Jim sighed impatiently and placed his bag on the counter.
“Can you tell me where the new mill is being built?”
“Down the road a piece. Keep right a-goin’ and you can’t miss the dum thing.”
“Thank you,” said Jim, and started out to inspect the plant of which he had become proprietor.
Jim walked down the street, which did not run ahead in a straight line, but meandered about aimlessly as though trying for all it was worth to keep under the shade of the fine big maples which bordered it. Nobody could blame it. In fact, Jim thought it showed extraordinary intelligence for an illiterate, unpaved, country clodhopper of a road, for the shade was the pleasantest, most friendly thing he had found in Diversity.
In five minutes he rounded a bend and came upon a flat which seemed like a huge platter on which somebody was trying to fry a number of large and small buildings. Half an eye could tell the buildings were new, indeed unfinished. Heat-waves radiated from their composition roofs, and as for their corrugated-iron sides, Jim fancied their ugly red was not due so much to paint as to the fact that they were red-hot. Everywhere were men hurrying about as if it were a reasonable day and they weren’t in the least danger of sunstroke. Inside Jim could hear the clang of hammers, the rasp of saws, the multitude of sounds which denote the business of an army of workmen.
It looked very big and raw and uninviting to him. There was nothing homey about it at all. It didn’t even look interesting, and Jim stood under a tree and wished his father had chosen some other calling than the manufacture of clothespins. He mopped his head and wrinkled his nose, and grew very gloomy at the thought that down there on that unspeakable flat lay the work of his future years. His dreams had been of something very different.
He shrugged his shoulders and walked rapidly down on to his property, acting very much like a man with a tender tooth on his way to the dentist’s.
As he walked along the side of the biggest building he encountered a small Italian boy with a big pail of water.
“Son,” he said, “where’s the office? Where’s the boss?”