Although he had not yet realized it, Hugh's career as a successful inventor
had received a sharp check. The trick of driving directly at the point, of
becoming utterly absorbed in the thing before him, had been lost. He went
to Pittsburgh to see about the casting of new parts for the hay-loading
machine, but what he did in Pittsburgh was of no importance to the men who
would manufacture and sell that worthy, labor-saving tool. Although he did
not know it, a young man from Cleveland, in the employ of Tom and Steve,
had already done what Hugh was striving half-heartedly to do. The machine
had been finished and ready to market in October three years before, and
after repeated tests a lawyer had made formal application for patent. Then
it was discovered that an Iowa man had already made application for and
been granted a patent on a similar apparatus.

When Tom came to the shop and told him what had happened Hugh had been
ready to drop the whole matter, but that was not Tom's notion. "The devil!"
he said. "Do you think we're going to waste all this money and labor?"

Drawings of the Iowa man's machine were secured, and Tom set Hugh at the
task of doing what he called "getting round" the other fellow's patents.
"Do the best you can and we'll go ahead," he said. "You see we've got the
money and that means power. Make what changes you can and then we'll go on
with our manufacturing plans. We'll whipsaw this other fellow through the
courts. We'll fight him till he's sick of fight and then we'll buy him
out cheap. I've had the fellow looked up and he hasn't any money and is a
boozer besides. You go ahead. We'll get that fellow all right."

Hugh had tried valiantly to go along the road marked out for him by his
father-in-law and had put aside other plans to rebuild the machine he had
thought of as completed and out of the way. He made new parts, changed
other parts, studied the drawings of the Iowa man's machine, did what he