road stood back of an apple orchard and there was a second orchard beside the house. The Medina Road ran south from Bidwell and climbed gradually upward toward a country of low hills, and from the side porch of the Butterworth house the view was magnificent. The house itself was a large brick affair with a cupola on top and was considered at that time the most pretentious place in the county.

Behind the house were several great barns for the horses and cattle. Most of Tom Butterworth's farm land lay north of Bidwell, and some of his fields were five miles from his home; but as he did not himself work the land it did not matter. The farms were rented to men who worked them on shares. Beside the business of farming Tom carried on other affairs. He owned two hundred acres of hillside land near his house and, with the exception of a few fields and a strip of forest land, it was devoted to the grazing of sheep and cattle. Milk and cream were delivered each morning to the householders of Bidwell by two wagons driven by his employees. A half mile to the west of his residence there was a slaughter house on a side road and at the edge of a field where cattle were killed for the Bidwell market. Tom owned it and employed the men who did the killing. A creek that came down out of the hills through one of the fields past his house had been dammed, and south of the pond there was an ice house. He also supplied the town with ice. In his orchards beneath the trees stood more than a hundred beehives and every year he shipped honey to Cleveland. The farmer himself was a man who appeared to do nothing, but his shrewd mind was always at work. In the summer throughout the long sleepy afternoons, he drove about over the county buying sheep and cattle, stopping to trade horses with some farmer, dickering for new pieces of land, everlastingly busy. He had one passion. He loved fast trotting horses, but would not humor himself by owning one. "It's a game that only gets you into trouble and debt," he said to his friend John Clark, the banker. "Let other men own the horses and go broke racing them. I'll go to the races. Every fall I can go to Cleveland to the grand circuit. If I go crazy about a horse I can bet ten dollars he'll win. If he doesn't I'm out ten dollars. If I owned him I would maybe be out hundreds for the expense of training and all that." The farmer was a tall man with a white beard, broad shoulders, and rather small slender white hands. He chewed tobacco, but in spite of the habit kept both himself and his white beard scrupulously clean. His wife had died while he was yet in the full vigor of life, but he had no eye for women. His mind, he once told one of his friends, was too much occupied with his own affairs and with thoughts of the fine horses he had seen to concern itself with any such nonsense.

For many years the farmer did not appear to pay much attention to his daughter Clara, who was his only child. Throughout her childhood she was under the care of one of his five sisters, all of whom except the one who lived with him and managed his household being comfortably married. His own wife had been a somewhat frail woman, but his daughter had inherited his own physical strength.

When Clara was seventeen, she and her father had a quarrel that eventually destroyed their relationship. The quarrel began late in July. It was a busy summer on the farms and more than a dozen men were employed about the barns, in the delivery of ice and milk to the town, and at the slaughtering pens a half mile away. During that summer something happened to the girl. For hours she sat in her own room in the house reading books, or lay in a hammock in the orchard and looked up through the fluttering leaves of the apple trees at the summer sky. A light, strangely soft and enticing, sometimes came into her eyes. Her figure that had been boyish and strong began to change. As she went about the house she sometimes smiled at nothing. Her aunt hardly noticed what was happening to her, but her father, who all her life had seemed hardly to take account of her existence, was interested. In her presence he began to feel like a young man. As in the days of his courtship of her mother and before the possessive passion in him destroyed his ability to love, he began to feel vaguely that life about him was full of significance. Sometimes in the afternoon when he went for one of his long drives through the country he asked his daughter to accompany him, and although he had little to say a kind of gallantry crept into his attitude toward the awakening girl. While she was in the buggy with him, he did not chew tobacco, and after one or two attempts to indulge in the habit without having the smoke blow in her face, he gave up smoking his pipe during the drives.

Always before that summer Clara had spent the months when there was no school in the company of the farm hands. She rode on wagons, visited the barns, and when she grew weary of the company of older people, went into town to spend an afternoon with one of her friends among the town girls.

In the summer of her seventeenth year she did none of these things. At the table she ate in silence. The Butterworth household was at that time run on the old-fashioned American plan, and the farm hands, the men who drove the ice and milk wagons and even the men who killed and dressed cattle and sheep, ate at the same table with Tom Butterworth, his sister, who was the housekeeper, and his daughter. Three hired girls were employed in the house and after all had been served they also came and took their places at table. The older men among the farmer's employees, many of whom had known her from childhood, had got into the habit of teasing the daughter of the house. They made comments concerning town boys, young fellows who clerked in stores or who were apprenticed to some tradesman and one of whom had perhaps brought the girl home at night from a school party or from one of the affairs called "socials" that were held at the town churches. After they had eaten in the peculiar silent intent way common to hungry laborers, the farm hands leaned back in their chairs and winked at each other. Two of them began an elaborate conversation touching on some incident in the girl's life. One of the older men, who had been on the farm for many years and who had a reputation among the others of being something of a wit, chuckled softly. He began to talk, addressing no one in particular. The man's name was Jim Priest, and although the Civil War had come upon the country when he was past forty, he had been a soldier. In Bidwell he was looked upon as something of a rascal, but his employer was very fond of him. The two men often talked together for hours concerning the merits of well known trotting horses. In the war Jim had been what was called a bounty man, and it was whispered about town that he had also been a deserter and a bounty jumper. He did not go to town with the other men on Saturday afternoons, and had never attempted to get into the Bidwell chapter of the G. A. R. On Saturdays when the other farm hands washed, shaved and dressed themselves in their Sunday clothes preparatory to the weekly flight to town, he called one of them into the barn, slipped a quarter into his hand, and said, "Bring me a half pint and don't you forget it." On Sunday afternoons he crawled into the hayloft of one of the barns, drank his weekly portion of whisky, got drunk, and sometimes did not appear again until time to go to work on Monday morning. In the fall Jim took his savings and went to spend a week at the grand circuit trotting meeting at Cleveland, where he bought a costly present for his employer's daughter and then bet the rest of his money on the races. When he was lucky he stayed on in Cleveland, drinking and carousing until his winnings were gone.

It was Jim Priest who always led the attacks of teasing at the table, and in the summer of her seventeenth year, when she was no longer in the mood for such horse-play, it was Jim who brought the practice to an end. At the table Jim leaned back in his chair, stroked his red bristly beard, now rapidly graying, looked out of a window over Clara's head, and told a tale concerning an attempt at suicide on the part of a young man in love with Clara. He said the young man, a clerk in a Bidwell store, had taken a pair of trousers from a shelf, tied one leg about his neck and the other to a bracket in the wall. Then he jumped off a counter and had only been saved from death because a town girl, passing the store, had seen him and had rushed in and cut him down. "Now what do you think of that?" he cried. "He was in love with our Clara, I tell you."

After the telling of the tale, Clara got up from the table and ran out of the room. The farm hands joined by her father laughed heartily. Her aunt shook her finger at Jim Priest, the hero of the occasion. "Why don't you let her alone?" she asked.

"She'll never get married if she stays here where you make fun of every young man who pays her any attention." At the door Clara stopped and, turning, put out her tongue at Jim Priest. Another roar of laughter arose. Chairs were scraped along the floor and the men filed out of the house to go back to the work in the barns and about the farm.

In the summer when the change came over her Clara sat at the table and did not hear the tales told by Jim Priest. She thought the farm hands who ate so greedily were vulgar, a notion she had never had before, and wished she did not have to eat with them. One afternoon as she lay in the hammock in the orchard, she heard several of the men in a nearby barn discussing the change that had come over her. Jim Priest was explaining what had happened. "Our fun's over with Clara," he said. "Now we'll have to treat her in a new way. She's no longer a kid. We'll have to let her alone or pretty soon she won't speak to any of us. It's a thing that happens when a girl begins to think about being a woman. The sap has begun to run up the tree."

The puzzled girl lay in the hammock and looked up at the sky. She thought about Jim Priest's words and tried to understand what he meant. Sadness crept over her and tears came into her eyes. Although she did not know what the old man meant by the words about the sap and the tree, she did, in a detached subconscious way, understand something of the import of the words, and she was grateful for the thoughtfulness that had led to his telling the others to stop trying to tease her at the table. The half worn-out old farm hand, with the bristly beard and the strong old body, became a figure full of significance to her mind. She remembered with gratitude that, in spite of all of his teasing, Jim Priest had never said anything that had in any way hurt her. In the new mood that had come upon her that meant much. A greater hunger for understanding, love, and friendliness took possession of her. She did not think of turning to her father or to her aunt, with whom she had never talked of anything intimate or close to herself, but turned instead to the crude old man. A hundred minor points in the character of Jim Priest she had never thought of before came sharply into her mind. In the barns he had never mistreated the animals as the other farm hands sometimes did. When on Sunday afternoons he was drunk and went staggering through the barns, he did not strike the horses or swear at them. She wondered if it would be possible for her to talk to Jim Priest, to ask him questions about life and people and what he meant by his words regarding the sap and the tree. The farm hand was old and unmarried. She wondered if in his youth he had ever loved a woman. She decided he had. His words about the sap were, she was sure, in some way connected with the idea of love. How strong his hands were. They were gnarled and rough, but there was something beautifully powerful about them. She half wished the old man had been her father. In his youth, in the darkness at night or when he was alone with a girl, perhaps in a quiet wood in the late afternoon when the sun was going down, he had put his hands on her shoulders. He had drawn the girl to him. He had kissed her.

Clara jumped quickly out of the hammock and walked about under the trees in the orchard. Her thoughts of Jim Priest's youth startled her. It was as though she had walked suddenly into a room where a man and woman were making love. Her cheeks burned and her hands trembled. As she walked slowly through the clumps of grass and weeds that grew between the trees where the sunlight struggled through, bees coming home to the hives heavily laden with honey flew in droves about her head. There was something heady and purposeful about the song of labor that arose out of the beehives. It got into her blood and her step quickened. The words of Jim Priest that kept running through her mind seemed a part of the same song the bees were singing. "The sap has begun to run up the tree," she repeated aloud. How significant and strange the words seemed! They were the kind of words a lover might use in speaking to his beloved. She had read many novels, but they contained no such words. It was better so. It was better to hear them from human lips. Again she thought of Jim Priest's youth and boldly wished he were still young. She told herself that she would like to see him young and married to a beautiful young woman. She stopped by a fence that looked out upon a hillside meadow. The sun seemed extraordinarily bright, the grass in the meadow greener than she had ever seen it before. Two birds in a tree nearby made love to each other. The female flew madly about and was pursued by the male bird. In his eagerness he was so intent that he flew directly before the girl's face, his wing nearly touching her cheek. She went back through the orchard to the barns and through one of them to the open door of a long shed that was used for housing wagons and buggies, her mind occupied with the idea of finding Jim Priest, of standing perhaps near him. He was not about, but in the open space before the shed, John May, a young man of twenty-two who had just come to work on the farm, was oiling the wheels of a wagon. His back was turned and as he handled the heavy wagon wheels the muscles could be seen playing beneath his thin cotton shirt. "It is so Jim Priest must have looked in his youth," the girl thought.

The farm girl wanted to approach the young man, to speak to him, to ask him questions concerning many strange things in life she did not understand. She knew that under no circumstances would she be able to do such a thing, that it was but a meaningless dream that had come into her head, but the dream was sweet. She did not, however, want to talk to John May. At the moment she was in a girlish period of being disgusted at what she thought of as the vulgarity of the men who worked on the place. At the table they ate noisily and greedily like hungry animals. She wanted youth that was like her own youth, crude and uncertain perhaps, but reaching eagerly out into the unknown. She wanted to draw very near to something young, strong, gentle, insistent, beautiful. When the farm hand looked up and saw her standing and looking intently at him, she was embarrassed. For a moment the two young animals, so unlike each other, stood staring at each other and then, to relieve her embarrassment, Clara began to play a game. Among the men employed on the farm she had always passed for something of a tomboy. In the hayfields and in the barns she had wrestled and fought playfully with both the old and the young men. To them she had always been a privileged person. They liked her and she was the boss's daughter. One did not get rough with her or say or do rough things. A basket of corn stood just within the door of the shed, and running to it Clara took an ear of the yellow corn and threw it at the farm hand. It struck a post of the barn just above his head. Laughing shrilly Clara ran into the shed among the wagons, and the farm hand pursued her.

John May was a very determined man. He was the son of a laborer in Bidwell and for two or three years had been employed about the stable of a doctor, something had happened between him and the doctor's wife and he had left the place because he had a notion that the doctor was becoming suspicious. The experience had taught him the value of boldness in dealing with women. Ever since he had come to work on the Butterworth farm, he had been having thoughts regarding the girl who had now, he imagined, given him direct challenge. He was a little amazed by her boldness but did not stop to ask himself questions, she had openly invited him to pursue her. That was enough. His accustomed awkwardness and clumsiness went away and he leaped lightly over the extended tongues of wagons and buggies. He caught Clara in dark corner of the shed. Without a word he took her tightly into his arms and kissed her, first upon the neck and then on the mouth. She lay trembling and weak in his arms and he took hold of the collar of her dress and tore it open. Her brown neck and one of her hard, round breasts were exposed. Clara's eyes grew big with fright. Strength came back into her body. With her sharp hard little fist she struck John May in the face; and when he stepped back she ran quickly out of the shed. John May did not understand. He thought she had sought him out once and would return. "She's a little green. I was too fast. I scared her. Next time I'll go a little easy," he thought.

Clara ran through the barn and then walked slowly to the house and went upstairs to her own room. A farm dog followed her up the stairs and stood at her door wagging his tail. She shut the door in his face. For the moment everything that lived and breathed seemed to her gross and ugly. Her cheeks were pale and she pulled shut the blinds to the window and sat down on the bed, overcome with the strange new fear of life. She did not want even the sunlight to come into her presence. John May had followed her through the barn and now stood in the barnyard staring at the house. She could see him through the cracks of the blinds and wished it were possible to kill him with a gesture of her hand.

The farm hand, full of male confidence, waited for her to come to the window and look down at him. He wondered if there were any one else in the house. Perhaps she would beckon to him. Something of the kind had happened between him and the doctor's wife and it had turned out that way. When after five or ten minutes he did not see her, he went back to the work of oiling the wagon wheels. "It's going to be a slower thing. She's shy, a green girl," he told himself.

One evening a week later Clara sat on the side porch of the house with her father when John May came into the barnyard. It was a Wednesday evening and the farm hands were not in the habit of going into town until Saturday, but he was dressed in his Sunday clothes and had shaved and oiled his hair. On the occasion of a wedding or a funeral the laborers put oil in their hair. It was indicative of something very important about to happen. Clara looked at him, and in spite of the feeling of repugnance that swept over her, her eyes glistened. Ever since the affair in the barn she had managed to avoid meeting him but she was not afraid. He had in fact taught her something. There was a power within her with which she could conquer men. The touch of her father's shrewdness, that was a part of her nature, had come to her rescue. She wanted to laugh at the silly pretensions of the man, to make a fool of him. Her cheeks flushed with pride in her mastery of the situation.

John May walked almost to the house and then turned along the path that led to the road. He made a gesture with his hand and by chance Tom Butterworth, who had been looking off across the open country toward Bidwell, turned and saw both the movement and the leering confident smile on the farm hand's face. He arose and followed John May into the road, astonishment and anger fighting for possession of him. The two men stood talking for three minutes in the road before the house and then returned. The farm hand went to the barn and then came back along the path to the road carrying under his arm a grain bag containing his work clothes. He did not look up as he went past. The farmer returned to the porch.

The misunderstanding that was to wreck the tender relationship that had begun to grow up between father and daughter began on that evening. Tom Butterworth was furious. He muttered and clinched his fists. Clara's heart beat heavily. For some reason she felt guilty, as though she had been caught in an intrigue with the man. For a long time her father remained silent and then he, like the farm hand, made a furious and brutal attack on her. "Where have you been with that fellow? What you been up to?" he asked harshly.

For a time Clara did not answer her father's question. She wanted to scream, to strike him in the face with her fist as she had struck the man in the shed. Then her mind struggled to take hold of the new situation. The fact that her father had accused her of seeking the thing that had happened made her hate John May less heartily. She had some one else to hate.

Clara did not think the matter out clearly on that first evening but, after denying that she had ever been anywhere with John May, burst into tears and ran into the house. In the darkness of her own room she began to think of her father's words. For some reason she could not understand, the attack made on her spirit seemed more terrible and unforgivable than the attack upon her body made by the farm hand in the shed. She began to understand vaguely that the young man had been confused by her presence on that warm sunshiny afternoon as she had been confused by the words uttered by Jim Priest, by the song of the bees in the orchard, by the love-making of the birds, and by her own uncertain thoughts. He had been confused and he was stupid and young. There had been an excuse for his confusion. It was understandable and could be dealt with. She had now no doubt of her own ability to deal with John May. As for her father—it was all right for him to be suspicious regarding the farm hand, but why had he been suspicious of her?

The perplexed girl sat down in the darkness on the edge of the bed, and a hard look came into her eyes. After a time her father came up the stairs and knocked at her door. He did not come in but stood in the hallway outside and talked. She remained calm while the conversation lasted, and that confused the man who had expected to find her in tears. That she was not seemed to him an evidence of guilt.

Tom Butterworth, in many ways a shrewd, observing man, never understood the quality of his own daughter. He was an intensely possessive man and once, when he was newly married, there had been a suspicion in his mind that there was something between his wife and a young man who had worked on the farm where he then lived. The suspicion was unfounded, but he discharged the man and one evening, when his wife had gone into town to do some shopping and did not return at the accustomed time, he followed, and when he saw her on the street stepped into a store to avoid a meeting. She was in trouble. Her horse had become suddenly lame and she had to walk home. Without letting her see him the husband followed along the road. It was dark and she heard the footsteps in the road behind her and becoming frightened ran the last half mile to her own house. He waited until she had entered and then followed her in, pretending he had just come from the barns. When he heard her story of the accident to the horse and of her fright in the road he was ashamed; but as the horse, that had been left in a livery stable, seemed all right when he went for it the next day he became suspicious again.

As he stood outside the door of his daughter's room, the farmer felt as he had felt that evening long before when he followed his wife along the road. When on the porch downstairs he had looked up suddenly and had seen the gesture made by the farm hand, he had also looked quickly at his daughter. She looked confused and, he thought, guilty. "Well, it is the same thing over again," he thought bitterly, "like mother, like daughter—they are both of the same stripe." Getting quickly out of his chair he had followed the young man into the road and had discharged him. "Go, to-night. I don't want to see you on the place again," he said. In the darkness before the girl's room he thought of many bitter things he wanted to say. He forgot she was a girl and talked to her as he might have talked to a mature, sophisticated, and guilty woman. "Come," he said, "I want to know the truth. If you have been with that farm hand you are starting young. Has anything happened between you?"

Clara walked to the door and confronted her father. The hatred of him, born in that hour and that never left her, gave her strength. She did not know what he was talking about, but had a keen sense of the fact that he, like the stupid, young man in the shed, was trying to violate something very precious in her nature. "I don't know what you are talking about," she said calmly, "but I know this. I am no longer a child. Within the last week I've become a woman. If you don't want me in your house, if you don't like me any more, say so and I'll go away."

The two people stood in the darkness and tried to look at each other. Clara was amazed by her own strength and by the words that had come to her. The words had clarified something. She felt that if her father would but take her into his arms or say some kindly understanding word, all could be forgotten. Life could be started over again. In the future she would understand much that she had not understood. She and her father could draw close to each other. Tears came into her eyes and a sob trembled in her throat. As her father, however, did not answer her words and turned to go silently away, she shut the door with a loud bang and afterward lay awake all night, white and furious with anger and disappointment.

Clara left home to become a college student that fall, but before she left had another passage at arms with her father. In August a young man who was to teach in the town schools came to Bidwell, and she met him at a supper given in the basement of the church. He walked home with her and came on the following Sunday afternoon to call. She introduced the young man, a slender fellow with black hair, brown eyes, and a serious face, to her father who answered by nodding his head and walking away. She and the young man walked along a country road and went into a wood. He was five years older than herself and had been to college, but she felt much the older and wiser. The thing that happens to so many women had happened to her. She felt older and wiser than all the men she had ever seen. She had decided, as most women finally decide, that there are two kinds of men in the world, those who are kindly, gentle, well-intentioned children, and those who, while they remain children, are obsessed with stupid, male vanity and imagine themselves born to be masters of life. Clara's thoughts on the matter were not very clear. She was young and her thoughts were indefinite. She had, however, been shocked into an acceptance of life and she was made of the kind of stuff that survives the blows life gives.

In the wood with the young school teacher, Clara began an experiment. Evening came on and it grew dark. She knew her father would be furious that she did not come home but she did not care. She led the school teacher to talk of love and the relationships of men and women. She pretended an innocence that was not hers. School girls know many things that they do not apply to themselves until something happens to them such as had happened to Clara. The farmer's daughter became conscious. She knew a thousand things she had not known a month before and began to take her revenge upon men for their betrayal of her. In the darkness as they walked home together, she tempted the young man into kissing her, and later lay in his arms for two hours, entirely sure of herself, striving to find out, without risk to herself, the things she wanted to know about life.

That night she again quarreled with her father. He tried to scold her for remaining out late with a man, and she shut the door in his face. On another evening she walked boldly out of the house with the school teacher. The two walked along a road to where a bridge went over a small stream. John May, who was still determined that the farmer's daughter was in love with him, had on that evening followed the school teacher to the Butterworth house and had been waiting outside intending to frighten his rival with his fists. On the bridge something happened that drove the school teacher away. John May came up to the two people and began to make threats. The bridge had just been repaired and a pile of small, sharp-edged stones lay close at hand. Clara picked one of them up and handed it to the school teacher. "Hit him," she said. "Don't be afraid. He's only a coward. Hit him on the head with the stone."

The three people stood in silence waiting for something to happen. John May was disconcerted by Clara's words. He had thought she wanted him to pursue her. He stepped toward the school teacher, who dropped the stone that had been put into his hand and ran away. Clara went back along the road toward her own house followed by the muttering farm hand who, after her speech at the bridge, did not dare approach. "Maybe she was making a bluff. Maybe she didn't want that young fellow to get on to what is between us," he muttered, as he stumbled along in the darkness.

In the house Clara sat for a half hour at a table in the lighted living room beside her father, pretending to read a book. She half hoped he would say something that would permit her to attack him. When nothing happened she went upstairs and to bed, only again to spend the night awake and white with anger at the thought of the cruel and unexplainable things life seemed trying to do to her.

In September Clara left the farm to attend the State University at Columbus. She was sent there because Tom Butterworth had a sister who was married to a manufacturer of plows and lived at the State Capital. After the incident with the farm hand and the misunderstanding that had sprung up between himself and his daughter, he was uncomfortable with her in the house and was glad to have her away. He did not want to frighten his sister by telling of what had happened, and when he wrote, tried to be diplomatic. "Clara has been too much among the rough men who work on my farms and had become a little rough," he wrote. "Take her in hand. I want her to become more of a lady. Get her acquainted with the right kind of people." In secret he hoped she would meet and marry some young man while she was away. Two of his sisters had gone away to school and it had turned out that way.

During the month before his daughter left home the farmer tried to be somewhat more human and gentle in his attitude toward her, but did not succeed in dispelling the dislike of himself that had taken deep root in her nature. At table he made jokes at which the farm hands laughed boisterously. Then he looked at his daughter who did not appear to have been listening. Clara ate quickly and hurried out of the room. She did not go to visit her girl friends in town and the young school teacher came no more to see her. During the long summer afternoons she walked in the orchard among the beehives or climbed over fences and went into a wood, where she sat for hours on a fallen log staring at the trees and the sky. Tom Butterworth also hurried out of his house. He pretended to be busy and every day drove far and wide over the country. Sometimes he thought he had been brutal and crude in his treatment of his daughter, and decided he would speak to her regarding the matter and ask her to forgive him. Then his suspicion returned. He struck the horse with the whip and drove furiously along the lonely roads. "Well, there's something wrong," he muttered aloud. "Men don't just look at women and approach them boldly, as that young fellow did with Clara. He did it before my very eyes. He's been given some encouragement." An old suspicion awoke in him. "There was something wrong with her mother, and there's something wrong with her. I'll be glad when the time comes for her to marry and settle down, so I can get her off my hands," he thought bitterly.

On the evening when Clara left the farm to go to the train that was to take her away, her father said he had a headache, a thing he had never been known to complain of before, and told Jim Priest to drive her to the station. Jim took the girl to the station, saw to the checking of her baggage, and waited about until her train came in. Then he boldly kissed her on the cheek. "Good-by, little girl," he said gruffly. Clara was so grateful she could not reply. On the train she spent an hour weeping softly. The rough gentleness of the old farm hand had done much to take the growing bitterness out of her heart. She felt that she was ready to begin life anew, and wished she had not left the farm without coming to a better understanding with her father.



CHAPTER IX

The Woodburns of Columbus were wealthy by the standards of their day. They lived in a large house and kept two carriages and four servants, but had no children. Henderson Woodburn was small of stature, wore a gray beard, and was neat and precise about his person. He was treasurer of the plow manufacturing company and was also treasurer of the church he and his wife attended. In his youth he had been called "Hen" Woodburn and had been bullied by larger boys, and when he grew to be a man and after his persistent shrewdness and patience had carried him into a position of some power in the business life of his native city he in turn became something of a bully to the men beneath him. He thought his wife Priscilla had come from a better family than his own and was a little afraid of her. When they did not agree on any subject, she expressed her opinion gently but firmly, while he blustered for a time and then gave in. After a misunderstanding his wife put her arms about his neck and kissed the bald spot on the top of his head. Then the subject was forgotten.

Life in the Woodburn house was lived without words. After the stir and bustle of the farm, the silence of the house for a long time frightened Clara. Even when she was alone in her own room she walked about on tiptoe. Henderson Woodburn was absorbed in his work, and when he came home in the evening, ate his dinner in silence and then worked again. He brought home account books and papers from the office and spread them out on a table in the living room. His wife Priscilla sat in a large chair under a lamp and knitted children's stockings. They were, she told Clara, for the children of the poor. As a matter of fact the stockings never left her house. In a large trunk in her room upstairs lay hundreds of pairs knitted during the twenty-five years of her family life.

Clara was not very happy in the Woodburn household, but on the other hand, was not very unhappy. She attended to her studies at the University passably well and in the late afternoons took a walk with a girl classmate, attended a matinee at the theater, or read a book. In the evening she sat with her aunt and uncle until she could no longer bear the silence, and then went to her own room, where she studied until it was time to go to bed. Now and then she went with the two older people to a social affair at the church, of which Henderson Woodburn was treasurer, or accompanied them to dinners at the homes of other well-to-do and respectable business men. On several occasions young men, sons of the people with whom the Woodburns dined, or students at the university, came in the evening to call. On such an occasion Clara and the young man sat in the parlor of the house and talked. After a time they grew silent and embarrassed in each other's presence. From the next room Clara could hear the rustling of the papers containing the columns of figures over which her uncle was at work. Her aunt's knitting needles clicked loudly. The young man told a tale of some football game, or if he had already gone out into the world, talked of his experiences as a traveler selling the wares manufactured or merchandized by his father. Such visits all began at the same hour, eight o'clock, and the young man left the house promptly at ten. Clara grew to feel that she was being merchandized and that they had come to look at the goods. One evening one of the men, a fellow with laughing blue eyes and kinky yellow hair, unconsciously disturbed her profoundly. All the evening he talked just as the others had talked and got out of his chair to go away at the prescribed hour. Clara walked with him to the door. She put out her hand, which he shook cordially. Then he looked at her and his eyes twinkled. "I've had a good time," he said. Clara had a sudden and almost overpowering desire to embrace him. She wanted to disturb his assurance, to startle him by kissing him on the lips or holding him tightly in her arms. Shutting the door quickly, she stood with her hand on the door-knob, her whole body trembling. The trivial by-products of her age's industrial madness went on in the next room. The sheets of paper rustled and the knitting needles clicked. Clara thought she would like to call the young man back into the house, lead him to the room where the meaningless industry went endlessly on and there do something that would shock them and him as they had never been shocked before. She ran quickly upstairs. "What is getting to be the matter with me?" she asked herself anxiously.

* * * * *

One evening in the month of May, during her third year at the University, Clara sat on the bank of a tiny stream by a grove of trees, far out on the edge of a suburban village north of Columbus. Beside her sat a young man named Frank Metcalf whom she had known for a year and who had once been a student in the same classes with herself. He was the son of the president of the plow manufacturing company of which her uncle was treasurer. As they sat together by the stream the afternoon light began to fade and darkness came on. Before them across an open field stood a factory, and Clara remembered that the whistle had long since blown and the men from the factory had gone home. She grew restless and sprang to her feet. Young Metcalf who had been talking very earnestly arose and stood beside her. "I can't marry for two years, but we can be engaged and that will be all the same thing as far as the right and wrong of what I want and need is concerned. It isn't my fault I can't ask you to marry me now," he declared. "In two years now, I'll inherit eleven thousand dollars. My aunt left it to me and the old fool went and fixed it so I don't get it if I marry before I'm twenty-four. I want that money. I've got to have it, but I got to have you too."

Clara looked away into the evening darkness and waited for him to finish his speech. All afternoon he had been making practically the same speech, over and over. "Well, I can't help it, I'm a man," he said doggedly. "I can't help it, I want you. I can't help it, my aunt was an old fool." He began to explain the necessity of remaining unmarried in order that he could receive the eleven thousand dollars. "If I don't get that money I'll be just the same as I am now," he declared. "I won't be any good." He grew angry and, thrusting his hands into his pockets, stared also across the field into the darkness. "Nothing keeps me satisfied," he said. "I hate being in my father's business and I hate going to school. In only two years I'll get the money. Father can't keep it from me. I'll take it and light out. I don't know just what I'll do. I'm going maybe to Europe, that's what I'm going to do. Father wants me to stay here and work in his office. To hell with that. I want to travel. I'll be a soldier or something. Anyway I'll get out of here and go somewhere and do something exciting, something alive. You can go with me. We'll cut out together. Haven't you got the nerve? Why don't you be my woman?"

Young Metcalf took hold of Clara's shoulder and tried to take her into his arms. For a moment they struggled and then, in disgust, he stepped away from her and again began to scold.

Clara walked away across two or three vacant lots and got into a street of workingmen's houses, the man following at her heels. Night had come and the people in the street facing the factory had already disposed of the evening meal. Children and dogs played in the road and a strong smell of food hung in the air. To the west across the fields, a passenger train ran past going toward the city. Its light made wavering yellow patches against the bluish black sky. Clara wondered why she had come to the out of the way place with Frank Metcalf. She did not like him, but there was a restlessness in him that was like the restless thing in herself. He did not want stupidly to accept life, and that fact made him brother to herself. Although he was but twenty-two years old, he had already achieved an evil reputation. A servant in his father's house had given birth to a child by him, and it had cost a good deal of money to get her to take the child and go away without making an open scandal. During the year before he had been expelled from the University for throwing another young man down a flight of stairs, and it was whispered about among the girl students that he often got violently drunk. For a year he had been trying to ingratiate himself with Clara, had written her letters, sent flowers to her house, and when he met her on the street had stopped to urge that she accept his friendship. On the day in May she had met him on the street and he had begged that she give him one chance to talk things out with her. They had met at a street crossing where cars went past into the suburban villages that lay about the city. "Come on," he had urged, "let's take a street car ride, let's get out of the crowds, I want to talk to you." He had taken hold of her arm and fairly dragged her to a car. "Come and hear what I have to say," he had urged, "then if you don't want to have anything to do with me, all right. You can say so and I'll let you alone." After she had accompanied him to the suburb of workingmen's houses, in the vicinity of which they had spent the afternoon in the fields, Clara had found he had nothing to urge upon her except the needs of his body. Still she felt there was something he wanted to say that had not been said. He was restless and dissatisfied with his life, and at bottom she felt that way about her own life. During the last three years she had often wondered why she had come to the school and what she was to gain by learning things out of books. The days and months went past and she knew certain rather uninteresting facts she had not known before. How the facts were to help her to live, she couldn't make out. They had nothing to do with such problems as her attitude toward men like John May the farm hand, the school teacher who had taught her something by holding her in his arms and kissing her, and the dark sullen young man who now walked beside her and talked of the needs of his body. It seemed to Clara that every additional year spent at the University but served to emphasize its inadequacy. It was so also with the books she read and the thoughts and actions of the older people about her. Her aunt and uncle did not talk much, but seemed to take it for granted she wanted to live such another life as they were living. She thought with horror of the probability of marrying a maker of plows or of some other dull necessity of life and then spending her days in the making of stockings for babies that did not come, or in some other equally futile manifestation of her dissatisfaction. She realized with a shudder that men like her uncle, who spent their lives in adding up rows of figures or doing over and over some tremendously trivial thing, had no conception of any outlook for their women beyond living in a house, serving them physically, wearing perhaps good enough clothes to help them make a show of prosperity and success, and drifting finally into a stupid acceptance of dullness—an acceptance that both she and the passionate, twisted man beside her were fighting against.

In a class in the University Clara had met, during that her third year there, a woman named Kate Chanceller, who had come to Columbus with her brother from a town in Missouri, and it was this woman who had given her thoughts form, who had indeed started her thinking of the inadequacy of her life. The brother, a studious, quiet man, worked as a chemist in a manufacturing plant somewhere at the edge of town. He was a musician and wanted to become a composer. One evening during the winter his sister Kate had brought Clara to the apartment where the two lived, and the three had become friends. Clara had learned something there that she did not yet understand and never did get clearly into her consciousness. The truth was that the brother was like a woman and Kate Chanceller, who wore skirts and had the body of a woman, was in her nature a man. Kate and Clara spent many evenings together later and talked of many things not usually touched on by girl students. Kate was a bold, vigorous thinker and was striving to grope her way through her own problem in life and many times, as they walked along the street or sat together in the evening, she forgot her companion and talked of herself and the difficulties of her position in life. "It's absurd the way things are arranged," she said. "Because my body is made in a certain way I'm supposed to accept certain rules for living. The rules were not made for me. Men manufactured them as they manufacture can-openers, on the wholesale plan." She looked at Clara and laughed. "Try to imagine me in a little lace cap, such as your aunt wears about the house, and spending my days knitting baby stockings," she said.

The two women had spent hours talking of their lives and in speculating on the differences in their natures. The experience had been tremendously educational for Clara. As Kate was a socialist and Columbus was rapidly becoming an industrial city, she talked of the meaning of capital and labor and the effect of changing conditions on the lives of men and women. To Kate, Clara could talk as to a man, but the antagonism that so often exists between men and women did not come into and spoil their companionship. In the evening when Clara went to Kate's house her aunt sent a carriage to bring her home at nine. Kate rode home with her. They got to the Woodburn house and went in. Kate was bold and free with the Woodburns, as with her brother and Clara. "Come," she said laughing, "put away your figures and your knitting. Let's talk." She sat in a large chair with her legs crossed and talked with Henderson Woodburn of the affairs of the plow company. The two got into a discussion of the relative merits of the free trade and protection ideas. Then the two older people went to bed and Kate talked to Clara. "Your uncle is an old duffer," she said. "He knows nothing about the meaning of what he's doing in life." When she started home afoot across the city, Clara was alarmed for her safety. "You must get a cab or let me wake up uncle's man; something may happen," she said. Kate laughed and went off, striding along the street like a man. Sometimes she thrust her hands into her skirt pockets, that were like the trouser pockets of a man, and it was difficult for Clara to remember that she was a woman. In Kate's presence she became bolder than she had ever been with any one. One evening she told the story of the thing that had happened to her that afternoon long before on the farm, the afternoon when, her mind having been inflamed by the words of Jim Priest regarding the sap that goes up the tree and by the warm sensuous beauty of the day, she had wanted so keenly to draw close to some one. She explained to Kate how she had been so brutally jarred out of the feeling in herself that she felt was at bottom all right. "It was like a blow in the face at the hand of God," she said.