Hugh's first inventive effort stirred the town of Bidwell deeply. When
word of it ran about, the men who had been listening to the talk of
Judge Horace Hanby and whose minds had turned toward the arrival of the
new forward-pushing impulse in American life thought they saw in Hugh
the instrument of its coming to Bidwell. From the day of his coming to
live among them, there had been much curiosity in the stores and houses
regarding the tall, gaunt, slow-speaking stranger at Pickleville. George
Pike had told Birdie Spinks the druggist how Hugh worked all day over
books, and how he made drawings for parts of mysterious machines and
left them on his desk in the telegraph office. Birdie Spinks told others
and the tale grew. When Hugh walked alone in the streets during the
evening and thought no one took account of his presence, hundreds of
pairs of curious eyes followed him about.
A tradition in regard to the telegraph operator began to grow up. The
tradition made Hugh a gigantic figure, one who walked always on a plane
above that on which other men lived. In the imagination of his fellow
citizens of the Ohio town, he went about always thinking great thoughts,
solving mysterious and intricate problems that had to do with the new
mechanical age Judge Hanby talked about to the eager listeners in the
drug-store. An alert, talkative people saw among them one who could not
talk and whose long face was habitually serious, and could not think
of him as having daily to face the same kind of minor problems as
themselves.
The Bidwell young man who had come down to the Wheeling station with a
group of other young men, who had seen the evening train go away to
the south, who had met at the station one of the town girls and had, in
order to escape the others and be alone with her, taken her to the pump
in George Pike's yard on the pretense of wanting a drink, walked away
with her into the darkness of the summer evening with his mind fixed
on Hugh. The young man's name was Ed Hall and he was apprentice to Ben
Peeler, the carpenter who had sent his son to Cleveland to a technical
school. He wanted to marry the girl he had met at the station and
did not see how he could manage it on his salary as a carpenter's
apprentice. When he looked back and saw Hugh standing on the station
platform, he took the arm he had put around the girl's waist quickly
away and began to talk. “I'll tell you what,” he said earnestly, “if
things don't pretty soon get on the stir around here I'm going to get
out. I'll go over by Gibsonburg and get a job in the oil fields, that's
what I'll do. I got to have more money.” He sighed heavily and looked
over the girl's head into the darkness. “They say that telegraph fellow
back there at the station is up to something,” he ventured. “It's all
the talk. Birdie Spinks says he is an inventor; says George Pike told
him; says he is working all the time on new inventions to do things by
machinery; that his passing off as a telegraph operator is only a bluff.
Some think maybe he was sent here to see about starting a factory to
make one of his inventions, sent by rich men maybe in Cleveland or some
other place. Everybody says they'll bet there'll be factories here in
Bidwell before very long now. I wish I knew. I don't want to go away if
I don't have to, but I got to have more money. Ben Peeler won't never
give me a raise so I can get married or nothing. I wish I knew that
fellow back there so I could ask him what's up. They say he's smart. I
suppose he wouldn't tell me nothing. I wish I was smart enough to invent
something and maybe get rich. I wish I was the kind of fellow they say
he is.”
Ed Hall again put his arm about the girl's waist and walked away. He
forgot Hugh and thought of himself and of how he wanted to marry the
girl whose young body nestled close to his own--wanted her to be utterly
his. For a few hours he passed out of Hugh's growing sphere of influence
on the collective thought of the town, and lost himself in the immediate
deliciousness of kisses.
And as he passed out of Hugh's influence others came in. On Main Street
in the evening every one speculated on the Missourian's purpose in
coming to Bidwell. The forty dollars a month paid him by the Wheeling
railroad could not have tempted such a man. They were sure of that.
Steve Hunter the jeweler's son had returned to town from a course in
a business college at Buffalo, New York, and hearing the talk became
interested. Steve had in him the making of a live man of affairs, and
he decided to investigate. It was not, however, Steve's method to go
at things directly, and he was impressed by the notion, then abroad in
Bidwell, that Hugh had been sent to town by some one, perhaps by a group
of capitalists who intended to start factories there.
Steve thought he would go easy. In Buffalo, where he had gone to the
business college, he had met a girl whose father, E. P. Horn, owned
a soap factory; had become acquainted with her at church and had been
introduced to her father. The soap maker, an assertive positive man who
manufactured a product called Horn's Household Friend Soap, had his own
notion of what a young man should be and how he should make his way
in the world, and had taken pleasure in talking to Steve. He told the
Bidwell jeweler's son of how he had started his own factory with but
little money and had succeeded and gave Steve many practical hints on
the organization of companies. He talked a great deal of a thing called
“control.” “When you get ready to start for yourself keep that in mind,”
he said. “You can sell stock and borrow money at the bank, all you can
get, but don't give up control. Hang on to that. That's the way I made
my success. I always kept the control.”
Steve wanted to marry Ernestine Horn, but felt that he should show what
he could do as a business man before he attempted to thrust himself into
so wealthy and prominent a family. When he returned to his own town
and heard the talk regarding Hugh McVey and his inventive genius, he
remembered the soap maker's words regarding control, and repeated them
to himself. One evening he walked along Turner's Pike and stood in the
darkness by the old pickle factory. He saw Hugh at work under a lamp in
the telegraph office and was impressed. “I'll lay low and see what
he's up to,” he told himself. “If he's got an invention, I'll get up a
company. I'll get money in and I'll start a factory. The people here'll
tumble over each other to get into a thing like that. I don't believe
any one sent him here. I'll bet he's just an inventor. That kind always
are queer. I'll keep my mouth shut and watch my chance. If there is
anything starts, I'll start it and I'll get into control, that's what
I'll do, I'll get into control.”
* * * * *
In the country stretching away north beyond the fringe of small berry
farms lying directly about town, were other and larger farms. The land
that made up these larger farms was also rich and raised big crops.
Great stretches of it were planted to cabbage for which a market had
been built up in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati. Bidwell was
often in derision called Cabbageville by the citizens of nearby towns.
One of the largest of the cabbage farms belonged to a man named Ezra
French, and was situated on Turner's Pike, two miles from town and a
mile beyond the Wheeling station.
On spring evenings when it was dark and silent about the station
and when the air was heavy with the smell of new growth and of land
fresh-turned by the plow, Hugh got out of his chair in the telegraph
office and walked in the soft darkness. He went along Turner's Pike to
town, saw groups of men standing on the sidewalks before the stores and
young girls walking arm in arm along the street, and then came back to
the silent station. Into his long and habitually cold body the warmth
of desire began to creep. The spring rains came and soft winds blew down
from the hill country to the south. One evening when the moon shone he
went around the old pickle factory to where the creek went chattering
under leaning willow trees, and as he stood in the heavy shadows by the
factory wall, tried to imagine himself as one who had become suddenly
clean-limbed, graceful, and agile. A bush grew beside the stream near
the factory and he took hold of it with his powerful hands and tore it
out by the roots. For a moment the strength in his shoulders and arms
gave him an intense masculine satisfaction. He thought of how powerfully
he could hold the body of a woman against his body and the spark of the
fires of spring that had touched him became a flame. He felt new-made
and tried to leap lightly and gracefully across the stream, but stumbled
and fell in the water. Later he went soberly back to the station and
tried again to lose himself in the study of the problems he had found in
his books.
The Ezra French farm lay beside Turner's Pike a mile north of the
Wheeling station and contained two hundred acres of land of which a
large part was planted to cabbages. It was a profitable crop to raise
and required no more care than corn, but the planting was a terrible
task. Thousands of plants that had been raised from seeds planted in a
seed-bed back of the barn had to be laboriously transplanted. The plants
were tender and it was necessary to handle them carefully. The planter
crawled slowly and painfully along, and from the road looked like a
wounded beast striving to make his way to a hole in a distant wood. He
crawled forward a little and then stopped and hunched himself up into
a ball-like mass. Taking the plant, dropped on the ground by one of
the plant droppers, he made a hole in the soft ground with a small
three-cornered hoe, and with his hands packed the earth about the plant
roots. Then he crawled on again.
Ezra the cabbage farmer had come west from one of the New England states
and had grown comfortably wealthy, but he would not employ extra labor
for the plant setting and the work was done by his sons and daughters.
He was a short, bearded man whose leg had been broken in his youth by a
fall from the loft of a barn. As it had not mended properly he could
do little work and limped painfully about. To the men of Bidwell he was
known as something of a wit, and in the winter he went to town every
afternoon to stand in the stores and tell the Rabelaisian stories for
which he was famous; but when spring came he became restlessly active,
and in his own house and on the farm, became a tyrant. During the time
of the cabbage setting he drove his sons and daughters like slaves.
When in the evening the moon came up, he made them go back to the fields
immediately after supper and work until midnight. They went in sullen
silence, the girls to limp slowly along dropping the plants out of
baskets carried on their arms, and the boys to crawl after them and set
the plants. In the half darkness the little group of humans went slowly
up and down the long fields. Ezra hitched a horse to a wagon and brought
the plants from the seed-bed behind the barn. He went here and there
swearing and protesting against every delay in the work. When his wife,
a tired little old woman, had finished the evening's work in the house,
he made her come also to the fields. “Come, come,” he said, sharply, “we
need every pair of hands we can get.” Although he had several thousand
dollars in the Bidwell bank and owned mortgages on two or three
neighboring farms, Ezra was afraid of poverty, and to keep his family at
work pretended to be upon the point of losing all his possessions. “Now
is our chance to save ourselves,” he declared. “We must get in a big
crop. If we do not work hard now we'll starve.” When in the field his
sons found themselves unable to crawl longer without resting, and stood
up to stretch their tired bodies, he stood by the fence at the field's
edge and swore. “Well, look at the mouths I have to feed, you lazies!”
he shouted. “Keep at the work. Don't be idling around. In two weeks
it'll be too late for planting and then you can rest. Now every plant
we set will help to save us from ruin. Keep at the job. Don't be idling
around.”
In the spring of his second year in Bidwell, Hugh went often in the
evening to watch the plant setters at work in the moonlight on the
French farm. He did not make his presence known but hid himself in
a fence corner behind bushes and watched the workers. As he saw the
stooped misshapen figures crawling slowly along and heard the words of
the old man driving them like cattle, his heart was deeply touched and
he wanted to protest. In the dim light the slowly moving figures of
women appeared, and after them came the crouched crawling men. They
came down the long row toward him, wriggling into his line of sight like
grotesquely misshapen animals driven by some god of the night to the
performance of a terrible task. An arm went up. It came down again
swiftly. The three-cornered hoe sank into the ground. The slow rhythm
of the crawler was broken. He reached with his disengaged hand for the
plant that lay on the ground before him and lowered it into the hole the
hoe had made. With his fingers he packed the earth about the roots of
the plant and then again began the slow crawl forward. There were four
of the French boys and the two older ones worked in silence. The younger
boys complained. The three girls and their mother, who were attending
to the plant dropping, came to the end of the row and turning, went away
into the darkness. “I'm going to quit this slavery,” one of the younger
boys said. “I'll get a job over in town. I hope it's true what they say,
that factories are coming.”
The four young men came to the end of the row and, as Ezra was not in
sight, stood a moment by the fence near where Hugh was concealed. “I'd
rather be a horse or a cow than what I am,” the complaining voice went
on. “What's the good being alive if you have to work like this?”
For a moment as he listened to the voices of the complaining workers,
Hugh wanted to go to them and ask them to let him share in their labor.
Then another thought came. The crawling figures came sharply into his
line of vision. He no longer heard the voice of the youngest of the
French boys that seemed to come out of the ground. The machine-like
swing of the bodies of the plant setters suggested vaguely to his mind
the possibility of building a machine that would do the work they were
doing. His mind took eager hold of that thought and he was relieved.
There had been something in the crawling figures and in the moonlight
out of which the voices came that had begun to awaken in his mind the
fluttering, dreamy state in which he had spent so much of his boyhood.
To think of the possibility of building a plant-setting machine was
safer. It fitted into what Sarah Shepard had so often told him was the
safe way of life. As he went back through the darkness to the railroad
station, he thought about the matter and decided that to become an
inventor would be the sure way of placing his feet at last upon the path
of progress he was trying to find.
Hugh became absorbed in the notion of inventing a machine that would
do the work he had seen the men doing in the field. All day he thought
about it. The notion once fixed in his mind gave him something tangible
to work upon. In the study of mechanics, taken up in a purely
amateur spirit, he had not gone far enough to feel himself capable of
undertaking the actual construction of such a machine, but thought
the difficulty might be overcome by patience and by experimenting with
combinations of wheels, gears and levers whittled out of pieces of wood.
From Hunter's Jewelry Store he got a cheap clock and spent days
taking it apart and putting it together again. He dropped the doing
of mathematical problems and sent away for books describing the
construction of machines. Already the flood of new inventions, that was
so completely to change the methods of cultivating the soil in America,
had begun to spread over the country, and many new and strange kinds
of agricultural implements arrived at the Bidwell freight house of
the Wheeling railroad. There Hugh saw a harvesting machine for cutting
grain, a mowing machine for cutting hay and a long-nosed strange-looking
implement that was intended to root potatoes out of the ground very much
after the method pursued by energetic pigs. He studied these carefully.
For a time his mind turned away from the hunger for human contact and
he was content to remain an isolated figure, absorbed in the workings of
his own awakening mind.
An absurd and amusing thing happened. After the impulse to try to invent
a plant-setting machine came to him, he went every evening to conceal
himself in the fence corner and watch the French family at their labors.
Absorbed in watching the mechanical movements of the men who crawled
across the fields in the moonlight, he forgot they were human. After
he had watched them crawl into sight, turn at the end of the rows, and
crawl away again into the hazy light that had reminded him of the dim
distances of his own Mississippi River country, he was seized with
a desire to crawl after them and to try to imitate their movements.
Certain intricate mechanical problems, that had already come into his
mind in connection with the proposed machine, he thought could be better
understood if he could get the movements necessary to plant setting
into his own body. His lips began to mutter words and getting out of the
fence corner where he had been concealed he began to crawl across the
field behind the French boys. “The down stroke will go so,” he muttered,
and bringing up his arm swung it above his head. His fist descended into
the soft ground. He had forgotten the rows of new set plants and crawled
directly over them, crushing them into the soft ground. He stopped
crawling and waved his arm about. He tried to relate his arms to the
mechanical arms of the machine that was being created in his mind.
Holding one arm stiffly in front of him he moved it up and down. “The
stroke will be shorter than that. The machine must be built close to the
ground. The wheels and the horses will travel in paths between the
rows. The wheels must be broad to provide traction. I will gear from the
wheels to get power for the operation of the mechanism,” he said aloud.
Hugh arose and stood in the moonlight in the cabbage field, his arms
still going stiffly up and down. The great length of his figure and
his arms was accentuated by the wavering uncertain light. The laborers,
aware of some strange presence, sprang to their feet and stood listening
and looking. Hugh advanced toward them, still muttering words and
waving his arms. Terror took hold of the workers. One of the woman plant
droppers screamed and ran away across the field, and the others ran
crying at her heels. “Don't do it. Go away,” the older of the French
boys shouted, and then he with his brothers also ran.
Hearing the voices Hugh stopped and stared about. The field was empty.
Again he lost himself in his mechanical calculations. He went back along
the road to the Wheeling station and to the telegraph office where he
worked half the night on a rude drawing he was trying to make of the
parts of his plant setting machine, oblivious to the fact that he had
created a myth that would run through the whole countryside. The French
boys and their sisters stoutly declared that a ghost had come into the
cabbage fields and had threatened them with death if they did not go
away and quit working at night. In a trembling voice their mother backed
up their assertion. Ezra French, who had not seen the apparition and did
not believe the tale, scented a revolution. He swore. He threatened the
entire family with starvation. He declared that a lie had been invented
to deceive and betray him.
However, the work at night in the cabbage fields on the French farm was
at an end. The story was told in the town of Bidwell, and as the entire
French family except Ezra swore to its truth, was generally believed.
Tom Foresby, an old citizen who was a spiritualist, claimed to have
heard his father say that there had been in early days an Indian
burying-ground on the Turner Pike.
The cabbage field on the French farm became locally famous. Within
a year two other men declared they had seen the figure of a gigantic
Indian dancing and singing a funeral dirge in the moonlight. Farmer
boys, who had been for an evening in town and were returning late at
night to lonely farmhouses, whipped their horses into a run when they
came to the farm. When it was far behind them they breathed more freely.
Although he continued to swear and threaten, Ezra never again succeeded
in getting his family into the fields at night. In Bidwell he declared
that the story of the ghost invented by his lazy sons and daughters had
ruined his chance for making a decent living out of his farm.