When Tom came to the shop and told him what had happened Hugh had been ready to drop the whole matter, but that was not Tom's notion. “The devil!” he said. “Do you think we're going to waste all this money and labor?” Drawings of the Iowa man's machine were secured, and Tom set Hugh at the task of doing what he called “getting round” the other fellow's patents. “Do the best you can and we'll go ahead,” he said. “You see we've got the money and that means power. Make what changes you can and then we'll go on with our manufacturing plans. We'll whipsaw this other fellow through the courts. We'll fight him till he's sick of fight and then we'll buy him out cheap. I've had the fellow looked up and he hasn't any money and is a boozer besides. You go ahead. We'll get that fellow all right.” Hugh had tried valiantly to go along the road marked out for him by his father-in-law and had put aside other plans to rebuild the machine he had thought of as completed and out of the way. He made new parts, changed other parts, studied the drawings of the Iowa man's machine, did what he could to accomplish his task. Nothing happened. A conscientious determination not to infringe on the work of the Iowa man stood in his way. Then something did happen. At night as he sat alone in his shop after a long study of the drawings of the other man's machine, he put them aside and sat staring into the darkness beyond the circle of light cast by his lamp. He forgot the machine and thought of the unknown inventor, the man far away over forests, lakes and rivers, who for months had worked on the same problem that had occupied his mind. Tom had said the man had no money and was a boozer. He could be defeated, bought cheap. He was himself at work on the instrument of the man's defeat. Hugh left his shop and went for a walk, and the problem connected with the twisting of the iron and steel parts of the hay-loading apparatus into new forms was again left unsolved. The Iowa man had become a distinct, almost understandable personality to Hugh. Tom had said he drank, got drunk. His own father had been a drunkard. Once a man, the very man who had been the instrument of his own coming to Bidwell, had taken it for granted he was a drunkard. He wondered if some twist of life might not have made him one. Thinking of the Iowa man, Hugh began to think of other men. He thought of his father and of himself. When he was striving to come out of the filth, the flies, the poverty, the fishy smells, the shadowy dreams of his life by the river, his father had often tried to draw him back into that life. In imagination he saw before him the dissolute man who had bred him. On afternoons of summer days in the river town, when Henry Shepard was not about, his father sometimes came to the station where he was employed. He had begun to earn a little money and his father wanted it to buy drinks. Why?