The car came to the first of the houses of the town, long rows of cheaply built frame houses standing in what had once been Ezra French's cabbage patch, where Hugh had crawled on the ground in the moonlight, working out the mechanical problems that confronted him in the building of his plant-setting machine. Suddenly the distraught and frightened man crouched on the floor of the car, raised himself on his hands and lurched forward, trying to spring over the side. Ed Hall caught him by the arm and jerked him back. He drew back his arm to strike again but Clara's voice, cold and intense with passion, stopped him. “If you touch him, I'll kill you,” she said. “No matter what he does, don't you dare strike him again.” Tom drove the car slowly through the streets of Bidwell to the door of a police station. Word of the return of the murderer had run ahead, and a crowd had gathered. Although it was past two o'clock the lights still burned in stores and saloons, and crowds stood at every corner. With the aid of a policeman, Ed Hall, with one eye fixed cautiously on the front seat where Clara sat, started to lead Joe Wainsworth away. “Come on now, we won't hurt you,” he said reassuringly, and had got his man free of the car when he broke away. Springing back into the rear seat the crazed man turned to look at the crowd. A sob broke from his lips. For a moment he stood trembling with fright, and then turning, he for the first time saw Hugh, the man in whose footsteps he had once crept in the darkness in Turner's Pike, the man who had invented the machine by which the earnings of a lifetime had been swept away. “It wasn't me. You did it. You killed Jim Gibson,” he screamed, and springing forward sank his fingers and teeth into Hugh's neck. CHAPTER XXIII One day in the month of October, four years after the time of his first motor ride with Clara and Tom, Hugh went on a business trip to the city of Pittsburgh. He left Bidwell in the morning and got to the steel city at noon. At three o'clock his business was finished and he was ready to return. Although he had not yet realized it, Hugh's career as a successful inventor had received a sharp check. The trick of driving directly at the point, of becoming utterly absorbed in the thing before him, had been lost. He went to Pittsburgh to see about the casting of new parts for the hay-loading machine, but what he did in Pittsburgh was of no importance to the men who would manufacture and sell that worthy, labor-saving tool. Although he did not know it, a young man from Cleveland, in the employ of Tom and Steve, had already done what Hugh was striving half-heartedly to do. The machine had been finished and ready to market in October three years before, and after repeated tests a lawyer had made formal application for patent. Then it was discovered that an Iowa man had already made application for and been granted a patent on a similar apparatus.