“I suppose you're standing off for more of an interest! Pretty underhanded of you to creep up like this!”
“Well, I'm going to stop creeping. I reckon this will set me on my legs good and fair,” and Benson grinned.
“Is it a half you're after, Tom?” demanded Bendy sourly.
“Well, yes, make it a fair half, and I'm your man!”
In the end Bendy accepted his terms, and a few years later, Tom Benson, who was a good-looking fellow, repaid his kindness by running off with and marrying his daughter. The relations between the two men were never quite friendly. Bendy drifted more and more into politics, first holding one office and then another; while Tom, at the shops, freed of his active opposition, began to build heavy machinery, and secured contracts his father-in-law would never have dreamed of taking, and could not have filled, had he taken them.
Benson was consumed by a great ambition, not for wealth exactly, though wealth must have been an incident. The railroad had already greatly extended their market, but this did not satisfy him; he felt that the world was at the beginning of an age when iron and steam would be used for a multitude of then unknown purposes. He was experimenting with improved machinery, machinery that was to largely displace the costly hand labour which at its best could not be counted on for results that were always uniform, since the human equation seemed to combat organization, to limit production. He imagined machinery, tireless, and skillful far beyond the skill of men, and unvaryingly effective; but above all, his great dream was to cheapen iron and steam. Toward this end, he was always planning, always contriving.
Mr. Bendy, now established at the post-office, swore a good deal at what the energetic Tom was doing; however, when he ventured into the shops he was meek enough, his displeasure and disapproval manifesting itself only in an air of cynical derision with which he listened to the Yankee mechanic's plans and theories.
Yet at the end of ten years, under Benson's management, the works covered an acre of ground, and employed fifty men where they had not kept twenty busy when he assumed control.
His family now consisted of his wife and a daughter; he lived in a large house on Water Street, which built according to plans of his own, violated every known law of beauty, but conformed to every requirement of strength and durability.
Jacob Benson was on the best of terms with his uncle. As a result of their intimacy Stephen came to know the mechanic and his daughter Marian, who was frequently her father's companion when he strolled around to the lawyer's office of an evening to chat—for he had a mighty hankering for political discussion, and certain radical convictions of his own were as fundamental with his nephew as they were with himself, being in truth a part of their very blood and bone.