That, however, came near happening. After the coming of his success, a thousand little voices began calling to him. The soft hands of women reached out of the masses of people about him, out of the old dwellers and new dwellers in the city that was growing up about the factories where his machines were being made in ever increasing numbers. New houses were constantly being built along Turner's Pike that led down to his workshop at Pickleville. Beside Allie Mulberry a dozen mechanics were now employed in his experimental shop. They helped Hugh with a new invention, a hay-loading apparatus on which he was at work, and also made special tools for use in the corn-cutter factory and the new bicycle factory. A dozen new houses had been built in Pickleville itself. The wives of the mechanics lived in the houses and occasionally one of them came to see her husband at Hugh's shop. He found it less and less difficult to talk to people. The workmen, themselves not given to the use of many words, did not think his habitual silence peculiar. They were more skilled than Hugh in the use of tools and thought it rather an accident that he had done what they had not done. As he had grown rich by that road they also tried their hand at inventions. One of them made a patent door hinge that Steve sold for ten thousand dollars, keeping half the money for his services, as he had done in the case of Hugh's car-dumping apparatus. At the noon hour the men hurried to their houses to eat and then came back to loaf before the factory and smoke their noonday pipes. They talked of money-making, of the price of food stuffs, of the advisability of a man's buying a house on the partial payment plan. Sometimes they talked of women and of their adventures with women. Hugh sat by himself inside the door of the shop and listened. At night after he had gone to bed he thought of what they had said. He lived in a house belonging to a Mrs. McCoy, the widow of a railroad section hand killed in a railroad accident, who had a daughter. The daughter, Rose McCoy, taught a country school and most of the year was away from home from Monday morning until late on Friday afternoon. Hugh lay in bed thinking of what his workmen had said of women and heard the old housekeeper moving about down stairs. Sometimes he got out of bed to sit by an open window. Because she was the woman whose life touched his most closely, he thought often of the school teacher. The McCoy house, a small frame affair with a picket fence separating it from Turner's Pike, stood with its back door facing the Wheeling Railroad. The section hands on the railroad remembered their former fellow workman, Mike McCoy, and wanted to be good to his widow. They sometimes dumped half decayed railroad ties over the fence into a potato patch back of the house. At night, when heavily loaded coal trains rumbled past, the brakemen heaved large chunks of coal over the fence. The widow awoke whenever a train passed.