Why?

There was a problem for Hugh's mind, a problem that could not be solved in
wood and steel. He walked and thought about it when he should have been
making new parts for the hay-loading apparatus. He had lived but little in
the life of the imagination, had been afraid to live that life, had been
warned and re-warned against living it. The shadowy figure of the unknown
inventor in the state of Iowa, who had been brother to himself, who had
worked on the same problems and had come to the same conclusions, slipped
away, followed by the almost equally shadowy figure of his father. Hugh
tried to think of himself and his own life.

For a time that seemed a simple and easy way out of the new and intricate
task he had set for his mind. His own life was a matter of history. He
knew about himself. Having walked far out of town, he turned and went back
toward his shop. His way led through the new city that had grown up since
his coming to Bidwell. Turner's Pike that had been a country road along
which on summer evenings lovers strolled to the Wheeling station and
Pickleville was now a street. All that section of the new city was given
over to workers' homes and here and there a store had been built. The Widow
McCoy's place was gone and in its place was a warehouse, black and silent
under the night sky. How grim the street in the late night! The berry
pickers who once went along the road at evening were now gone forever. Like
Ezra French's sons they had perhaps become factory hands. Apple and cherry
trees once grew along the road. They had dropped their blossoms on the
heads of strolling lovers. They also were gone. Hugh had once crept along
the road at the heels of Ed Hall, who walked with his arm about a girl's
waist. He had heard Ed complaining of his lot in life and crying out for
new times. It was Ed Hall who had introduced the piecework plan in the
factories of Bidwell and brought about the strike, during which three men