The dreams he had tried
so hard to put away from him and that the New England woman Sarah Shepard
had told him would lead to his destruction had come to something. The
car-dumping apparatus, that had sold for two hundred thousand dollars, had
given Steve Hunter money to buy the plant-setting machine factory, and with
Tom Butterworth to start manufacturing the corn-cutters, had affected the
lives of fewer people, but it had carried the Missourian's name into other
places and had also made a new kind of poetry in railroad yards and along
rivers at the back of cities where ships are loaded. On city nights as you
lie in your houses you may hear suddenly a long reverberating roar. It is a
giant that has cleared his throat of a carload of coal. Hugh McVey helped
to free the giant. He is still doing it. In Bidwell, Ohio, he is still at
it, making new inventions, cutting the bands that have bound the giant. He
is one man who had not been swept aside from his purpose by the complexity
of life.
That, however, came near happening. After the coming of his success, a
thousand little voices began calling to him. The soft hands of women
reached out of the masses of people about him, out of the old dwellers and
new dwellers in the city that was growing up about the factories where
his machines were being made in ever increasing numbers. New houses were
constantly being built along Turner's Pike that led down to his workshop at
Pickleville.
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