When Hugh got to his shop he lighted his lamp and again got out the
drawings he had come from home to study. They lay unnoticed on the desk.
He looked at his watch. It was two o'clock. “Clara may be awake. I must
go home,” he thought vaguely. He now owned his own motor car and it
stood in the road before the shop. Getting in he drove away into the
darkness over the bridge, out of Turner's Pike and along a street lined
with factories and railroad sidings. Some of the factories were working
and were ablaze with lights. Through lighted windows he could see men
stationed along benches and bending over huge, iron machines. He had
come from home that evening to study the work of an unknown man from the
far away state of Iowa, to try to circumvent that man. Then he had gone
to walk and to think of himself and his own life. “The evening has been
wasted. I have done nothing,” he thought gloomily as his car climbed up
a long street lined with the homes of the wealthier citizens of his town
and turned into the short stretch of Medina Road still left between the
town and the Butterworth farmhouse.
* * * * *
On the day when he went to Pittsburgh, Hugh got to the station where
he was to take the homeward train at three, and the train did not leave
until four. He went into a big waiting-room and sat on a bench in a
corner. After a time he arose and going to a stand bought a newspaper,
but did not read it. It lay unopened on the bench beside him. The
station was filled with men, women, and children who moved restlessly
about. A train came in and a swarm of people departed, were carried into
faraway parts of the country, while new people came into the station
from a nearby street. He looked at those who were going out into the
train shed. “It may be that some of them are going to that town in Iowa
where that fellow lives,” he thought. It was odd how thoughts of the
unknown Iowa man clung to him.
One day, during the same summer and but a few months earlier, Hugh had
gone to the town of Sandusky, Ohio, on the same mission that had brought
him to Pittsburgh. How many parts for the hay-loading machine had been
cast and later thrown away! They did the work, but he decided each time
that he had infringed on the other man's machine. When that happened he
did not consult Tom. Something within him warned him against doing that.
He destroyed the part. “It wasn't what I wanted,” he told Tom who had
grown discouraged with his son-in-law but did not openly voice his
dissatisfaction. “Oh, well, he's lost his pep, marriage has taken the
life out of him. We'll have to get some one else on the job,” he said to
Steve, who had entirely recovered from the wound received at the hands
of Joe Wainsworth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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