"I'm out to get what I can out of life," he declared. "I'm going
back and I'm going to make a record. Before I get through I'm going to be
with a woman of every nationality on earth, that's what I'm going to do."
Joseph Wainsworth the harness maker, who had been the first man in Bidwell
to feel the touch of the heavy finger of industrialism, could not get over
the effect of the conversation had with Butterworth, the farmer who had
asked him to repair harnesses made by machines in a factory. He became a
silent disgruntled man and muttered as he went about his work in the shop.
When Will Sellinger his apprentice threw up his place and went to Cleveland
he did not get another boy but for a time worked alone in the shop. He got
the name of being disagreeable, and on winter afternoons the farmers no
longer came into his place to loaf. Being a sensitive man, Joe felt like a
pigmy, a tiny thing walking always in the presence of a giant that might
at any moment and by a whim destroy him. All his life he had been somewhat
off-hand with his customers. "If they don't like my work, let 'em go to the
devil," he said to his apprentices. "I know my trade and I don't have to
bow down to any one here."
When Steve Hunter organized the Bidwell Plant-Setting Machine Company, the
harness maker put his savings, twelve hundred dollars, into the stock of
the company. One day, during the time when the factory was building, he
heard that Steve had paid twelve hundred dollars for a new lathe that had
just arrived by freight and had been set on the floor of the uncompleted
building.
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