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Updated: June 7, 2025
After Jim came to work for him, Joe made in one year almost twice the amount he had lost in the failure of the plant-setting machine factory. The money was not invested in stock of any factory but lay in the bank. Still he was not happy.
The blustering and half intoxicated harness maker stood in the open shop door and told again and in detail the story of his triumph over his employer. Then another thought came and he spoke of the twelve hundred dollars Joe had lost in the stock, of the plant-setting machine company. "He lost his money and you fellows are going to get licked in this fight," he declared.
"I lost six hundred dollars in the plant-setting machine failure and this is all I get, to be played a trick on by a young suck like Ed Hall," a voice grumbled. Another voice took up the refrain. In the dim light Hugh could see the speaker, a man with a bent back, a product of the cabbage fields, who had come to town to find employment.
It was Steve Hunter, who had induced him to invest the twelve hundred dollars in the stock of the plant-setting machine company, the man who had brought the new times to Bidwell, the man who was at the bottom of all such innovations as machine-made harnesses. Joe had killed his employee, Jim Gibson, in cold anger, but now a new kind of anger took possession of him.
Clara Butterworth left Bidwell, Ohio, in September of the year in which Steve Hunter's plant-setting machine company went into the hands of a receiver, and in January of the next year that enterprising young man, together with Tom Butterworth, bought the plant. In March a new company was organized and at once began making Hugh's corn-cutting machine, a success from the beginning.
It was money he had earned in a long lifetime of effort and it had now bought a machine that would do the work of a hundred men. Already his money had increased by a hundred fold and he wondered why he could not be happy about the matter. On some days he was happy, and then his happiness was followed by an odd fit of depression. Suppose, after all, the plant-setting machine wouldn't work?
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.
The car-dumping apparatus, that had sold for two hundred thousand dollars, had given Steve Hunter money to buy the plant-setting machine factory, and with Tom Butterworth to start manufacturing the corn-cutters, had affected the lives of fewer people, but it had carried the Missourian's name into other places and had also made a new kind of poetry in railroad yards and along rivers at the back of cities where ships are loaded.
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.
And if sometimes in the intimacy of seed-sowing and plant-setting, the touch of the slenderer fingers sent a thrill through the browner ones, Bertram made no sign. He was careful always to be the cheerful, helpful assistant and that was all. Billy, it is true, was a little disturbed at being quite so much with Bertram.
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