The car driven by Tom Butterworth stopped at a town, and Tom got out to
fill his pockets with cigars and incidentally to enjoy the wonder and
admiration of the citizens. He was in an exalted mood and words flowed
from him. As the motor under its hood purred, so the brain under the
graying old head purred and threw forth words. He talked to the idlers
before the drug stores in the towns and, when the car started again and
they were out in the open country, his voice, pitched in a high key to
make itself heard above the purring engine, became shrill. Having struck
the shrill tone of the new age the voice went on and on.
But the voice and the swift-moving car did not stir Clara. She tried
not to hear the voice, and fixing her eyes on the soft landscape flowing
past under the moon, tried to think of other times and places. She
thought of nights when she had walked with Kate Chanceller through the
streets of Columbus, and of the silent ride she had taken with Hugh that
night they were married. Her mind went back into her childhood and she
remembered the long days she had spent riding with her father in this
same valley, going from farm to farm to haggle and dicker for the
purchase of calves and pigs. Her father had not talked then but
sometimes, when they had driven far and were homeward bound in the
failing light of evening, words did come to him. She remembered one
evening in the summer after her mother died and when her father often
took her with him on his drives. They had stopped for the evening meal
at the house of a farmer and when they got on the road again, the moon
came out. Something present in the spirit of the night stirred Tom, and
he spoke of his life as a boy in the new country and of his fathers and
brothers. “We worked hard, Clara,” he said. “The whole country was new
and every acre we planted had to be cleared.” The mind of the prosperous
farmer fell into a reminiscent mood and he spoke of little things
concerning his life as a boy and young man; the days of cutting wood
alone in the silent, white forest when winter came and it was time for
getting out firewood and logs for new farm buildings, the log rollings
to which neighboring farmers came, when great piles of logs were made
and set afire that space might be cleared for planting. In the winter
the boy went to school in the village of Bidwell and as he was even then
an energetic, pushing youth, already intent on getting on in the world,
he set traps in the forest and on the banks of streams and walked the
trap line on his way to and from school. In the spring he sent his pelts
to the growing town of Cleveland where they were sold. He spoke of the
money he got and of how he had finally saved enough to buy a horse of
his own.
Tom had talked of many other things on that night, of the spelling-downs
at the schoolhouse in town, of huskings and dances held in the barns and
of the evening when he went skating on the river and first met his wife.
“We took to each other at once,” he said softly. “There was a fire built
on the bank of the river and after I had skated with her we went and sat
down to warm ourselves.
“We wanted to get married to each other right away,” he told Clara. “I
walked home with her after we got tired of skating, and after that I
thought of nothing but how to get my own farm and have a home of my
own.”
As the daughter sat in the motor listening to the shrill voice of the
father, who now talked only of the making of machines and money, that
other man talking softly in the moonlight as the horse jogged slowly
along the dark road seemed very far away. All such men seemed very far
away. “Everything worth while is very far away,” she thought bitterly.
“The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far
from the old sweet things.”
The motor flew along the roads and Tom thought of his old longing to
own and drive fast racing horses. “I used to be half crazy to own fast
horses,” he shouted to his son-in-law. “I didn't do it, because owning
fast horses meant a waste of money, but it was in my mind all the time.
I wanted to go fast: faster than any one else.” In a kind of ecstasy he
gave the motor more gas and shot the speed up to fifty miles an hour.
The hot, summer air, fanned into a violent wind, whistled past his head.
“Where would the damned race horses be now,” he called, “where would
your Maud S. or your J.I.C. be, trying to catch up with me in this car?”
Yellow wheat fields and fields of young corn, tall now and in the light
breeze that was blowing whispering in the moonlight, flashed past,
looking like squares on a checker board made for the amusement of
the child of some giant. The car ran through miles of the low farming
country, through the main streets of towns, where the people ran out of
the stores to stand on the sidewalks and look at the new wonder, through
sleeping bits of woodlands--remnants of the great forests in which
Tom had worked as a boy--and across wooden bridges over small streams,
beside which grew tangled masses of elderberries, now yellow and
fragrant with blossoms.
At eleven o'clock having already achieved some ninety miles Tom turned
the car back. Running more sedately he again talked of the mechanical
triumphs of the age in which he had lived. “I've brought you whizzing
along, you and Clara,” he said proudly. “I tell you what, Hugh, Steve
Hunter and I have brought you along fast in more ways that one. You've
got to give Steve credit for seeing something in you, and you've got to
give me credit for putting my money back of your brains. I don't want to
take no credit from Steve. There's credit enough for all. All I got
to say for myself is that I saw the hole in the doughnut. Yes, sir, I
wasn't so blind. I saw the hole in the doughnut.”
Tom stopped to light a cigar and then drove on again. “I'll tell you
what, Hugh,” he said, “I wouldn't say so to any one not of my family,
but the truth is, I'm the man that's been putting over the big things
there in Bidwell. The town is going to be a city now and a mighty big
city. Towns in this State like Columbus, Toledo and Dayton, had better
look out for themselves. I'm the man has always kept Steve Hunter steady
and going straight ahead down the track, as this car goes with my hand
at the steering wheel.
“You don't know anything about it, and I don't want you should talk,
but there are new things coming to Bidwell,” he added. “When I was in
Chicago last month I met a man who has been making rubber buggy and
bicycle tires. I'm going in with him and we're going to start a plant
for making automobile-tires right in Bidwell. The tire business is bound
to be one of the greatest on earth and they ain't no reason why Bidwell
shouldn't be the biggest tire center ever known in the world.” Although
the car now ran quietly, Tom's voice again became shrill. “There'll
be hundreds of thousands of cars like this tearing over every road in
America,” he declared. “Yes, sir, they will; and if I calculate right
Bidwell'll be the great tire town of the world.”
For a long time Tom drove in silence, and when he again began to talk it
was a new mood. He told a tale of life in Bidwell that stirred both Hugh
and Clara deeply. He was angry and had Clara not been in the car would
have become violently profane.
“I'd like to hang the men who are making trouble in the shops in town,”
he broke forth. “You know who I mean, I mean the labor men who are
trying to make trouble for Steve Hunter and me. There's a socialist
talking every night on the street over there. I'll tell you, Hugh, the
laws of this country are wrong.” For ten minutes he talked of the labor
difficulties in the shops.
“They better look out,” he declared, and was so angry that his voice
rose to something like a suppressed scream. “We're inventing new
machines pretty fast now-days,” he cried. “Pretty soon we'll do all the
work by machines. Then what'll we do? We'll kick all the workers out and
let 'em strike till they're sick, that's what we'll do. They can talk
their fool socialism all they want, but we'll show 'em, the fools.”
His angry mood passed, and as the car turned into the last fifteen-mile
stretch of road that led to Bidwell, he told the tale that so deeply
stirred his passengers. Chuckling softly he told of the struggle of
the Bidwell harness maker, Joe Wainsworth, to prevent the sale of
machine-made harness in the community, and of his experience with his
employee, Jim Gibson. Tom had heard the tale in the bar-room of the
Bidwell House and it had made a profound impression on his mind. “I'll
tell you what,” he declared, “I'm going to get in touch with Jim
Gibson. That's the kind of man to handle workers. I only heard about him
to-night, but I'm going to see him to-morrow.”
Leaning back in his seat Tom laughed heartily as he told of the
traveling man who had visited Joe Wainsworth's shop and the placing of
the order for the factory-made harness. In some intangible way he felt
that when Jim Gibson laid the order for the harness on the bench in the
shop and by the force of his personality compelled Joe Wainsworth to
sign, he justified all such men as himself. In imagination he lived in
that moment with Jim, and like Jim the incident aroused his inclination
to boast. “Why, a lot of cheap laboring skates can't down such men as
myself any more than Joe Wainsworth could down that Jim Gibson,” he
declared. “They ain't got the character, you see, that's what the
matter, they ain't got the character.” Tom touched some mechanism
connected with the engine of the car and it shot suddenly forward.
“Suppose one of them labor leaders were standing in the road there,” he
cried. Instinctively Hugh leaned forward and peered into the darkness
through which the lights of the car cut like a great scythe, and on the
back seat Clara half rose to her feet. Tom shouted with delight and
as the car plunged along the road his voice rose in triumph. “The damn
fools!” he cried. “They think they can stop the machines. Let 'em try.
They want to go on in their old hand-made way. Let 'em look out. Let 'em
look out for such men as Jim Gibson and me.”
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.