All of Bidwell was looking at itself and asking itself questions. Ed
Hall, who had been a carpenter's apprentice earning but a few dollars
a week with his master, Ben Peeler, was now foreman in the corn-cutter
factory and received a salary of twenty-five dollars every Saturday
night. It was more money than he had ever dreamed of earning in a week.
On pay nights he dressed himself in his Sunday clothes and had himself
shaved at Joe Trotter's barber shop. Then he went along Main Street,
fingering the money in his pocket and half fearing he would suddenly
awaken and find it all a dream. He went into Wymer's tobacco store to
get a cigar, and old Claude Wymer came to wait on him. On the second
Saturday evening after he got his new position, the tobacconist, a
rather obsequious man, called him Mr. Hall. It was the first time such a
thing had happened and it upset him a little. He laughed and made a joke
of it. “Don't get high and mighty,” he said, and turned to wink at the
men loafing in the shop. Later he thought about the matter and was sorry
he had not accepted the new title without protest. “Well, I'm foreman,
and a lot of the young fellows I've always known and fooled around with
will be working under me,” he told himself. “I can't be getting thick
with them.”
Ed walked along the street feeling very keenly the importance of his new
place in the community. Other young fellows in the factory were getting
a dollar and a half a day. At the end of the week he got twenty-five
dollars, almost three times as much. The money was an indication of
superiority. There could be no doubt about that. Ever since he had been
a boy he had heard older men speak respectfully of men who possessed
money. “Get on in the world,” they said to young men, when they talked
seriously. Among themselves they did not pretend that they did not want
money. “It's money makes the mare go,” they said.
Down Main Street to the New York Central tracks Ed went, and then turned
out of the street and disappeared into the station. The evening train
had passed and the place was deserted. He went into the dimly lighted
waiting-room. An oil lamp, turned low, and fastened by a bracket to
the wall made a little circle of light in a corner. The room was like
a church in the early morning of a wintry day, cold and still. He went
hurriedly to the light, and taking the roll of money from his pocket,
counted it. Then he went out of the room and along the station platform
almost to Main Street, but was not satisfied. On an impulse he returned
to the waiting room again and, late in the evening on his way home, he
stopped there for a final counting of the money before he went to bed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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