BOOK TWO
CHAPTER III
Bidwell, Ohio, was an old town as the ages of towns go in the Central West,
long before Hugh McVey, in his search for a place where he could penetrate
the wall that shut him off from humanity, went there to live and to try
to work out his problem. It is a busy manufacturing town now and has a
population of nearly a hundred thousand people; but the time for the
telling of the story of its sudden and surprising growth has not yet come.
From the beginning Bidwell has been a prosperous place. The town lies in
the valley of a deep, rapid-flowing river that spreads out just above the
town, becomes for the time wide and shallow, and goes singing swiftly along
over stones. South of the town the river not only spreads out, but the
hills recede. A wide flat valley stretches away to the north. In the days
before the factories came the land immediately about town was cut up into
small farms devoted to fruit and berry raising, and beyond the area of
small farms lay larger tracts that were immensely productive and that
raised huge crops of wheat, corn, and cabbage.
When Hugh was a boy sleeping away his days in the grass beside his father's
fishing shack by the Mississippi River, Bidwell had already emerged out of
the hardships of pioneer days. On the farms that lay in the wide valley to
the north the timber had been cut away and the stumps had all been rooted
out of the ground by a generation of men that had passed.
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