"His old snoot was all over his face," added Ernest in a cheerful voice.
"Hush, boys, come away for a little bit," said Mr. Wolf. And he led the two back toward the hose. But Roger would not go far. He loitered behind lest some one should molest that silent figure on the heap of débris. All the vicinity was brilliant with firelight. And standing waiting thus he saw a sight that he never was to forget. It was his father, bowing his head on a piece of the twisted, wrecked machinery—the machinery into which he had put the passionate hopes and dreams of his manhood. And moving nearer lest some one else should see, Roger saw that his father was sobbing as if indeed his heart was broken.
That picture was to direct the entire course of Roger's life. For it never left him. And at first it filled his boyish mind with such bitterness that he could not hear of labor and its strivings and troubles without seeing red.
But as the years on the farm slipped by and the atmosphere of competition and of feverish ambition gave place to the sweet silences, the quiet plodding, the placid sureness of farm living, the bitterness gave way to a dream.
Gradually Roger ceased to blame the factory workmen who had destroyed his father, or to blame his father for the egotism and selfishness that had driven his employees into reckless stubbornness. He saw behind both the urge of the inevitable, unquenchable desire of human beings for happiness; for the happiness that comes only when men have sufficient leisure in which to expand their minds and souls.
And as he grew older and read deeper it seemed to him that the solution lay only indirectly in any system of government. It seemed to him that until man had learned how to use directly and freely the power sources of nature, inequalities of wealth would always persist. And he had learned in one bitter lesson that unhappiness and economic inequality go hand in hand.
And so Roger dreamed his dream. For many years it was such a mad seeming dream that he was ashamed to speak of it, even to Ernest. And yet it was simple enough in its first outlines.
This was, Roger told himself, a machine age. The more perfect became man's use of machinery, the more leisure could he have and the more wealth. Ultimately man's efforts must concentrate on the effort to find power with which to drive the world's machinery. Coal was disappearing, water power was coming into its own. Was there not, however, some universal source of power that could be harnessed and given to the use of man? Some power that capital could not control nor labor misuse and destroy?
It was thus that Roger came to study the possibilities of Solar Heat utilization. It was thus that he became the world's first and greatest pioneer in a new field of engineering—a field so mighty that it was to become the dean of all other fields of power engineering.
He dreamed a dream of solving the problem of labor versus capital. He was to learn through years of heart breaking endeavor that neither capital nor labor has use for a dreamer of dreams no matter how practical the dreams may be, unless the dreamer is selfish enough, is grasping and ruthless enough to trample over other men to the top.