through a dozen residence streets in town and then out upon the long,
straight roads in the rich, flat country to the north. It had skirted
the town as a hungry wolf might have encircled silently and swiftly the
fire-lit camp of a hunter. To Clara the machine seemed like a wolf, bold
and cunning and yet afraid. Its great nose pushed through the troubled
air of the quiet roads, frightening horses, breaking the silence with its
persistent purring, drowning the song of insects. The headlights also
disturbed the slumbers of the night. They flashed into barnyards where
fowls slept on the lower branches of trees, played on the sides of barns
sent the cattle in fields galloping away into darkness, and frightened
horribly the wild things, the red squirrels and chipmunks that live in
wayside fences in the Ohio country. Clara hated the machine and began to
hate all machines. Thinking of machinery and the making of machines had,
she decided, been at the bottom of her husband's inability to talk with
her. Revolt against the whole mechanical impulse of her generation began to
take possession of her.

And as she rode another and more terrible kind of revolt against the
machine began in the town of Bidwell. It began in fact before Tom with his
new motor left the Butterworth farm, it began before the summer moon came
up, before the gray mantle of night had been laid over the shoulders of the
hills south of the farmhouse.

Jim Gibson, the journeyman harness maker who worked in Joe Wainsworth's
shop, was beside himself on that night. He had just won a great victory
over his employer and felt like celebrating. For several days he had been
telling the story of his anticipated victory in the saloons and store, and
now it had happened. After dining at his boarding-house he went to a saloon
and had a drink. Then he went to other saloons and had other drinks, after
which he swaggered through the streets to the door of the shop. Although