If the announcement startled less than great news should, the speaker could surely produce a sensation by adding: "The first automobile truck in Newbern Center."
And how had this immature being, capable out-of-doors boy though he was, come to be so exalted above his fellows? Sam Pickering's linotype had first revealed his gift for machinery. For Sam had installed a linotype, and Wilbur Cowan had patiently mastered its distracting intricacies. Dave Cowan had informally reappeared one day, still attired with decreasing elegance below the waist—his cloth-topped shoes but little more than distressing memories—and announced that he was now an able operator of this wondrous machine; and the harried editor of the Advance, stung to enterprise by flitting wastrels who tarried at his case only long enough to learn the name of the next town, had sought relief in machinery, even if it did take bread from the mouths of honest typesetters. Their lack of preference as to where they earned there bread, their insouciant flights from town to town without notice, had made Sam brutal. He had ceased to care whether they had bread or not. So Dave for a summer had brought him surcease from help worries.
The cynical journeyman printer of the moment, on a day when Dave tried out the new machine, had stood by and said she might set type but she certainly couldn't justify it, because it took a human to do that, and how would a paper look with unevenly ending lines? When Dave, seated before the thing, proved that she uncannily could justify the lines of type before casting them in metal, the dismayed printer had shuddered at the mystery of it.
Dave Cowan seized the moment to point out to his admiring son and other bystanders that it was all the working of evolution. If you couldn't change when your environment demanded it Nature scrapped you. Hand compositors would have to learn to set type by machinery or go down in the struggle for existence. Survival of the fittest—that was it. The doubting printer was not there to profit by this lecture. Though it was but five o'clock, he was down on the depot platform moodily waiting for the six-fifty-eight.
The next number of the Advance was set by linotype, a circumstance of which one of its columns spoke feelingly, and set, moreover, in the presence of as many curious persons as could crowd about the operator. Among these none was so fascinated as Wilbur Cowan. He hung lovingly about the machine, his fingers itching to be at its parts. When work for the day was over he stayed by it until the light grew dim in the low-ceilinged, dusty office. He took liberties with its delicate structure that would have alarmed its proud owner, playing upon it with wrench and screw driver, detaching parts from the whole for the pure pleasure of putting them back. He thus came to an intimate knowledge of the contrivance. He knew what made it go. He early mastered its mere operation. Sam Pickering felt fortified against the future.
Then it developed that though Dave Cowan could perform ably upon the instrument while it retained its health he was at a loss when it developed ailments; and to these it was prone, being a machine of temperament and airs, inclined to lose spirit, to sulk, even irritably to refuse all response to Dave's fingering of the keyboard. Dave was sincerely startled when his son one day skillfully restored tone to the thing after it had disconcertingly rebelled. Sam Pickering, on the point of wiring for the mechanic who had installed his treasure, looked upon the boy with awe as his sure hands wrought knowingly among the weirdest of its vitals. Dave was impressed to utter lack of speech, and resumed work upon the again compliant affair without comment. Perhaps he reflected that the stern processes of his favourite evolution demanded more knowledge of this machine than even he had acquired.
There ensued further profitable education for the young mechanic from the remarkable case of Sharon Whipple's first motor car. Sharon, the summer before, after stoutly affirming for two years that he would never have one of the noisy things on the place, even though the Whipple New Place now boasted two—boasting likewise of their speed and convenience—and even though Gideon Whipple jestingly called him a fossilized barnacle on the ship of progress, had secretly bought a motor car and secretly for three days taken instructions in its running from the city salesman who delivered it. His intention was to become daringly expert in its handling and flash upon the view of the discomfited Gideon, who had not yet driven a car. He would wheel carelessly up the drive to the Whipple New Place in apparently contemptuous mastery of the thing, and he would specifically deny ever having received any driving lessons whatever, thus by falsehood overwhelming his brother with confusion.
In the stable, therefore, one afternoon he had taken his place at the wheel. Affecting a jovial ease of mind, he commanded the company of his stableman, Elihu Titus, on the seat beside him. He wished a little to show off to Elihu, but he wished even more to be not alone if something happened. With set jaws and a tight grip of the wheel he had backed from the stable, and was rendered nervous in the very beginning by the apparent mad resolve of the car to continue backing long after it was wished not to. Elihu Titus was also rendered nervous, and was safely on the ground before the car yielded to the invincible mass of a boxwood hedge that had been forty years in growing. Sharon pointed his eyebrows.
"It makes you feel like a helpless fool," he confided to his hireling.