And now after the three years as a married woman Clara sat in the motor with her father and husband and with them was sent whirling swiftly through the summer night. The car ran down the hill road from the Butterworth farm, through a dozen residence streets in town and then out upon the long, straight roads in the rich, flat country to the north. It had skirted the town as a hungry wolf might have encircled silently and swiftly the fire-lit camp of a hunter. To Clara the machine seemed like a wolf, bold and cunning and yet afraid. Its great nose pushed through the troubled air of the quiet roads, frightening horses, breaking the silence with its persistent purring, drowning the song of insects. The headlights also disturbed the slumbers of the night. They flashed into barnyards where fowls slept on the lower branches of trees, played on the sides of barns sent the cattle in fields galloping away into darkness, and frightened horribly the wild things, the red squirrels and chipmunks that live in wayside fences in the Ohio country. Clara hated the machine and began to hate all machines. Thinking of machinery and the making of machines had, she decided, been at the bottom of her husband's inability to talk with her. Revolt against the whole mechanical impulse of her generation began to take possession of her.
And as she rode another and more terrible kind of revolt against the machine began in the town of Bidwell. It began in fact before Tom with his new motor left the Butterworth farm, it began before the summer moon came up, before the gray mantle of night had been laid over the shoulders of the hills south of the farmhouse.
Jim Gibson, the journeyman harness maker who worked in Joe Wainsworth's shop, was beside himself on that night. He had just won a great victory over his employer and felt like celebrating. For several days he had been telling the story of his anticipated victory in the saloons and store, and now it had happened. After dining at his boarding-house he went to a saloon and had a drink. Then he went to other saloons and had other drinks, after which he swaggered through the streets to the door of the shop. Although he was in his nature a spiritual bully, Jim did not lack energy, and his employer's shop was filled with work demanding attention. For a week both he and Joe had been returning to their work benches every evening. Jim wanted to come because some driving influence within made him love the thought of keeping the work always on the move, and Joe because Jim made him come.