The fact that Steve told them
nothing seemed to them a kind of insult. "The young upstart, I believe yet
he's a bluff," the banker declared to his friend, Tom Butterworth.
On Main Street the old and young men who stood about before the stores in
the evening tried also to make light of the jeweler's son and the air of
importance he constantly assumed. They also spoke of him as a young upstart
and a windbag, but after the beginning of his connection with Hugh McVey,
something of conviction went out of their voices. "I read in the paper that
a man in Toledo made thirty thousand dollars out of an invention. He got it
up in less than a day. He just thought of it. It's a new kind of way for
sealing fruit cans," a man in the crowd before Birdie Spink's drug store
absent-mindedly observed.
Inside the drug store by the empty stove, Judge Hanby talked persistently
of the time when factories would come. He seemed to those who listened a
sort of John the Baptist crying out of the coming of the new day. One
evening in May of that year, when a goodly crowd was assembled, Steve
Hunter came in and bought a cigar. Every one became silent. Birdie Spinks
was for some mysterious reason a little upset. In the store something
happened that, had there been some one there to record it, might later have
been remembered as the moment that marked the coming of the new age to
Bidwell. The druggist, after he had handed out the cigar, looked at the
young man whose name had so suddenly come upon every one's lips and whom he
had known from babyhood, and then addressed him as no young man of his age
had ever before been addressed by an older citizen of the town.
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