The traction engine, puffing forth smoke and attracting the excited attention of dogs and children as it rumbled along and pulled the heavy red grain separator, had trailed slowly over miles of road and had come down almost to Lake Erie. Tom, with the fat Bottsford boy sitting beside him on the water wagon, followed the rumbling puffing engine, and when they came to the new place, where they were to stay for several days, he could see, from the wagon seat, the smoke of the factories in the town of Sandusky rising into the clear morning air.
The man for whom John Bottsford was threshing owned three farms, one on an island in the bay, where he lived, and two on the mainland, and the larger of the mainland farms had great stacks of wheat standing in a field near the barns. The farm was in a wide basin of land, very fertile, through which a creek flowed northward into Sandusky Bay and, besides the stacks of wheat in the basin, other stacks had been made in the upland fields beyond the creek, where a country of low hills began. From these latter fields the waters of the bay could be seen glistening in the bright fall sunlight and steamers went from Sandusky to a pleasure resort called Cedar Point. When the wind blew from the north or west and when the threshing machinery had been stopped at the noon hour the men, resting with their backs against a strawstack, could hear a band playing on one of the steamers.
Fall came on early that year and the leaves on the trees in the forests that grew along the roads that ran down through the low creek bottom lands began to turn yellow and red. In the afternoons when Tom went to the creek for water he walked beside his horses and the dry leaves crackled and snapped underfoot.
As the season had been a prosperous one Bottsford decided that his youngest son should attend school in town during the fall and winter. He had bought himself a machine for cutting firewood and with his two older sons intended to take up that work. “The logs will have to be hauled out of the wood lots to where we set up the saws,” he said to Tom. “You can come with us if you wish.”
The thresherman began to talk to Tom of the value of learning. “You’d better go to some town yourself this winter. It would be better for you to get into a school,” he said sharply. He grew excited and walked up and down beside the water wagon, on the seat of which Tom sat listening and said that God had given men both minds and bodies and it was wicked to let either decay because of neglect. “I have watched you,” he said. “You don’t talk very much but you do plenty of thinking, I guess. Go into the schools. Find out what the books have to say. You don’t have to believe when they say things that are lies.”
The Bottsford family lived in a rented house facing a stone road near the town of Bellevue, and the fat boy was to go to that town—a distance of some eighteen miles from where the men were at work—afoot, and on the evening before he set out he and Tom went out of the barns intending to have a last walk and talk together on the roads.
They went along in the dusk of the fall evening, each thinking his own thoughts, and coming to a bridge that led over the creek in the valley sat on the bridge rail. Tom had little to say but his companion wanted to talk about women and, when darkness came on, the embarrassment he felt regarding the subject went quite away and he talked boldly and freely. He said that in the town of Bellevue, where he was to live and attend school during the coming winter, he would be sure to get in with a woman. “I’m not going to be cheated out of that chance,” he declared. He explained that as his father would be away from home when he moved into town he would be free to pick his own place to board.
The fat boy’s imagination became inflamed and he told Tom his plans. “I won’t try to get in with any young girl,” he declared shrewdly. “That only gets a fellow in a fix. He might have to marry her. I’ll go live in a house with a widow, that’s what I’ll do. And in the evening the two of us will be there alone. We’ll begin to talk and I’ll keep touching her with my hands. That will get her excited.”
The fat boy jumped to his feet and walked back and forth on the bridge. He was nervous and a little ashamed and wanted to justify what he had said. The thing for which he hungered had he thought become a possibility—an act half achieved. Coming to stand before Tom he put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll go into her room at night,” he declared. “I’ll not tell her I’m coming, but will creep in when she is asleep. Then I’ll get down on my knees by her bed and I’ll kiss her, hard, hard. I’ll hold her tight, so she can’t get away and I’ll kiss her mouth till she wants what I want. Then I’ll stay in her house all winter. No one will know. Even if she won’t have me I’ll only have to move, I’m sure to be safe. No one will believe what she says, if she tells on me. I’m not going to be like a boy any more, I’ll tell you what—I’m as big as a man and I’m going to do like men do, that’s what I am.”
The two young men went back to the barn where they were to sleep on the hay. The rich farmer for whom they were now at work had a large house and provided beds for the thresherman and his two older sons but the two younger men slept in the barn loft and on the night before had lain under one blanket. After the talk by the bridge however, Tom did not feel very comfortable and that stout exponent of manhood, the younger Bottsford, was also embarrassed. In the road the young man, whose name was Paul, walked a little ahead of his companion and when they got to the barn each sought a separate place in the loft. Each wanted to have thoughts into which he did not want the presence of the other to intrude.