The truth of the matter, and the thing the town never found out, was that
from the beginning Steve had intended to get the plant for himself, but at
the last had decided it would be better to take some one in with him. He
was afraid of John Clark. For two or three days he thought about the matter
and decided that the banker was not to be trusted. "He's too good a friend
to Tom Butterworth," he told himself. "If I tell him my scheme, he'll tell
Tom. I'll go to Tom myself. He's a money maker and a man who knows the
difference between a bicycle and a wheelbarrow when you put one of them
into bed with him."
Steve drove out to Tom's house late one evening in September. He hated to
go but was convinced it would be better to do so. "I don't want to burn
all my bridges behind me," he told himself. "I've got to have at least one
friend among the solid men here in town. I've got to do business with these
rubes, maybe all my life. I can't shut myself off too much, at least not
yet a while."
When Steve got to the farm he asked Tom to get into his buggy, and the two
men went for a long drive. The horse, a gray gelding with one blind eye
hired for the occasion from liveryman Neighbors, went slowly along through
the hill country south of Bidwell. He had hauled hundreds of young men with
their sweethearts. Ambling slowly along, thinking perhaps of his own youth
and of the tyranny of man that had made him a gelding, he knew that as long
as the moon shone and the intense voiceless quiet continued to reign over
the two people in the buggy, the whip would not come out of its socket and
he would not be expected to hurry.
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