Tell 'em Tom Butterworth'll pay what they ask. The sky's the limit
to-night, Jim. That's the word, the sky's the limit."
To the older citizens of Bidwell, those who lived there when every
citizen's affairs were the affair of the town, that evening will be long
remembered. The new men, the Italians, Greeks, Poles, Rumanians, and many
other strange-talking, dark-skinned men who had come with the coming of
the factories, went on with their lives on that evening as on all others.
They worked in the night shift at the Corn-Cutting Machine Plant, at the
foundry, the bicycle factory or at the big new Tool Machine Factory that
had just moved to Bidwell from Cleveland. Those who were not at work
lounged in the streets or wandered aimlessly in and out of saloons. Their
wives and children were housed in the hundreds of new frame houses in the
streets that now crept out in all directions. In those days in Bidwell new
houses seemed to spring out of the ground like mushrooms. In the morning
there was a field or an orchard on Turner Pike or on any one of a dozen
roads leading out of town. On the trees in the orchard green apples hung
down waiting, ready to ripen. Grasshoppers sang in the long grass beneath
the trees.
Then appeared Ben Peeler with a swarm of men. The trees were cut and the
song of the grasshopper choked beneath piles of boards. There was a great
shouting and rattling of hammers.
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