The pride of the workmen had been touched, and for two weeks they had worked like demons to outdo the boss. At night when the amount of work done was calculated, they laughed at Ed. Then they heard that the piece-work plan was to be installed in the factory, and were afraid they would be paid by a scale calculated on the amount of work done during the two weeks of furious effort.
The workman who stumbled along the tracks cursed Ed Hall and the men for whom he worked. “I lost six hundred dollars in the plant-setting machine failure and this is all I get, to be played a trick on by a young suck like Ed Hall,” a voice grumbled. Another voice took up the refrain. In the dim light Hugh could see the speaker, a man with a bent back, a product of the cabbage fields, who had come to town to find employment. Although he did not recognize it, he had heard the voice before. It came from a son of the cabbage farmer, Ezra French and was the same voice he had once heard complaining at night as the French boys crawled across a cabbage field in the moonlight. The man now said something that startled Hugh. “Well,” he declared, “it's a joke on me. I quit Dad and made him sore; now he won't take me back again. He says I'm a quitter and no good. I thought I'd come to town to a factory and find it easier here. Now I've got married and have to stick to my job no matter what they do. In the country I worked like a dog a few weeks a year, but here I'll probably have to work like that all the time. It's the way things go. I thought it was mighty funny, all this talk about the factory work being so easy. I wish the old days were back. I don't see how that inventor or his inventions ever helped us workers. Dad was right about him. He said an inventor wouldn't do nothing for workers. He said it would be better to tar and feather that telegraph operator. I guess Dad was right.”
The swagger went out of Hugh's walk and he stopped to let the men pass out of sight and hearing along the track. When they had gone a little away a quarrel broke out. Each man felt the others must be in some way responsible for his betrayal in the matter of the contest with Ed Hall and accusations flew back and forth. One of the men threw a heavy stone that ran down along the tracks and jumped into a ditch filled with dry weeds. It made a heavy crashing sound. Hugh heard heavy footsteps running. He was afraid the men were going to attack him, and climbed over a fence, crossed a barnyard, and got into an empty street. As he went along trying to understand what had happened and why the men were angry, he met Clara Butterworth, standing and apparently waiting for him under a street lamp.
Hugh walked beside Clara, too perplexed to attempt to understand the new impulses crowding in upon his mind. She explained her presence in the street by saying she had been to town to mail a letter and intended walking home by a side road. “You may come with me if you're just out for a walk,” she said. The two walked in silence. Hugh's mind, unaccustomed to traveling in wide circles, centered on his companion. Life seemed suddenly to be crowding him along strange roads. In two days he had felt more new emotions and had felt them more deeply than he would have thought possible to a human being. The hour through which he had just passed had been extraordinary. He had started out from his boarding-house sad and depressed. Then he had come by the factories and pride in what he thought he had accomplished swept in on him. Now it was apparent the workers in the factories were not happy, that there was something the matter. He wondered if Clara would know what was wrong and would tell him if he asked. He wanted to ask many questions. “That's what I want a woman for. I want some one close to me who understands things and will tell me about them,” he thought. Clara remained silent and Hugh decided that she, like the complaining workman stumbling along the tracks, did not like him. The man had said he wished Hugh had never come to town. Perhaps every one in Bidwell secretly felt that way.
Hugh was no longer proud of himself and his achievements. Perplexity had captured him. When he and Clara got out of town into a country road, he began thinking of Sarah Shepard, who had been friendly and kind to him when he was a lad, and wished she were with him, or better yet that Clara would take the attitude toward him she had taken. Had Clara taken it into her head to scold as Sarah Shepard had done he would have been relieved.
Instead Clara walked in silence, thinking of her own affairs and planning to use Hugh for her own ends. It had been a perplexing day for her. Late that afternoon there had been a scene between her and her father and she had left home and come to town because she could no longer bear being in his presence. When she had seen Hugh coming toward her she had stopped under a street lamp to wait for him. “I could set everything straight by getting him to ask me to marry him,” she thought.
The new difficulty that had arisen between Clara and her father was something with which she had nothing to do. Tom, who thought himself so shrewd and crafty, had been taken in by the city man, Alfred Buckley. A federal officer had come to town during the afternoon to arrest Buckley. The man had turned out to be a notorious swindler wanted in several cities. In New York he had been one of a gang who distributed counterfeit money, and in other states he was wanted for swindling women, two of whom he married unlawfully.
The arrest had been like a shot fired at Tom by a member of his own household. He had almost come to think of Alfred Buckley as one of his family, and as he drove rapidly along the road toward home, he had been profoundly sorry for his daughter and had intended to ask her to forgive him for his part in betraying her into a false position. That he had not openly committed himself to any of Buckley's schemes, had signed no papers and written no letters that would betray the conspiracy he had entered into against Steve, filled him with joy. He had intended to be generous, and even, if necessary, confess to Clara his indiscretion in talking of a possible marriage, but when he got to the farm house and had taken Clara into the parlor and had closed the door, he changed his mind. He told her of Buckley's arrest, and then started tramping excitedly up and down in the room. Her coolness infuriated him. “Don't set there like a clam!” he shouted. “Don't you know what's happened? Don't you know you're disgraced, have brought disgrace on my name?”
The angry father explained that half the town knew of her engagement to marry Alfred Buckley, and when Clara declared they were not engaged and that she had never intended marrying the man, his anger did not abate. He had himself whispered the suggestion about town, had told Steve Hunter, Gordon Hart, and two or three others, that Alfred Buckley and his daughter would no doubt do what he spoke of as “hitting it off,” and they had of course told their wives. The fact that he had betrayed his daughter into an ugly position gnawed at his consciousness. “I suppose the rascal told it himself,” he said, in reply to her statement, and again gave way to anger. He glared at his daughter and wished she were a son so he could strike with his fists. His voice arose to a shout and could be heard in the barnyard where Jim Priest and a young farm hand were at work. They stopped work and listened. “She's been up to something. Do you suppose some man has got her in trouble?” the young farm hand asked.