Steve Hunter decided that it was time something was done to wake up his
native town. The call of the spring wind awoke something in him as in
Hugh. It came up from the south bringing rain followed by warm fair
days. Robins hopped about on the lawns before the houses on the
residence streets of Bidwell, and the air was again sweet with the
pregnant sweetness of new-plowed ground. Like Hugh, Steve walked about
alone through the dark, dimly lighted residence streets during the
spring evenings, but he did not try awkwardly to leap over creeks in
the darkness or pull bushes out of the ground, nor did he waste his time
dreaming of being physically young, clean-limbed and beautiful.
Before the coming of his great achievements in the industrial field,
Steve had not been highly regarded in his home town. He had been a noisy
boastful youth and had been spoiled by his father. When he was twelve
years old what were called safety bicycles first came into use and for
a long time he owned the only one in town. In the evening he rode it up
and down Main Street, frightening the horses and arousing the envy
of the town boys. He learned to ride without putting his hands on the
handle-bars and the other boys began to call him Smarty Hunter and
later, because he wore a stiff, white collar that folded down over his
shoulders, they gave him a girl's name. “Hello, Susan,” they shouted,
“don't fall and muss your clothes.”
In the spring that marked the beginning of his great industrial
adventure, Steve was stirred by the soft spring winds into dreaming his
own kind of dreams. As he walked about through the streets, avoiding the
other young men and women, he remembered Ernestine, the daughter of the
Buffalo soap maker, and thought a great deal about the magnificence of
the big stone house in which she lived with her father. His body ached
for her, but that was a matter he felt could be managed. How he could
achieve a financial position that would make it possible for him to ask
for her hand was a more difficult problem. Since he had come back from
the business college to live in his home town, he had secretly, and at
the cost of two new five dollar dresses, arranged a physical alliance
with a girl named Louise Trucker whose father was a farm laborer,
and that left his mind free for other things. He intended to become a
manufacturer, the first one in Bidwell, to make himself a leader in the
new movement that was sweeping over the country. He had thought out
what he wanted to do and it only remained to find something for him to
manufacture to put his plans through. First of all he had selected with
great care certain men he intended to ask to go in with him. There was
John Clark the banker, his own father, E. H. Hunter the town jeweler,
Thomas Butterworth the rich farmer, and young Gordon Hart, who had a job
as assistant cashier in the bank. For a month he had been dropping hints
to these men of something mysterious and important about to happen. With
the exception of his father who had infinite faith in the shrewdness and
ability of his son, the men he wanted to impress were only amused. One
day Thomas Butterworth went into the bank and stood talking the matter
over with John Clark. “The young squirt was always a Smart-Aleck and
a blow-hard,” he said. “What's he up to now? What's he nudging and
whispering about?”
As he walked in the main street of Bidwell, Steve began to acquire
that air of superiority that later made him so respected and feared. He
hurried along with a peculiarly intense absorbed look in his eyes. He
saw his fellow townsmen as through a haze, and sometimes did not see
them at all. As he went along he took papers from his pocket, read
them hurriedly, and then quickly put them away again. When he did
speak--perhaps to a man who had known him from boyhood--there was in his
manner something gracious to the edge of condescension. One morning in
March he met Zebe Wilson the town shoemaker on the sidewalk before the
post-office. Steve stopped and smiled. “Well, good morning, Mr. Wilson,”
he said, “and how is the quality of leather you are getting from the
tanneries now?”
Word regarding this strange salutation ran about among the merchants
and artisans. “What's he up to now?” they asked each other. “Mr. Wilson,
indeed! Now what's wrong between that young squirt and Zebe Wilson?”
In the afternoon, four clerks from the Main Street stores and Ed Hall
the carpenter's apprentice, who had a half day off because of rain,
decided to investigate. One by one they went along Hamilton Street
to Zebe Wilson's shop and stepped inside to repeat Steve Hunter's
salutation. “Well, good afternoon, Mr. Wilson,” they said, “and how is
the quality of leather you are getting from the tanneries now?” Ed Hall,
the last of the five who went into the shop to repeat the formal and
polite inquiry, barely escaped with his life. Zebe Wilson threw a
shoemaker's hammer at him and it went through the glass in the upper
part of the shop door.
Once when Tom Butterworth and John Clark the banker were talking of the
new air of importance he was assuming, and half indignantly speculated
on what he meant by his whispered suggestion of something significant
about to happen, Steve came along Main Street past the front door of the
bank. John Clark called him in. The three men confronted each other and
the jeweler's son sensed the fact that the banker and the rich farmer
were amused by his pretensions. At once he proved himself to be what
all Bidwell later acknowledged him to be, a man who could handle men
and affairs. Having at that time nothing to support his pretensions he
decided to put up a bluff. With a wave of his hand and an air of knowing
just what he was about, he led the two men into the back room of the
bank and shut the door leading into the large room to which the general
public was admitted. “You would have thought he owned the place,” John
Clark afterward said with a note of admiration in his voice to young
Gordon Hart when he described what took place in the back room.
Steve plunged at once into what he had to say to the two solid moneyed
citizens of his town. “Well, now, look here, you two,” he began
earnestly. “I'm going to tell you something, but you got to keep still.”
He went to the window that looked out upon an alleyway and glanced about
as though fearful of being overheard, then sat down in the chair usually
occupied by John Clark on the rare occasions when the directors of the
Bidwell bank held a meeting. Steve looked over the heads of the two men
who in spite of themselves were beginning to be impressed. “Well,”
he began, “there is a fellow out at Pickleville. You have maybe heard
things said about him. He's telegraph operator out there. Perhaps you
have heard how he is always making drawings of parts of machines. I
guess everybody in town has been wondering what he's up to.”
Steve looked at the two men and then got nervously out of the chair
and walked about the room. “That fellow is my man. I put him there,” he
declared. “I didn't want to tell any one yet.”
The two men nodded and Steve became lost in the notion created in his
fancy. It did not occur to him that what he had just said was untrue.
He began to scold the two men. “Well, I suppose I'm on the wrong track
there,” he said. “My man has made an invention that will bring millions
in profits to those who get into it. In Cleveland and Buffalo I'm
already in touch with big bankers. There's to be a big factory built,
but you see yourself how it is, here I'm at home. I was raised as a boy
here.”
The excited young man plunged into an exposition of the spirit of the
new times. He grew bold and scolded the older men. “You know yourself
that factories are springing up everywhere, in towns all over the
State,” he said. “Will Bidwell wake up? Will we have factories here? You
know well enough we won't, and I know why. It's because a man like me
who was raised here has to go to a city to get money to back his plans.
If I talked to you fellows you would laugh at me. In a few years I might
make you more money than you have made in your whole lives, but what's
the use talking? I'm Steve Hunter; you knew me when I was a kid. You'd
laugh. What's the use my trying to tell you fellows my plans?”
Steve turned as though to go out of the room, but Tom Butterworth took
hold of his arm and led him back to a chair. “Now, you tell us what
you're up to,” he demanded. In turn he grew indignant. “If you've got
something to manufacture you can get backing here as well as any place,”
he said. He became convinced that the jeweler's son was telling the
truth. It did not occur to him that a Bidwell young man would dare lie
to such solid men as John Clark and himself. “You let them city bankers
alone,” he said emphatically. “You tell us your story. What you got to
tell?”
In the silent little room the three men stared at each other. Tom
Butterworth and John Clark in their turn began to have dreams. They
remembered the tales they had heard of vast fortunes made quickly by men
who owned new and valuable inventions. The land was at that time full of
such tales. They were blown about on every wind. Quickly they realized
that they had made a mistake in their attitude toward Steve, and were
anxious to win his regard. They had called him into the bank to bully
him and to laugh at him. Now they were sorry. As for Steve, he only
wanted to get away--to get by himself and think. An injured look crept
over his face. “Well,” he said, “I thought I'd give Bidwell a chance.
There are three or four men here. I have spoken to all of you and
dropped a hint of something in the wind, but I'm not ready to be very
definite yet.”
Seeing the new look of respect in the eyes of the two men Steve
became bold. “I was going to call a meeting when I was ready,” he said
pompously. “You two do what I've been doing. You keep your mouths shut.
Don't go near that telegraph operator and don't talk to a soul. If you
mean business I'll give you a chance to make barrels of money, more'n
you ever dreamed of, but don't be in a hurry.” He took a bundle of
letters out of his inside coat pocket, and beat with them on the edge
of the table that occupied the center of the room. Another bold thought
came into his mind.
“I've got letters here offering me big money to take my factory either
to Cleveland or Buffalo,” he declared emphatically. “It isn't money
that's hard to get. I can tell you men that. What a man wants in his
home town is respect. He don't want to be looked on as a fool because he
tries to do something to rise in the world.”
* * * * *
Steve walked boldly out of the bank and into Main Street. When he had
got out of the presence of the two men he was frightened. “Well, I've
done it. I've made a fool of myself,” he muttered aloud. In the bank he
had said that Hugh McVey the telegraph operator was his man, that he had
brought the fellow to Bidwell. What a fool he had been. In his anxiety
to impress the two older men he had told a story, the falsehood of which
could be discovered in a few minutes. Why had he not kept his dignity
and waited? There had been no occasion for being so definite. He had
gone too far, had been carried away. To be sure he had told the two men
not to go near the telegraph operator, but that would no doubt but serve
to arouse their suspicions of the thinness of his story. They would talk
the matter over and start an investigation of their own. Then they would
find out he had lied. He imagined the two men as already engaged in a
whispered conversation regarding the probability of his tale. Like most
shrewd men he had an exalted notion regarding the shrewdness of others.
He walked a little away from the bank and then turned to look back. A
shiver ran over his body. Into his mind came the sickening fear that the
telegraph operator at Pickleville was not an inventor at all. The town
was full of tales, and in the bank he had taken advantage of that fact
to make an impression; but what proof had he? No one had seen one of the
inventions supposed to have been worked out by the mysterious
stranger from Missouri. There had after all been nothing but whispered
suspicions, old wives' tales, fables invented by men who had nothing to
do but loaf in the drug-store and make up stories.
The thought that Hugh McVey might not be an inventor overpowered him and
he put it quickly aside. He had something more immediate to think about.
The story of the bluff he had just made in the bank would be found out
and the whole town would rock with laughter at his expense. The young
men of the town did not like him. They would roll the story over on
their tongues. Ribald old fellows who had nothing else to do would take
up the story with joy and would elaborate it. Fellows like the cabbage
farmer, Ezra French, who had a talent for saying cutting things would
exercise it. They would make up imaginary inventions, grotesque, absurd
inventions. Then they would get young fellows to come to him and propose
that he take them up, promote them, and make every one rich. Men would
shout jokes at him as he went along Main Street. His dignity would be
gone forever. He would be made a fool of by the very school boys as
he had been in his youth when he bought the bicycle and rode it about
before the eyes of other boys in the evenings.
Steve hurried out of Main Street and went over the bridge that crossed
the river into Turner's Pike. He did not know what he intended to do,
but felt there was much at stake and that he would have to do something
at once. It was a warm, cloudy day and the road that led to Pickleville
was muddy. During the night before it had rained and more rain was
promised. The path beside the road was slippery, and so absorbed was he
that as he plunged along, his feet slipped out from under him and he
sat down in a small pool of water. A farmer driving past along the road
turned to laugh at him. “You go to hell,” Steve shouted. “You just mind
your own business and go to hell.”
The distracted young man tried to walk sedately along the path. The long
grass that grew beside the path wet his shoes, and his hands were wet
and muddy. Farmers turned on their wagon seats to stare at him. For some
obscure reason he could not himself understand, he was terribly afraid
to face Hugh McVey. In the bank he had been in the presence of men who
were trying to get the best of him, to make a fool of him, to have fun
at his expense. He had felt that and had resented it. The knowledge had
given him a certain kind of boldness; it had enabled his mind to make up
the story of the inventor secretly employed at his own expense and the
city bankers anxious to furnish him capital. Although he was terribly
afraid of discovery, he felt a little glow of pride at the thought of
the boldness with which he had taken the letters out of his pocket and
had challenged the two men to call his bluff.
Steve, however, felt there was something different about the man in
the telegraph office in Pickleville. He had been in town for nearly
two years and no one knew anything about him. His silence might be
indicative of anything. He was afraid the tall silent Missourian might
decide to have nothing to do with him, and pictured himself as being
brushed rudely aside, being told to mind his own business.
Steve knew instinctively how to handle business men. One simply created
the notion of money to be made without effort. He had done that to the
two men in the bank and it had worked. After all he had succeeded in
making them respect him. He had handled the situation. He wasn't such
a fool at that kind of a thing. The other thing he had to face might be
very different. Perhaps after all Hugh McVey was a big inventor, a
man with a powerful creative mind. It was possible he had been sent
to Bidwell by a big business man of some city. Big business men did
strange, mysterious things; they put wires out in all directions,
controlled a thousand little avenues for the creation of wealth.
Just starting out on his own career as a man of affairs, Steve had an
overpowering respect for what he thought of as the subtlety of men of
affairs. With all the other American youths of his generation he had
been swept off his feet by the propaganda that then went on and is
still going on, and that is meant to create the illusion of greatness
in connection with the ownership of money. He did not then know and, in
spite of his own later success and his own later use of the machinery
by which illusion is created, he never found out that in an industrial
world reputations for greatness of mind are made as a Detroit
manufacturer would make automobiles. He did not know that men are
employed to bring up the name of a politician so that he may be called
a statesman, as a new brand of breakfast food that it may be sold; that
most modern great men are mere illusions sprung out of a national hunger
for greatness. Some day a wise man, one who has not read too many books
but who has gone about among men, will discover and set forth a very
interesting thing about America. The land is vast and there is a
national hunger for vastness in individuals. One wants an Illinois-sized
man for Illinois, an Ohio-sized man for Ohio, and a Texas-sized man for
Texas.
To be sure, Steve Hunter had no notion of all this. He never did get a
notion of it. The men he had already begun to think of as great and to
try to imitate were like the strange and gigantic protuberances that
sometimes grow on the side of unhealthy trees, but he did not know it.
He did not know that throughout the country, even in that early day, a
system was being built up to create the myth of greatness. At the seat
of the American Government at Washington, hordes of somewhat clever
and altogether unhealthy young men were already being employed for the
purpose. In a sweeter age many of these young men might have become
artists, but they had not been strong enough to stand against the
growing strength of dollars. They had become instead newspaper
correspondents and secretaries to politicians. All day and every day
they used their minds and their talents as writers in the making of
puffs and the creating of myths concerning the men by whom they were
employed. They were like the trained sheep that are used at great
slaughter-houses to lead other sheep into the killing pens. Having
befouled their own minds for hire, they made their living by befouling
the minds of others. Already they had found out that no great cleverness
was required for the work they had to do. What was required was constant
repetition. It was only necessary to say over and over that the man
by whom they were employed was a great man. No proof had to be brought
forward to substantiate the claims they made; no great deeds had to
be done by the men who were thus made great, as brands of crackers or
breakfast food are made salable. Stupid and prolonged and insistent
repetition was what was necessary.
As the politicians of the industrial age have created a myth about
themselves, so also have the owners of dollars, the big bankers, the
railroad manipulators, the promoters of industrial enterprise. The
impulse to do so is partly sprung from shrewdness but for the most part
it is due to a hunger within to be of some real moment in the world.
Knowing that the talent that had made them rich is but a secondary
talent, and being a little worried about the matter, they employ men to
glorify it. Having employed a man for the purpose, they are themselves
children enough to believe the myth they have paid money to have
created. Every rich man in the country unconsciously hates his press
agent.
Although he had never read a book, Steve was a constant reader of the
newspapers and had been deeply impressed by the stories he had read
regarding the shrewdness and ability of the American captains of
industry. To him they were supermen and he would have crawled on his
knees before a Gould or a Cal Price--the commanding figures among
moneyed men of that day. As he went down along Turner's Pike that day
when industry was born in Bidwell, he thought of these men and of lesser
rich men of Cleveland and Buffalo, and was afraid that in approaching
Hugh he might be coming into competition with one of these men. As he
hurried along under the gray sky, he however realized that the time
for action had come and that he must at once put the plans that he had
formed in his mind to the test of practicability; that he must at once
see Hugh McVey, find out if he really did have an invention that could
be manufactured, and if he did try to secure some kind of rights of
ownership over it. “If I do not act at once, either Tom Butterworth or
John Clark will get in ahead of me,” he thought. He knew they were both
shrewd capable men. Had they not become well-to-do? Even during the talk
in the bank, when they had seemed to be impressed by his words, they
might well have been making plans to get the better of him. They would
act, but he must act first.
Steve hadn't the courage of the lie he had told. He did not have
imagination enough to understand how powerful a thing is a lie.
He walked quickly along until he came to the Wheeling Station at
Pickleville, and then, not having the courage to confront Hugh at once,
went past the station and crept in behind the deserted pickle factory
that stood across the tracks. Through a broken window at the back he
climbed, and crept like a thief across the earth floor until he came
to a window that looked out upon the station. A freight train rumbled
slowly past and a farmer came to the station to get a load of goods
that had arrived by freight. George Pike came running from his house to
attend to the wants of the farmer. He went back to his house and Steve
was left alone in the presence of the man on whom he felt all of his
future depended. He was as excited as a village girl in the presence of
a lover. Through the windows of the telegraph office he could see
Hugh seated at a desk with a book before him. The presence of the book
frightened him. He decided that the mysterious Missourian must be some
strange sort of intellectual giant. He was sure that one who could sit
quietly reading hour after hour in such a lonely isolated place could
be of no ordinary clay. As he stood in the deep shadows inside the
old building and stared at the man he was trying to find courage to
approach, a citizen of Bidwell named Dick Spearsman came to the station
and going inside, talked to the telegraph operator. Steve trembled with
anxiety. The man who had come to the station was an insurance agent who
also owned a small berry farm at the edge of town. He had a son who had
gone west to take up land in the state of Kansas, and the father thought
of visiting him. He came to the station to make inquiry regarding the
railroad fare, but when Steve saw him talking to Hugh, the thought came
into his mind that John Clark or Thomas Butterworth might have sent him
to the station to make an investigation of the truth of the statements
he had made in the bank. “It would be like them to do it that way,” he
muttered to himself. “They wouldn't come themselves. They would send
some one they thought I wouldn't suspect. They would play safe, damn
'em.”
Trembling with fear, Steve walked up and down in the empty factory.
Cobwebs hanging down brushed against his face and he jumped aside as
though a hand had reached out of the darkness to touch him. In the
corners of the old building shadows lurked and distorted thoughts
began to come into his head. He rolled and lighted a cigarette and then
remembered that the flare of the match could probably be seen from the
station. He cursed himself for his carelessness. Throwing the cigarette
on the earth floor he ground it under his heel. When at last Dick
Spearsman had disappeared up the road that led to Bidwell and he came
out of the old factory and got again into Turner's Pike, he felt that he
was in no shape to talk of business but nevertheless must act at once.
In front of the factory he stopped in the road and tried to wipe the mud
off the seat of his trousers with a handkerchief. Then he went to the
creek and washed his soiled hands. With wet hands he arranged his tie
and straightened the collar of his coat. He had an air of one about
to ask a woman to become his wife. Striving to look as important and
dignified as possible, he went along the station platform and into the
telegraph office to confront Hugh and to find out at once and finally
what fate the gods had in store for him.
* * * * *
It no doubt contributed to Steve's happiness in after life, in the
days when he was growing rich, and later when he reached out for public
honors, contributed to campaign funds, and even in secret dreamed of
getting into the United States Senate or being Governor of his state,
that he never knew how badly he overreached himself that day in his
youth when he made his first business deal with Hugh at the Wheeling
Station at Pickleville. Later Hugh's interest in the Steven Hunter
industrial enterprises was taken care of by a man who was as shrewd as
Steve himself. Tom Butterworth, who had made money and knew how to make
and handle money, managed such things for the inventor, and Steve's
chance was gone forever.
That is, however, a part of the story of the development of the town
of Bidwell and a story that Steve never understood. When he overreached
himself that day he did not know what he had done. He made a deal with
Hugh and was happy to escape the predicament he thought he had got
himself into when he talked too much to the two men in the bank.
Although Steve's father had always a great faith in his son's shrewdness
and when he talked to other men represented him as a peculiarly capable
and unappreciated man, the two did not in private get on well. In the
Hunter household they quarreled and snarled at each other. Steve's
mother had died when he was a small boy and his one sister, two years
older than himself, kept herself always in the house and seldom appeared
on the streets. She was a semi-invalid. Some obscure nervous disease had
twisted her body out of shape, and her face twitched incessantly.
One morning in the barn back of the Hunter house Steve, then a lad of
fourteen, was oiling his bicycle when his sister appeared and stood
watching him. A small wrench lay on the ground and she picked it up.
Suddenly and without warning she began to beat him on the head. He was
compelled to knock her down in order to tear the wrench out of her hand.
After the incident she was ill in bed for a month.
Elsie Hunter was always a source of unhappiness to her brother. As he
began to get up in life Steve had a growing passion for being respected
by his fellows. It got to be something of an obsession with him and
among other things he wanted very much to be thought of as one who had
good blood in his veins. A man whom he hired searched out his
ancestry, and with the exception of his immediate family it seemed
very satisfactory. The sister, with her twisted body and her face that
twitched so persistently, seemed to be everlastingly sneering at him. He
grew half afraid to come into her presence. After he began to grow rich
he married Ernestine, the daughter of the soap maker at Buffalo, and
when her father died she also had a great deal of money. His own father
died and he set up a household of his own. That was in the time when big
houses began to appear at the edge of the berry lands and on the hills
south of Bidwell. On his father's death Steve became guardian for his
sister. The jeweler had left a small estate and it was entirely in the
son's hands. Elsie lived with one servant in a small house in town and
was put in the position of being entirely dependent on her brother's
bounty. In a sense it might be said that she lived by her hatred of him.
When on rare occasions he came to her house she would not see him. A
servant came to the door and reported her asleep. Almost every month she
wrote a letter demanding that her share of her father's money be
handed over to her, but it did no good. Steve occasionally spoke to an
acquaintance of his difficulty with her. “I am more sorry for the woman
than I can say,” he declared. “It's the dream of my life to make the
poor afflicted soul happy. You see yourself that I provide her with
every comfort of life. Ours is an old family. I have it from an expert
in such matters that we are descendants of one Hunter, a courtier in the
court of Edward the Second of England. Our blood has perhaps become
a little thin. All the vitality of the family was centered in me.
My sister does not understand me and that has been the cause of much
unhappiness and heart burning, but I shall always do my duty by her.”
In the late afternoon of the spring day that was also the most eventful
day of his life, Steve went quickly along the Wheeling Station platform
to the door of the telegraph office. It was a public place, but before
going in he stopped, again straightened his tie and brushed his clothes,
and then knocked at the door. As there was no response he opened the
door softly and looked in. Hugh was at his desk but did not look up.
Steve went in and closed the door. By chance the moment of his entrance
was also a big moment in the life of the man he had come to see.
The mind of the young inventor, that had for so long been dreamy and
uncertain, had suddenly become extraordinarily clear and free. One of
the inspired moments that come to intense natures, working intensely,
had come to him. The mechanical problem he was trying so hard to work
out became clear. It was one of the moments that Hugh afterwards thought
of as justifying his existence, and in later life he came to live for
such moments. With a nod of his head to Steve he arose and hurried out
to the building that was used by the Wheeling as a freight warehouse.
The jeweler's son ran at his heels. On an elevated platform before the
freight warehouse sat an odd looking agricultural implement, a machine
for rooting potatoes out of the ground that had been received on the day
before and was now awaiting delivery to some farmer. Hugh dropped to his
knees beside the machine and examined it closely. Muttered exclamations
broke from his lips. For the first time in his life he was not
embarrassed in the presence of another person. The two men, the one
almost grotesquely tall, the other short of stature and already inclined
toward corpulency, stared at each other. “What is it you're inventing? I
came to see you about that,” Steve said timidly.
Hugh did not answer the question directly. He stepped across the narrow
platform to the freight warehouse and began to make a rude drawing on
the side of the building. Then he tried to explain his plant-setting
machine. He spoke of it as a thing already achieved. At the moment he
thought of it in that way. “I had not thought of the use of a
large wheel with the arms attached at regular intervals,” he said
absent-mindedly. “I will have to find money now. That'll be the next
step. It will be necessary to make a working model of the machine now. I
must find out what changes I'll have to make in my calculations.”
The two men returned to the telegraph office and while Hugh listened
Steve made his proposal. Even then he did not understand what the
machine that was to be made was to do. It was enough for him that a
machine was to be made and he wanted to share in its ownership at once.
As the two men walked back from the freight warehouse, his mind took
hold of Hugh's remark about getting money. Again he was afraid. “There's
some one in the background,” he thought. “Now I must make a proposal he
can't refuse. I mustn't leave until I've made a deal with him.”
Fairly carried away by his anxiety, Steve proposed to provide money out
of his own pocket to make the model of the machine. “We'll rent the old
pickle factory across the track,” he said, opening the door and pointing
with a trembling finger. “I can get it cheap. I'll have windows and
a floor put in. Then I'll get you a man to whittle out a model of the
machine. Allie Mulberry can do it. I'll get him for you. He can whittle
anything if you only show him what you want. He's half crazy and won't
get on to our secret. When the model is made, leave it to me, you just
leave it to me.”
Rubbing his hands together Steve walked boldly to The telegrapher's
desk and picking up a sheet of paper began to write out a contract. It
provided that Hugh Was to get a royalty of ten per cent. of the selling
price on the machine he had invented and that was to be manufactured
by a company to be organized by Steven Hunter. The contract also stated
that a promoting company was to be organized at once and money provided
for the experimental work Hugh had yet to do. The Missourian was
to begin getting a salary at once. He was to risk nothing, as Steve
elaborately explained. When he was ready for them mechanics were to be
employed and their salaries paid. When the contract had been written and
read aloud, a copy was made and Hugh, who was again embarrassed beyond
words, signed his name.
With a flourish of his hand Steve laid a little pile of money on the
desk. “That's for a starter,” he said and turned to frown at George Pike
who at that moment came to the door. The freight agent went quickly away
and the two men were left alone together. Steve shook hands with his new
partner. He went out and then came in again. “You understand,” he said
mysteriously. “The fifty dollars is your first month's salary. I was
ready for you. I brought it along. You just leave everything to me, just
you leave it to me.” Again he went out and Hugh was left alone. He saw
the young man go across the tracks to the old factory and walk up and
down before it. When a farmer came along and shouted at him, he did not
reply, but stepping back into the road swept the deserted old building
with his eyes as a general might have looked over a battlefield. Then
he went briskly down the road toward town and the farmer turned on his
wagon seat to stare after him.
Hugh McVey also stared. When Steve had gone away, he walked to the end
of the station platform and looked along the road toward town. It seemed
to him wonderful that he had at last held conversation with a citizen
of Bidwell. A little of the import of the contract he had signed came to
him, and he went into the station and got his copy of it and put it in
his pocket. Then he came out again. When he read it over and realized
anew that he was to be paid a living wage and have time and help to work
out the problem that had now become vastly important to his happiness,
it seemed to him that he had been in the presence of a kind of god.
He remembered the words of Sarah Shepard concerning the bright alert
citizens of eastern towns and realized that he had been in the presence
of such a being, that he had in some way become connected in his
new work with such a one. The realization overcame him completely.
Forgetting entirely his duties as a telegrapher, he closed the office
and went for a walk across the meadows and in the little patches of
woodlands that still remained standing in the open plain north of
Pickleville. He did not return until late at night, and when he did, had
not solved the puzzle as to what had happened. All he got out of it was
the fact that the machine he had been trying to make was of great and
mysterious importance to the civilization into which he had come to
live and of which he wanted so keenly to be a part. There seemed to him
something almost sacred in that fact. A new determination to complete
and perfect his plant-setting machine had taken possession of him.
* * * * *
The meeting to organize a promotion company that would in turn launch
the first industrial enterprise in the town of Bidwell was held in the
back room of the Bidwell bank one afternoon in June. The berry season
had just come to an end and the streets were full of people. A circus
had come to town and at one o'clock there was a parade. Before the
stores horses belonging to visiting country people stood hitched in two
long rows. The meeting in the bank was not held until four o'clock,
when the banking business was at an end for the day. It had been a hot,
stuffy afternoon and a storm threatened. For some reason the whole town
had an inkling of the fact that a meeting was to be held on that day,
and in spite of the excitement caused by the coming of the circus, it
was in everybody's mind. From the very beginning of his upward journey
in life, Steve Hunter had the faculty of throwing an air of mystery and
importance about everything he did. Every one saw the workings of the
machinery by which the myth concerning himself was created, but was
nevertheless impressed. Even the men of Bidwell who retained the ability
to laugh at Steve could not laugh at the things he did.
For two months before the day on which the meeting was held, the town
had been on edge. Every one knew that Hugh McVey had suddenly given
up his place in the telegraph office and that he was engaged in some
enterprise with Steve Hunter. “Well, I see he has thrown off the mask,
that fellow,” said Alban Foster, superintendent of the Bidwell schools,
in speaking of the matter to the Reverend Harvey Oxford, the minister of
the Baptist Church.
Steve saw to it that although every one was curious the curiosity was
unsatisfied. Even his father was left in the dark. The two men had a
sharp quarrel about the matter, but as Steve had three thousand dollars
of his own, left him by his mother, and was well past his twenty-first
year, there was nothing his father could do.
At Pickleville the windows and doors at the back of the deserted factory
were bricked up, and over the windows and the door at the front, where a
floor had been laid, iron bars specially made by Lew Twining the Bidwell
blacksmith had been put. The bars over the door locked the place at
night and gave the factory the air of a prison. Every evening before he
went to bed Steve walked to Pickleville. The sinister appearance of the
building at night gave him a peculiar satisfaction. “They'll find out
what I'm up to when I want 'em to,” he said to himself. Allie Mulberry
worked at the factory during the day. Under Hugh's direction he whittled
pieces of wood into various shapes, but had no idea of what he was
doing. No one but the half-wit and Steve Hunter were admitted to the
society of the telegraph operator. When Allie Mulberry came into the
Main Street at night, every one stopped him and a thousand questions
were asked, but he only shook his head and smiled foolishly. On
Sunday afternoons crowds of men and women walked down Turner's Pike to
Pickleville and stood looking at the deserted building, but no one tried
to enter. The bars were in place and window shades were drawn over the
windows. Above the door that faced the road there was a large sign.
“Keep Out. This Means You,” the sign said.
The four men who met Steve in the bank knew vaguely that some sort of
invention was being perfected, but did not know what it was. They spoke
in an offhand way of the matter to their friends and that increased the
general curiosity. Every one tried to guess what was up. When Steve was
not about, John Clark and young Gordon Hart pretended to know everything
but gave the impression of men sworn to secrecy. The fact that Steve
told them nothing seemed to them a kind of insult. “The young upstart,
I believe yet he's a bluff,” the banker declared to his friend, Tom
Butterworth.
On Main Street the old and young men who stood about before the stores
in the evening tried also to make light of the jeweler's son and the air
of importance he constantly assumed. They also spoke of him as a young
upstart and a windbag, but after the beginning of his connection with
Hugh McVey, something of conviction went out of their voices. “I read
in the paper that a man in Toledo made thirty thousand dollars out of an
invention. He got it up in less than a day. He just thought of it. It's
a new kind of way for sealing fruit cans,” a man in the crowd before
Birdie Spink's drug store absent-mindedly observed.
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.