Beside Allie Mulberry a dozen mechanics were now employed in
his experimental shop. They helped Hugh with a new invention, a hay-loading
apparatus on which he was at work, and also made special tools for use in
the corn-cutter factory and the new bicycle factory. A dozen new houses
had been built in Pickleville itself. The wives of the mechanics lived in
the houses and occasionally one of them came to see her husband at Hugh's
shop. He found it less and less difficult to talk to people. The workmen,
themselves not given to the use of many words, did not think his habitual
silence peculiar. They were more skilled than Hugh in the use of tools and
thought it rather an accident that he had done what they had not done. As
he had grown rich by that road they also tried their hand at inventions.
One of them made a patent door hinge that Steve sold for ten thousand
dollars, keeping half the money for his services, as he had done in the
case of Hugh's car-dumping apparatus. At the noon hour the men hurried to
their houses to eat and then came back to loaf before the factory and
smoke their noonday pipes. They talked of money-making, of the price of
food stuffs, of the advisability of a man's buying a house on the partial
payment plan. Sometimes they talked of women and of their adventures with
women. Hugh sat by himself inside the door of the shop and listened. At
night after he had gone to bed he thought of what they had said.
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