You go ahead. We'll get that fellow all right."
Hugh had tried valiantly to go along the road marked out for him by his
father-in-law and had put aside other plans to rebuild the machine he had
thought of as completed and out of the way. He made new parts, changed
other parts, studied the drawings of the Iowa man's machine, did what he
could to accomplish his task.
Nothing happened. A conscientious determination not to infringe on the work
of the Iowa man stood in his way.
Then something did happen. At night as he sat alone in his shop after a
long study of the drawings of the other man's machine, he put them aside
and sat staring into the darkness beyond the circle of light cast by his
lamp. He forgot the machine and thought of the unknown inventor, the man
far away over forests, lakes and rivers, who for months had worked on the
same problem that had occupied his mind. Tom had said the man had no money
and was a boozer. He could be defeated, bought cheap. He was himself at
work on the instrument of the man's defeat.
Hugh left his shop and went for a walk, and the problem connected with the
twisting of the iron and steel parts of the hay-loading apparatus into new
forms was again left unsolved. The Iowa man had become a distinct, almost
understandable personality to Hugh. Tom had said he drank, got drunk. His
own father had been a drunkard. Once a man, the very man who had been the
instrument of his own coming to Bidwell, had taken it for granted he was a
drunkard.
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