Down a slight incline in the road shot the car and swept around a wide curve, and then the jumping, dancing light, running far ahead, revealed a sight that made Tom thrust out his foot and jam on the brakes.
In the road and in the very center of the circle of light, as though performing a scene on the stage, three men were struggling. As the car came to a stop, so sudden that it pitched both Clara and Hugh out of their seats, the struggle came to an end. One of the struggling figures, a small man without coat or hat, had jerked himself away from the others and started to run toward the fence at the side of the road and separating it from a grove of trees. A large, broad-shouldered man sprang forward and catching the tail of the fleeing man’s coat pulled him back into the circle of light. His fist shot out and caught the small man directly on the mouth. He fell like a dead thing, face downward in the dust of the road.
Tom ran the car slowly forward and its headlight continued to play over the three figures. From a little pocket at the side of his driver’s seat he took a revolver. He ran the car quickly to a position near the group in the road and stopped.
“What’s up?” he asked sharply.
Ed Hall the factory superintendent, the man who had struck the blow that had felled the little man, stepped forward and explained the tragic happenings of the evening in town. The factory superintendent had remembered that as a boy he had once worked for a few weeks on the farm of which the wood beside the road was a part, and that on Sunday afternoons the harness maker had come to the farm with his wife and the two people had gone to walk in the very place where he had just been found. “I had a hunch he would be out here,” he boasted. “I figured it out. Crowds started out of town in all directions, but I cut out alone. Then I happened to see this fellow and just for company I brought him along.” He put up his hand and, looking at Tom, tapped his forehead. “Cracked,” he declared, “he always was. A fellow I knew saw him once in that woods,” he said pointing. “Somebody had shot a squirrel and he took on about it as though he had lost a child. I said then he was crazy, and he has sure proved I was right.”
At a word from her father Clara went to sit on the front seat on Hugh’s knees. Her body trembled and she was cold with fear. As her father had told the story of Jim Gibson’s triumph over Joe Wainsworth she had wanted passionately to kill that blustering fellow. Now the thing was done. In her mind the harness maker had come to stand for all the men and women in the world who were in secret revolt against the absorption of the age in machines and the products of machines. He had stood as a protesting figure against what her father had become and what she thought her husband had become. She had wanted Jim Gibson killed and it had been done. As a child she had gone often to Wainsworth’s shop with her father or some farm hand, and she now remembered sharply the peace and quiet of the place. At the thought of the same place, now become the scene of a desperate killing, her body shook so that she clutched at Hugh’s arms, striving to steady herself.
Ed Hall took the senseless figure of the old man in the road into his arms and half threw it into the back seat of the car. To Clara it was as though his rough, misunderstanding hands were on her own body. The car started swiftly along the road and Ed told again the story of the night’s happenings. “I tell you, Mr. Hunter is in mighty bad shape, he may die,” he said. Clara turned to look at her husband and thought him totally unaffected by what had happened. His face was quiet like her father’s face. The factory superintendent’s voice went on explaining his part in the adventures of the evening. Ignoring the pale workman who sat lost in the shadows in a corner of the rear seat, he spoke as though he had undertaken and accomplished the capture of the murderer single-handed. As he afterwards explained to his wife, Ed felt he had been a fool not to come alone. “I knew I could handle him all right,” he explained. “I wasn’t afraid, but I had figured it all out he was crazy. That made me feel shaky. When they were getting up a crowd to go out on the hunt, I says to myself, I’ll go alone. I says to myself, I’ll bet he’s gone out to that woods on the Riggly farm where he and his wife used to go on Sundays. I started and then I saw this other man standing on a corner and I made him come with me. He didn’t want to come and I wish I’d gone alone. I could have handled him and I’d got all the credit.”
In the car Ed told the story of the night in the streets of Bidwell. Some one had seen Steve Hunter shot down in the street and had declared the harness maker had done it and had then run away. A crowd had gone to the harness shop and had found the body of Jim Gibson. On the floor of the shop were the factory-made harnesses cut into bits. “He must have been in there and at work for an hour or two, stayed right in there with the man he had killed. It’s the craziest thing any man ever done.”
The harness maker, lying on the floor of the car where Ed had thrown him, stirred and sat up. Clara turned to look at him and shivered. His shirt was torn so that the thin, old neck and shoulders could be plainly seen in the uncertain light, and his face was covered with blood that had dried and was now black with dust. Ed Hall went on with the tale of his triumph. “I found him where I said to myself I would. Yes, sir, I found him where I said to myself I would.”
The car came to the first of the houses of the town, long rows of cheaply built frame houses standing in what had once been Ezra French’s cabbage patch, where Hugh had crawled on the ground in the moonlight, working out the mechanical problems that confronted him in the building of his plant-setting machine. Suddenly the distraught and frightened man crouched on the floor of the car, raised himself on his hands and lurched forward, trying to spring over the side. Ed Hall caught him by the arm and jerked him back. He drew back his arm to strike again but Clara’s voice, cold and intense with passion, stopped him. “If you touch him, I’ll kill you,” she said. “No matter what he does, don’t you dare strike him again.”
Tom drove the car slowly through the streets of Bidwell to the door of a police station. Word of the return of the murderer had run ahead, and a crowd had gathered. Although it was past two o’clock the lights still burned in stores and saloons, and crowds stood at every corner. With the aid of a policeman, Ed Hall, with one eye fixed cautiously on the front seat where Clara sat, started to lead Joe Wainsworth away. “Come on now, we won’t hurt you,” he said reassuringly, and had got his man free of the car when he broke away. Springing back into the rear seat the crazed man turned to look at the crowd. A sob broke from his lips. For a moment he stood trembling with fright, and then turning, he for the first time saw Hugh, the man in whose footsteps he had once crept in the darkness in Turner’s Pike, the man who had invented the machine by which the earnings of a lifetime had been swept away. “It wasn’t me. You did it. You killed Jim Gibson,” he screamed, and springing forward sank his fingers and teeth into Hugh’s neck.
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CHAPTER XXIII
ONE DAY IN THE MONTH of October, four years after the time of his first motor ride with Clara and Tom, Hugh went on a business trip to the city of Pittsburgh. He left Bidwell in the morning and got to the steel city at noon. At three o’clock his business was finished and he was ready to return.
Although he had not yet realized it, Hugh’s career as a successful inventor had received a sharp check. The trick of driving directly at the point, of becoming utterly absorbed in the thing before him, had been lost. He went to Pittsburgh to see about the casting of new parts for the hay-loading machine, but what he did in Pittsburgh was of no importance to the men who would manufacture and sell that worthy, labor-saving tool. Although he did not know it, a young man from Cleveland, in the employ of Tom and Steve, had already done what Hugh was striving half-heartedly to do. The machine had been finished and ready to market in October three years before, and after repeated tests a lawyer had made formal application for patent. Then it was discovered that an Iowa man had already made application for and been granted a patent on a similar apparatus.
When Tom came to the shop and told him what had happened Hugh had been ready
to drop the whole matter, but that was not Tom’s notion. “The devil!” he said. “Do you think we’re going to waste all this money and labor?”
Drawings of the Iowa man’s machine were secured, and Tom set Hugh at the task of doing what he called “getting round” the other fellow’s patents. “Do the best you can and we’ll go ahead,” he said. “You see we’ve got the money and that means power. Make what changes you can and then we’ll go on with our manufacturing plans. We’ll whipsaw this other fellow through the courts. We’ll fight him till he’s sick of fight and then we’ll buy him out cheap. I’ve had the fellow looked up and he hasn’t any money and is a boozer besides. You go ahead. We’ll get that fellow all right.”
Hugh had tried valiantly to go along the road marked out for him by his father-in-law and had put aside other plans to rebuild the machine he had thought of as completed and out of the way. He made new parts, changed other parts, studied the drawings of the Iowa man’s machine, did what he could to accomplish his task.
Nothing happened. A conscientious determination not to infringe on the work of the Iowa man stood in his way.
Then something did happen. At night as he sat alone in his shop after a long study of the drawings of the other man’s machine, he put them aside and sat staring into the darkness beyond the circle of light cast by his lamp. He forgot the machine and thought of the unknown inventor, the man far away over forests, lakes and rivers, who for months had worked on the same problem that had occupied his mind. Tom had said the man had no money and was a boozer. He could be defeated, bought cheap. He was himself at work on the instrument of the man’s defeat.
Hugh left his shop and went for a walk, and the problem connected with the twisting of the iron and steel parts of the hay-loading apparatus into new forms was again left unsolved. The Iowa man had become a distinct, almost understandable personality to Hugh. Tom had said he drank, got drunk. His own father had been a drunkard. Once a man, the very man who had been the instrument of his own coming to Bidwell, had taken it for granted he was a drunkard. He wondered if some twist of life might not have made him one.
Thinking of the Iowa man, Hugh began to think of other men. He thought of his father and of himself. When he was striving to come out of the filth, the flies, the poverty, the fishy smells, the shadowy dreams of his life by the river, his father had often tried to draw him back into that life. In imagination he saw before him the dissolute man who had bred him. On afternoons of summer days in the river town, when Henry Shepard was not about, his father sometimes came to the station where he was employed. He had begun to earn a little money and his father wanted it to buy drinks. Why?
There was a problem for Hugh’s mind, a problem that could not be solved in wood and steel. He walked and thought about it when he should have been making new parts for the hay-loading apparatus. He had lived but little in the life of the imagination, had been afraid to live that life, had been warned and re-warned against living it. The shadowy figure of the unknown inventor in the state of Iowa, who had been brother to himself, who had worked on the same problems and had come to the same conclusions, slipped away, followed by the almost equally shadowy figure of his father. Hugh tried to think of himself and his own life.
For a time that seemed a simple and easy way out of the new and intricate task he had set for his mind. His own life was a matter of history. He knew about himself. Having walked far out of town, he turned and went back toward his shop. His way led through the new city that had grown up since his coming to Bidwell. Turner’s Pike that had been a country road along which on summer evenings lovers strolled to the Wheeling station and Pickleville was now a street. All that section of the new city was given over to workers’ homes and here and there a store had been built. The Widow McCoy’s place was gone and in its place was a warehouse, black and silent under the night sky. How grim the street in the late night! The berry pickers who once went along the road at evening were now gone forever. Like Ezra French’s sons they had perhaps become factory hands. Apple and cherry trees once grew along the road. They had dropped their blossoms on the heads of strolling lovers. They also were gone. Hugh had once crept along the road at the heels of Ed Hall, who walked with his arm about a girl’s waist. He had heard Ed complaining of his lot in life and crying out for new times. It was Ed Hall who had introduced the piecework plan in the factories of Bidwell and brought about the strike, during which three men had been killed and ill-feeling engendered in hundreds of silent workers. That strike had been won by Tom and Steve and they had since that time been victorious in a larger and more serious strike. Ed Hall was now at the head of a new factory being built along the Wheeling tracks. He was growing fat and was prosperous.
When Hugh got to his shop he lighted his lamp and again got out the drawings he had come from home to study. They lay unnoticed on the desk. He looked at his watch. It was two o’clock. “Clara may be awake. I must go home,” he thought vaguely. He now owned his own motor car and it stood in the road before the shop. Getting in he drove away into the darkness over the bridge, out of Turner’s Pike and along a street lined with factories and railroad sidings. Some of the factories were working and were ablaze with lights. Through lighted windows he could see men stationed along benches and bending over huge, iron machines. He had come from home that evening to study the work of an unknown man from the far away state of Iowa, to try to circumvent that man. Then he had gone to walk and to think of himself and his own life. “The evening has been wasted. I have done nothing,” he thought gloomily as his car climbed up a long street lined with the homes of the wealthier citizens of his town and turned into the short stretch of Medina Road still left between the town and the Butterworth farmhouse.
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On the day when he went to Pittsburgh, Hugh got to the station where he was to take the homeward train at three, and the train did not leave until four. He went into a big waiting-room and sat on a bench in a corner. After a time he arose and going to a stand bought a newspaper, but did not read it. It lay unopened on the bench beside him. The station was filled with men, women, and children who moved restlessly about. A train came in and a swarm of people departed, were carried into faraway parts of the country, while new people came into the station from a nearby street. He looked at those who were going out into the train shed. “It may be that some of them are going to that town in Iowa where that fellow lives,” he thought. It was odd how thoughts of the unknown Iowa man clung to him.
One day, during the same summer and but a few months earlier, Hugh had gone to the town of Sandusky, Ohio, on the same mission that had brought him to Pittsburgh. How many parts for the hay-loading machine had been cast and later thrown away! They did the work, but he decided each time that he had infringed on the other man’s machine. When that happened he did not consult Tom. Something within him warned him against doing that. He destroyed the part. “It wasn’t what I wanted,” he told Tom who had grown discouraged with his son-in-law but did not openly voice his dissatisfaction. “Oh, well, he’s lost his pep, marriage has taken the life out of him. We’ll have to get some one else on the job,” he said to Steve, who had entirely recovered from the wound received at the hands of Joe Wainsworth.
On that day when he went to Sandusky, Hugh had several hours to wait for his homebound train and went to walk by the shores of a bay. Some brightly colored stones attracted his attention and he picked several of them up and put them in his pockets. In the station at Pittsburgh he took them out and held them in his hand. A light came in at a window, a long, slanting light that played over the stones. His roving, disturbed mind was caught and held. He rolled the stones back and forth. The colors blended and then separated again. When he raised his eyes, a woman and a child on a nearby bench, also attracted by the flashing bit of color held like a flame in his hand, were looking at him intently.
He was confused and walked out of the station into the street. “What a silly fellow I have become, playing with colored stones
like a child,” he thought, but at the same time put the stones carefully into his pockets.
Ever since that night when he had been attacked in the motor, the sense of some indefinable, inner struggle had been going on in Hugh, as it went on that day in the station at Pittsburgh and on the night in the shop, when he found himself unable to fix his attention on the prints of the Iowa man’s machine. Unconsciously and quite without intent he had come into a new level of thought and action. He had been an unconscious worker, a doer and was now becoming something else. The time of the comparatively simple struggle with definite things, with iron and steel, had passed. He fought to accept himself, to understand himself, to relate himself with the life about him. The poor white, son of the defeated dreamer by the river, who had forced himself in advance of his fellows along the road of mechanical development, was still in advance of his fellows of the growing Ohio towns. The struggle he was making was the struggle his fellows of another generation would one and all have to make.
Hugh got into his home-bound train at four o’clock and went into the smoking car. The somewhat distorted and twisted fragment of thoughts that had all day been playing through his mind stayed with him. “What difference does it make if the new parts I have ordered for the machine have to be thrown away?” he thought. “If I never complete the machine, it’s all right. The one the Iowa man had made does the work.”
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