have to, but I got to have more money. Ben Peeler won't never give me a
raise so I can get married or nothing. I wish I knew that fellow back there
so I could ask him what's up. They say he's smart. I suppose he wouldn't
tell me nothing. I wish I was smart enough to invent something and maybe
get rich. I wish I was the kind of fellow they say he is."

Ed Hall again put his arm about the girl's waist and walked away. He forgot
Hugh and thought of himself and of how he wanted to marry the girl whose
young body nestled close to his own--wanted her to be utterly his. For
a few hours he passed out of Hugh's growing sphere of influence on the
collective thought of the town, and lost himself in the immediate
deliciousness of kisses.

And as he passed out of Hugh's influence others came in. On Main Street in
the evening every one speculated on the Missourian's purpose in coming to
Bidwell. The forty dollars a month paid him by the Wheeling railroad could
not have tempted such a man. They were sure of that. Steve Hunter the
jeweler's son had returned to town from a course in a business college at
Buffalo, New York, and hearing the talk became interested. Steve had in him
the making of a live man of affairs, and he decided to investigate. It was
not, however, Steve's method to go at things directly, and he was impressed
by the notion, then abroad in Bidwell, that Hugh had been sent to town by
some one, perhaps by a group of capitalists who intended to start factories
there.

Steve thought he would go easy. In Buffalo, where he had gone to the
business college, he had met a girl whose father, E. P. Horn, owned a soap
factory; had become acquainted with her at church and had been introduced
to her father. The soap maker, an assertive positive man who manufactured
a product called Horn's Household Friend Soap, had his own notion of what