men, women, and children who moved restlessly about. A train came in and a
swarm of people departed, were carried into faraway parts of the country,
while new people came into the station from a nearby street. He looked at
those who were going out into the train shed. "It may be that some of them
are going to that town in Iowa where that fellow lives," he thought. It was
odd how thoughts of the unknown Iowa man clung to him.

One day, during the same summer and but a few months earlier, Hugh had gone
to the town of Sandusky, Ohio, on the same mission that had brought him to
Pittsburgh. How many parts for the hay-loading machine had been cast and
later thrown away! They did the work, but he decided each time that he had
infringed on the other man's machine. When that happened he did not consult
Tom. Something within him warned him against doing that. He destroyed the
part. "It wasn't what I wanted," he told Tom who had grown discouraged with
his son-in-law but did not openly voice his dissatisfaction. "Oh, well,
he's lost his pep, marriage has taken the life out of him. We'll have to
get some one else on the job," he said to Steve, who had entirely recovered
from the wound received at the hands of Joe Wainsworth.

On that day when he went to Sandusky, Hugh had several hours to wait for
his homebound train and went to walk by the shores of a bay. Some brightly
colored stones attracted his attention and he picked several of them up and
put them in his pockets. In the station at Pittsburgh he took them out and
held them in his hand. A light came in at a window, a long, slanting light
that played over the stones. His roving, disturbed mind was caught and
held. He rolled the stones back and forth. The colors blended and then
separated again. When he raised his eyes, a woman and a child on a nearby
bench, also attracted by the flashing bit of color held like a flame in his
hand, were looking at him intently.