"I'm going to quit this slavery," one of the younger boys
said. "I'll get a job over in town. I hope it's true what they say, that
factories are coming."
The four young men came to the end of the row and, as Ezra was not in
sight, stood a moment by the fence near where Hugh was concealed. "I'd
rather be a horse or a cow than what I am," the complaining voice went on.
"What's the good being alive if you have to work like this?"
For a moment as he listened to the voices of the complaining workers, Hugh
wanted to go to them and ask them to let him share in their labor. Then
another thought came. The crawling figures came sharply into his line of
vision. He no longer heard the voice of the youngest of the French boys
that seemed to come out of the ground. The machine-like swing of the bodies
of the plant setters suggested vaguely to his mind the possibility of
building a machine that would do the work they were doing. His mind took
eager hold of that thought and he was relieved. There had been something in
the crawling figures and in the moonlight out of which the voices came that
had begun to awaken in his mind the fluttering, dreamy state in which he
had spent so much of his boyhood. To think of the possibility of building
a plant-setting machine was safer. It fitted into what Sarah Shepard had
so often told him was the safe way of life. As he went back through the
darkness to the railroad station, he thought about the matter and decided
that to become an inventor would be the sure way of placing his feet at
last upon the path of progress he was trying to find.
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