At the front of the bank John Clark puffed at his cigar. He felt like a soldier weighing the chances of battle. Vaguely he thought of himself as a general, a kind of U. S. Grant of industry. The lives and happiness of many people, he told himself, depended on the clear working of his brain. “Well,” he thought, “when factories start coming to a town and it begins to grow as this town is growing no man can stop it. The fellow who thinks of individual men, little fellows with their savings invested, who may be hurt by an industrial failure, is just a weakling. Men have to face the duties life brings. The few men who see clearly have to think first of themselves. They have to save themselves in order that they may save others.” * * * * * Things kept on the stir in Bidwell and the gods of chance played into the hands of Steve Hunter. Hugh invented an apparatus for lifting a loaded coal-car off the railroad tracks, carrying it high up into the air and dumping its contents into a chute. By its use an entire car of coal could be emptied with a roaring rush into the hold of a ship or the engine room of a factory. A model of the new invention was made and a patent secured. Then Steve Hunter carried it off to New York. He received two hundred thousand dollars in cash for it, half of which went to Hugh. Steve's faith in the inventive genius of the Missourian was renewed and strengthened. He looked forward with a feeling almost approaching pleasure to the time when the town would be forced to face the fact that the plant-setting machine was a failure, and the factory with its new machinery would have to be thrown on the market. He knew that his associates in the promotion of the enterprise were secretly selling their stock. One day he went to Cleveland and had a long talk with a banker there. Hugh was at work on a corn-cutting machine and already he had secured an option on it. “Perhaps when the time comes to sell the factory there'll be more than one bidder,” he told Ernestine, the soap maker's daughter, who had married him within a month after the sale of the car-unloading device. He grew indignant when he told her of the disloyalty of the two men in the bank, and the rich farmer, Tom Butterworth. “They're selling their shares and letting the small stock-holders lose their money,” he declared. “I told 'em not to do it. Now if anything happens to spoil their plans they'll not have me to blame.”