Nearly a year had been spent in stirring up the people of Bidwell to the point of becoming investors. Then things began to stir. The ground was broken for the erection of the factory. No one knew of the difficulties that had been encountered in attempting to perfect the machine and word was passed about that in actual tests in the fields it had proven itself entirely practical. The skeptical farmers who came into town on Saturdays were laughed at by the town enthusiasts. A field, that had been planted during one of the brief periods when the machine finding ideal soil conditions had worked perfectly, was left to grow. As when he operated the tiny model in the store window, Steve took no chances. He engaged Ed Hall to go at night and replace the plants that did not live. “It's fair enough,” he explained to Ed. “A hundred things can cause the plants to die, but if they die it'll be blamed on the machine. What will become of the town if we don't believe in the thing we're going to manufacture here?” The crowds of people, who in the evenings walked out along Turner's Pike to look at the field with its long rows of sturdy young cabbages, moved restlessly about and talked of the new days. From the field they went along the railroad tracks to the site of the factory. The brick walls began to mount up into the sky. Machinery began to arrive and was housed under temporary sheds against the time when it could be installed. An advance horde of workmen came to town and new faces appeared on Main Street in the evening. The thing that was happening in Bidwell happened in towns all over the Middle West. Out through the coal and iron regions of Pennsylvania, into Ohio and Indiana, and on westward into the States bordering on the Mississippi River, industry crept. Gas and oil were discovered in Ohio and Indiana. Over night, towns grew into cities. A madness took hold of the minds of the people. Villages like Lima and Findlay, Ohio, and like Muncie and Anderson in Indiana, became small cities within a few weeks. To some of these places, so anxious were the people to get to them and to invest their money, excursion trains were run. Town lots that a few weeks before the discovery of oil or gas could have been bought for a few dollars sold for thousands. Wealth seemed to be spurting out of the very earth. On farms in Indiana and Ohio giant gas wells blew the drilling machinery out of the ground, and the fuel so essential to modern industrial development rushed into the open. A wit, standing in the presence of one of the roaring gas wells exclaimed, “Papa, Earth has indigestion; he has gas on his stomach. His face will be covered with pimples.”