In quick, sharp tones she ordered her father to drive the car to a doctor's
house and later stood by while the torn and lacerated flesh of Hugh's
cheek and neck was bandaged. The thing for which Joe Wainsworth stood and
that she had thought was so precious to herself no longer existed in her
consciousness, and if later she was for some weeks nervous and half ill, it
was not because of any thought given to the fate of the old harness maker.

The sudden attack out of the town's past had brought Hugh to Clara, had
made him a living if not quite satisfying companion to her, but it had
brought something quite different to Hugh. The bite of the man's teeth and
the torn places on his cheeks left by the tense fingers had mended, leaving
but a slight scar; but a virus had got into his veins. The disease of
thinking had upset the harness maker's mind and the germ of that disease
had got into Hugh's blood. It had worked up into his eyes and ears. Words
men dropped thoughtlessly and that in the past had been blown past his
ears, as chaff is blown from wheat in the harvest, now stayed to echo and
re-echo in his mind. In the past he had seen towns and factories grow and
had accepted without question men's word that growth was invariably good.
Now his eyes looked at the towns, at Bidwell, Akron, Youngstown, and all
the great, new towns scattered up and down mid-western America as on the
train and in the station at Pittsburgh he had looked at the colored stones
held in his hand. He looked at the towns and wanted light and color to play
over them as they played over the stones, and when that did not happen,
his mind, filled with strange new hungers engendered by the disease of
thinking, made up words over which lights played. "The gods have scattered
towns over the flat lands," his mind had said, as he sat in the smoking
car of the train, and the phrase came back to him later, as he sat in the
darkness on the log with his head held in his hands. It was a good phrase
and lights could play over it as they played over the colored stones, but
it would in no way answer the problem of how to "get around" the Iowa's man