“Like it? This old town? I should say not.”
“Why not?” I replied.
“Well, you ought to live here for a while, and you’d soon find out. It’s all right to go through in a machine, I suppose.”
“Well, where would you rather be, if not here?” I questioned.
“Oh, what’s the use wishing—lots of places,” she replied irritably, and as if desiring to end the vain discussion. “It never does me any good to wish.”
She walked off to wait upon another customer, and I departed.
South of Peru were several county seats and towns of small size, which we might have visited had we chosen to take the time; but aside from passing through Kokomo, in order to see an enormous automobile works with which Speed had formerly been connected, and from whence, earlier in his life, he had attempted to flee at the approach of the end of all things, we avoided all these towns. It was raining too hard, and there would have been no pleasure in stopping.
At Kokomo, which appeared presently out of a grey mist and across a middle distance of wet green grass and small, far scattered trees, we had a most interesting experience. We met the man who made the first automobile in America, and saw his factory—the Haynes Automobile Company, of which he was president and principal stockholder, and which was employing, at the time we were there, nearly three thousand men and turning out over two thousand cars a year, nearly a car apiece for every man and woman in the place. I saw no children employed.
The history of this man, as sketched to me beforehand by Franklin and Speed, was most interesting. Years before he had been a traveling salesman, using a light runabout in this very vicinity. Later he had interested himself in motors of the gas and steam variety and had entered upon the manufacture of them. Still later, when the problem of direct transmission was solved in France and the automobile began to appear abroad, he, in conjunction with a man named Apperson, decided to attempt to construct a car here which would avoid infringing all the French patents. Alone, really, without any inventive aid from Apperson, so to speak, Haynes solved the problem, at least in part. It was claimed later, and no doubt it was true, that he, along with many other mechanicians attempting to perfect an American car which would avoid French lawsuits, had merely rearranged, not improved upon, the French idea of direct transmission. At any rate, he was sued, along with others; but the American automobile manufacturers eventually beat the French patentees and remained in possession of their designs. Of all of these, Haynes was the first American to put an American automobile in the field.
We were shown over his factory before meeting him, however, and a fascinating spectacle it proved. We arrived in a driving rain, with the clouds so thick and low that you would have thought it dusk. All the lights in the great concern were glowing as though it were night. A friendly odor of smoke and hot mould sand and grease and shellac and ground metal permeated the air for blocks around. Inside were great rooms, three to four hundred feet long, all of a hundred feet wide, and glassed over top and sides for light, in which were droves of men, great companies of them, in jeans and jumpers, their faces and hands and hair stained brown or black with oil and smoke, their eyes alight with that keen interest which the intelligent workman always has in his work.