Jim ran through the crowd of men and knocked the speaker to the sidewalk with a blow of his fist. Two of the other workmen seemed about to take up the cause of their fallen brother, but when in spite of their threats Jim stood his ground, they hesitated. They went to help the pale workman to his feet, and Jim went into the shop and closed the door. Climbing onto his horse he went to work, and the men went off along the sidewalk, still threatening to do what they had not done when the opportunity offered.
Joe worked in silence beside his employee and night began to settle down over the disturbed town. Above the clatter of many voices in the street outside could be heard the loud voice of the socialist orator who had taken up his stand for the evening at a nearby corner. When it had become quite dark outside, the old harness maker climbed down from his horse and going to the front door opened it softly and looked up and down the street. Then he closed it again and walked toward the rear of the shop. In his hand he held his harness-maker’s knife, shaped like a half moon and with an extraordinarily sharp circular edge. The harness maker’s wife had died during the year before and since that time he had not slept well at night. Often for a week at a time he did not sleep at all, but lay all night with wide-open eyes, thinking strange, new thoughts. In the daytime and when Jim was not about, he sometimes spent hours sharpening the moon-shaped knife on a piece of leather; and on the day after the incident of the placing of the order for the factory-made harness he had gone into a hardware store and bought a cheap revolver. He had been sharpening the knife as Jim talked to the workmen outside. When Jim began to tell the story of his humiliation he had stopped sewing at the broken harness in his vise and, getting up, had taken the knife from its hiding-place under a pile of leather on a bench to give its edge a few last caressing strokes.
Holding the knife in his hand Joe went with shambling steps toward the place where Jim sat absorbed in his work. A brooding silence seemed to lie over the shop and even outside in the street all noises suddenly ceased. Old Joe’s gait changed. As he passed behind the horse on which Jim sat, life came into his figure and he walked with a soft, cat-like tread. Joy shone in his eyes. As though warned of something impending, Jim turned and opened his mouth to growl at his employer, but his words never found their way to his lips. The old man made a peculiar half step, half leap past the horse, and the knife whipped through the air. At one stroke he had succeeded in practically severing Jim Gibson’s head from his body.
There was no sound in the shop. Joe threw the knife into a corner and ran quickly past the horse where the body of Jim Gibson sat upright. Then the body fell to the floor with a thump and there was the sharp rattle of heels on the board floor. The old man locked the front door and listened impatiently. When all was again quiet he went to search for the knife he had thrown away, but could not find it. Taking Jim’s knife from a bench under the hanging lamp, he stepped over the body and climbed upon his horse to turn out the lights.
For an hour Joe stayed in the shop with the dead man. The eighteen sets of harness shipped from a Cleveland factory had been received that morning, and Jim had insisted they be unpacked and hung on hooks along the shop walls. He had bullied Joe into helping hang the harnesses, and now Joe took them down alone. One by one they were laid on the floor and with Jim’s knife the old man cut each strap into little pieces that made a pile of litter on the floor reaching to his waist. When that was done he went again to the rear of the shop, again stepping almost carelessly over the dead man, and took the revolver out of the pocket of an overcoat that hung by the door.
Joe went out of the shop by the back door, and having locked it carefully, crept through an alleyway and into the lighted street where people walked up and down. The next place to his own was a barber shop, and as he hurried along the sidewalk, two young men came out and called to him. “Hey,” they called, “do you believe in factory-made harness now-days, Joe Wainsworth? Hey, what do you say? Do you sell factory-made harness?”
Joe did not answer, but stepping off the sidewalk, walked in the road. A group of Italian laborers passed, talking rapidly and making gestures with their hands. As he went more deeply into the heart of the growing city, past the socialist orator and a labor organizer who was addressing a crowd of men on another corner, his step became cat-like as it had been in the moment before the knife flashed at the throat of Jim Gibson. The crowds of people frightened him. He imagined himself set upon by a crowd and hanged to a lamp-post. The voice of the labor orator arose above the murmur of voices in the street. “We’ve got to take power into our hands. We’ve got to carry on our own battle for power,” the voice declared.
The harness maker turned a corner into a quiet street, his hand caressing affectionately the revolver in the side pocket of his coat. He intended to kill himself, but had not wanted to die in the same room with Jim Gibson. In his own way he had always been a very sensitive man and his only fear was that rough hands fall upon him before he had completed the evening’s work. He was quite sure that had his wife been alive she would have understood what had happened. She had always understood everything he did or said. He remembered his courtship. His wife had been a country girl and on Sundays, after their marriage, they had gone together to spend the day in the wood. After Joe had brought his wife to Bidwell they continued the practice. One of his customers, a well-to-do farmer, lived five miles north of town, and on his farm there was a grove of beech trees. Almost every Sunday for several years he got a horse from the livery stable and took his wife there. After dinner at the farmhouse, he and the farmer gossiped for an hour, while the women washed the dishes, and then he took his wife and went into the beech forest. No underbrush grew under the spreading branches of the trees, and when the two people had remained silent for a time, hundreds of squirrels and chipmunks came to chatter and play about them. Joe had brought nuts in his pocket and threw them about. The quivering little animals drew near and then with a flip of their tails scampered away. One day a boy from a neighboring farm came to the wood and shot one of the squirrels. It happened just as Joe and his wife came from the farmhouse and he saw the wounded squirrel hang from the branch of a tree, and then fall. It lay at his feet and his wife grew ill and leaned against him for support. He said nothing, but stared at the quivering thing on the ground. When it lay still the boy came and picked it up. Still Joe said nothing. Taking his wife’s arm he walked to where they were in the habit of sitting, and reached in his pocket for the nuts to scatter on the ground. The farm boy, who had felt the reproach in the eyes of the man and woman, had gone out of the wood. Suddenly Joe began to cry. He was ashamed and did not want his wife to see, and she pretended she had not seen.
On the night when he had killed Jim, Joe decided he would walk to the farm and the beech forest and there kill himself. He hurried past a long row of dark stores and warehouses in the newly built section of town and came to a residence street. He saw a man coming toward him and stepped into the stairway of a store building. The man stopped under a street lamp to light a cigar, and the harness maker recognized him. 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. Something danced before his eyes and his hands trembled so that he was afraid the gun he had taken out of his pocket would fall to the sidewalk. It wavered as he raised it and fired, but chance came to his assistance. Steve Hunter pitched forward to the sidewalk.
Without stopping to pick up the revolver that had fallen out of his hand, Joe now ran up a stairway and got into a dark, empty hall. He felt his way along a wall and came presently to another stairway, leading down. It brought him into an alleyway, and going along this he came out near the bridge that led over the river and into what in the old days had been Turner’s Pike, the road out which he had driven with h
is wife to the farm and the beech forest.
But one thing now puzzled Joe Wainsworth. He had lost his revolver and did not know how he was to manage his own death. “I must do it some way,” he thought, when at last, after nearly three hours steady plodding and hiding in fields to avoid the teams going along the road he got to the beech forest. He went to sit under a tree near the place where he had so often sat through quiet Sunday afternoons with his wife beside him. “I’ll rest a little and then I’ll think how I can do it,” he thought wearily, holding his head in his hands. “I mustn’t go to sleep. If they find me they’ll hurt me. They’ll hurt me before I have a chance to kill myself. They’ll hurt me before I have a chance to kill myself,” he repeated, over and over, holding his head in his hands and rocking gently back and forth.
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CHAPTER XXII
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.”
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