On that day when he went to Sandusky, Hugh had several hours to wait for his homebound train and went to walk by the shores of a bay. Some brightly colored stones attracted his attention and he picked several of them up and put them in his pockets. In the station at Pittsburgh he took them out and held them in his hand. A light came in at a window, a long, slanting light that played over the stones. His roving, disturbed mind was caught and held. He rolled the stones back and forth. The colors blended and then separated again. When he raised his eyes, a woman and a child on a nearby bench, also attracted by the flashing bit of color held like a flame in his hand, were looking at him intently. He was confused and walked out of the station into the street. “What a silly fellow I have become, playing with colored stones like a child,” he thought, but at the same time put the stones carefully into his pockets. Ever since that night when he had been attacked in the motor, the sense of some indefinable, inner struggle had been going on in Hugh, as it went on that day in the station at Pittsburgh and on the night in the shop, when he found himself unable to fix his attention on the prints of the Iowa man's machine. Unconsciously and quite without intent he had come into a new level of thought and action. He had been an unconscious worker, a doer and was now becoming something else. The time of the comparatively simple struggle with definite things, with iron and steel, had passed. He fought to accept himself, to understand himself, to relate himself with the life about him. The poor white, son of the defeated dreamer by the river, who had forced himself in advance of his fellows along the road of mechanical development, was still in advance of his fellows of the growing Ohio towns. The struggle he was making was the struggle his fellows of another generation would one and all have to make. Hugh got into his home-bound train at four o'clock and went into the smoking car. The somewhat distorted and twisted fragment of thoughts that had all day been playing through his mind stayed with him. “What difference does it make if the new parts I have ordered for the machine have to be thrown away?” he thought. “If I never complete the machine, it's all right. The one the Iowa man had made does the work.” For a long time he struggled with that thought. Tom, Steve, all the Bidwell men with whom he had been associated, had a philosophy into which the thought did not fit. “When you put your hand to the plow do not turn back,” they said. Their language was full of such sayings. To attempt to do a thing and fail was the great crime, the sin against the Holy Ghost. There was unconscious defiance of a whole civilization in Hugh's attitude toward the completion of the parts that would help Tom and his business associates “get around” the Iowa man's patent.