Dumb masses of
materials taken out of the earth and the forests were molded by his mind
into fantastic shapes. As he sat in the telegraph office during the day or
walked alone through the streets of Bidwell at night, he saw in fancy a
thousand new machines, formed by his hands and brain, doing the work that
had been done by the hands of men. He had come to Bidwell, not only in
the hope that there he would at last find companionship, but also because
his mind was really aroused and he wanted leisure to begin trying to do
tangible things. When the citizens of Bidwell would not take him into their
town life but left him standing to one side, as the tiny dwelling place
for men called Pickleville where he lived stood aside out from under the
invisible roof of the town, he decided to try to forget men and to express
himself wholly in work.
CHAPTER V
Hugh's first inventive effort stirred the town of Bidwell deeply. When
word of it ran about, the men who had been listening to the talk of Judge
Horace Hanby and whose minds had turned toward the arrival of the new
forward-pushing impulse in American life thought they saw in Hugh the
instrument of its coming to Bidwell. From the day of his coming to live
among them, there had been much curiosity in the stores and houses
regarding the tall, gaunt, slow-speaking stranger at Pickleville. George
Pike had told Birdie Spinks the druggist how Hugh worked all day over
books, and how he made drawings for parts of mysterious machines and left
them on his desk in the telegraph office.
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