Thinking of the Iowa man, Hugh began to think of other men. He thought of his father and of himself. When he was striving to come out of the filth, the flies, the poverty, the fishy smells, the shadowy dreams of his life by the river, his father had often tried to draw him back into that life. In imagination he saw before him the dissolute man who had bred him. On afternoons of summer days in the river town, when Henry Shepard was not about, his father sometimes came to the station where he was employed. He had begun to earn a little money and his father wanted it to buy drinks. Why?
There was a problem for Hugh's mind, a problem that could not be solved in wood and steel. He walked and thought about it when he should have been making new parts for the hay-loading apparatus. He had lived but little in the life of the imagination, had been afraid to live that life, had been warned and re-warned against living it. The shadowy figure of the unknown inventor in the state of Iowa, who had been brother to himself, who had worked on the same problems and had come to the same conclusions, slipped away, followed by the almost equally shadowy figure of his father. Hugh tried to think of himself and his own life.
For a time that seemed a simple and easy way out of the new and intricate task he had set for his mind. His own life was a matter of history. He knew about himself. Having walked far out of town, he turned and went back toward his shop. His way led through the new city that had grown up since his coming to Bidwell. Turner's Pike that had been a country road along which on summer evenings lovers strolled to the Wheeling station and Pickleville was now a street. All that section of the new city was given over to workers' homes and here and there a store had been built. The Widow McCoy's place was gone and in its place was a warehouse, black and silent under the night sky. How grim the street in the late night! The berry pickers who once went along the road at evening were now gone forever. Like Ezra French's sons they had perhaps become factory hands. Apple and cherry trees once grew along the road. They had dropped their blossoms on the heads of strolling lovers. They also were gone. Hugh had once crept along the road at the heels of Ed Hall, who walked with his arm about a girl's waist. He had heard Ed complaining of his lot in life and crying out for new times. It was Ed Hall who had introduced the piecework plan in the factories of Bidwell and brought about the strike, during which three men had been killed and ill-feeling engendered in hundreds of silent workers. That strike had been won by Tom and Steve and they had since that time been victorious in a larger and more serious strike. Ed Hall was now at the head of a new factory being built along the Wheeling tracks. He was growing fat and was prosperous.