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In the midst of all this enjoyment of empire he never once violated that respectful awe with which the usher had found means to inspire him; but he by no means preserved the same regard for the principal master, an old illiterate German quack, who had formerly practised corn-cutting among the quality, and sold cosmetic washes to the ladies, together with teeth-powders, hair-dyeing liquors, prolific elixirs, and tinctures to sweeten the breath.
At the corner of Main and McKinley Streets and just beyond the place where three old buildings were being torn down to make room for the building of a new hotel, appeared a man who climbed upon a box and attacked, not the piece work prices at the corn-cutting machine plant, but the whole system that built and maintained factories where the wage scale of the workmen could be fixed by the whim or necessity of one man or a group of men.
As a matter of fact, I hung most of that sixteen dollars and fifty-nine cents' worth of paper myself. When I got back, my painters were about to begin cutting their corn. Westbury came, but at the end of the first day, when one of the up-stairs rooms was about finished, he also developed a violent interest in corn-cutting. I was thus abandoned to fate, also quite deserted.
The success of his corn-cutting machine and his car-dumping apparatus and the respect, amounting almost to worship, he sometimes saw in the eyes of the people of the Ohio town had fed his vanity. It was a time when all America was obsessed with one idea, and to the people of Bidwell nothing could be more important, necessary and vital to progress than the things Hugh had done.
The Queen, as usual, enjoyed and admired everything there was to admire the pretty jackets or "short gowns" of the rustic maidens; the "burns," clear as glass; the mossy stones; the peeps between the trees; the depth of the shadows; the corn-cutting or "shearing," when a patch of yellow oats broke the purple shadow of the moor; Ben-y-Ghlo standing like a mighty sentinel commanding the course of the Garry, as when many a lad "with his bonnet and white cockade," sped with fleet foot by the flashing waters, "leaving his mountains to follow Prince Charlie;" Chrianean, where the eagles sometimes sat; the sunsets when the sky was "crimson, golden red, and blue," and the hills "looked purple and lilac," till the hues grew softer and the outlines dimmer.
I own the rights to the corn-cutting machine and will take it somewhere else and manufacture it. I don't mind telling you that, if we split up, I will pretty well advertise what you three fellows did to the small investors after I asked you not to do it. You can all stay here and own your empty factory and get what satisfaction you can out of the love and respect you'll get from the people.
"Well, you can come in or stay out, just as you wish," he said a little sharply. "I'm going to get hold of that factory, if I can, and I'm going to manufacture corn-cutting machines. Already I have promises of orders enough to keep running for a year. I can't take you in with me and have it said around town you were one of the fellows who sold out the small investors.
One day he went to Cleveland and had a long talk with a banker there. Hugh was at work on a corn-cutting machine and already he had secured an option on it. "Perhaps when the time comes to sell the factory there'll be more than one bidder," he told Ernestine, the soap maker's daughter, who had married him within a month after the sale of the car-unloading device.
The men, two of them strikers from the corn-cutting machine plant, complained bitterly of the difficulty of supporting their families, and a third man, a fellow with a big black mustache who smoked a pipe, began to repeat some of the axioms in regard to industrialism and the class war he had picked up from the socialist orator.
Many things were on the move in the striving, hustling town on that evening. The system of checking on piece work, introduced by the superintendent Ed Hall in the corn-cutting machine plant, had brought on Bidwell's first industrial strike. The discontented workmen were not organized, and the strike was foredoomed to failure, but it had stirred the town deeply.
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