The two men drove back to the Butterworth farm house and Tom got out of the buggy. He intended to tell Steve to go to the devil, but as they drove along the road, he changed his mind. The young school teacher from Bidwell, who had come on several occasions to call on his daughter Clara, was on that night abroad with another young woman. He sat in a buggy with his arm around her waist and drove slowly through the hill country. Tom and Steve drove past them and the farmer, seeing in the moonlight the woman in the arms of the man, imagined his daughter in her place. The thought made him furious. “I'm losing the chance to be a big man in the town here in order to play safe and be sure of money to leave to Clara, and all she cares about is to galavant around with some young squirt,” he thought bitterly. He began to see himself as a wronged and unappreciated father. When he got out of the buggy, he stood for a moment by the wheel and looked hard at Steve. “I'm as good a sport as you are,” he said finally. “Bring around your stock and I'll give you the note. That's all it will be, you understand: just my note. I don't promise to back it up with any collateral and I don't expect you to offer it for sale.” Steve leaned out of the buggy and took him by the hand. “I won't sell your note, Tom,” he said. “I'll put it away. I want a partner to help me. You and I are going to do things together.”
The young promoter drove off along the road, and Tom went into the house and to bed. Like his daughter he did not sleep. For a time he thought of her and in imagination saw her again in the buggy with the school teacher who had her in his arms. The thought made him stir restlessly about beneath the sheets. “Damn women anyway,” he muttered. To relieve his mind he thought of other things. “I'll make out a deed and turn three of my farms over to Clara,” he decided shrewdly. “If things go wrong we won't be entirely broke. I know Charlie Jacobs in the court-house over at the county seat. I ought to be able to get a deed recorded without any one knowing it if I oil Charlie's hand a little.”
Clara's last two weeks in the Woodburn household were spent in the midst of a struggle, no less intense because no words were said. Both Henderson Wood, burn and his wife felt that Clara owed them an explanation of the scene at the front door with Frank Metcalf. When she did not offer it they were offended. When he threw open the door and confronted the two people, the plow manufacturer had got an impression that Clara was trying to escape Frank Metcalf's embraces. He told his wife that he did not think she was to blame for the scene on the front porch. Not being the girl's father he could look at the matter coldly. “She's a good girl,” he declared. “That beast of a Frank Metcalf is all to blame. I daresay he followed her home. She's upset now, but in the morning she'll tell us the story of what happened.”