could to accomplish his task.

Nothing happened. A conscientious determination not to infringe on the work
of the Iowa man stood in his way.

Then something did happen. At night as he sat alone in his shop after a
long study of the drawings of the other man's machine, he put them aside
and sat staring into the darkness beyond the circle of light cast by his
lamp. He forgot the machine and thought of the unknown inventor, the man
far away over forests, lakes and rivers, who for months had worked on the
same problem that had occupied his mind. Tom had said the man had no money
and was a boozer. He could be defeated, bought cheap. He was himself at
work on the instrument of the man's defeat.

Hugh left his shop and went for a walk, and the problem connected with the
twisting of the iron and steel parts of the hay-loading apparatus into new
forms was again left unsolved. The Iowa man had become a distinct, almost
understandable personality to Hugh. Tom had said he drank, got drunk. His
own father had been a drunkard. Once a man, the very man who had been the
instrument of his own coming to Bidwell, had taken it for granted he was a
drunkard. He wondered if some twist of life might not have made him one.

Thinking of the Iowa man, Hugh began to think of other men. He thought of
his father and of himself. When he was striving to come out of the filth,
the flies, the poverty, the fishy smells, the shadowy dreams of his life
by the river, his father had often tried to draw him back into that life.
In imagination he saw before him the dissolute man who had bred him. On
afternoons of summer days in the river town, when Henry Shepard was not
about, his father sometimes came to the station where he was employed. He
had begun to earn a little money and his father wanted it to buy drinks.