"Шервуд Андерсен. Белый бедняк (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

the United States Senate or being Governor of his state, that he never knew
how badly he overreached himself that day in his youth when he made his
first business deal with Hugh at the Wheeling Station at Pickleville. Later
Hugh's interest in the Steven Hunter industrial enterprises was taken care
of by a man who was as shrewd as Steve himself. Tom Butterworth, who had
made money and knew how to make and handle money, managed such things for
the inventor, and Steve's chance was gone forever.

That is, however, a part of the story of the development of the town of
Bidwell and a story that Steve never understood. When he overreached
himself that day he did not know what he had done. He made a deal with Hugh
and was happy to escape the predicament he thought he had got himself into
when he talked too much to the two men in the bank.

Although Steve's father had always a great faith in his son's shrewdness
and when he talked to other men represented him as a peculiarly capable and
unappreciated man, the two did not in private get on well. In the Hunter
household they quarreled and snarled at each other. Steve's mother had died
when he was a small boy and his one sister, two years older than himself,
kept herself always in the house and seldom appeared on the streets. She
was a semi-invalid. Some obscure nervous disease had twisted her body out
of shape, and her face twitched incessantly. One morning in the barn back
of the Hunter house Steve, then a lad of fourteen, was oiling his bicycle
when his sister appeared and stood watching him. A small wrench lay on the
ground and she picked it up. Suddenly and without warning she began to beat
him on the head. He was compelled to knock her down in order to tear the
wrench out of her hand. After the incident she was ill in bed for a month.

Elsie Hunter was always a source of unhappiness to her brother. As he began
to get up in life Steve had a growing passion for being respected by his
fellows. It got to be something of an obsession with him and among other
things he wanted very much to be thought of as one who had good blood in
his veins. A man whom he hired searched out his ancestry, and with the
exception of his immediate family it seemed very satisfactory. The sister,
with her twisted body and her face that twitched so persistently, seemed
to be everlastingly sneering at him. He grew half afraid to come into her
presence. After he began to grow rich he married Ernestine, the daughter of
the soap maker at Buffalo, and when her father died she also had a great
deal of money. His own father died and he set up a household of his own.
That was in the time when big houses began to appear at the edge of the
berry lands and on the hills south of Bidwell. On his father's death Steve
became guardian for his sister. The jeweler had left a small estate and it
was entirely in the son's hands. Elsie lived with one servant in a small
house in town and was put in the position of being entirely dependent on
her brother's bounty. In a sense it might be said that she lived by her
hatred of him. When on rare occasions he came to her house she would not
see him. A servant came to the door and reported her asleep. Almost every
month she wrote a letter demanding that her share of her father's money
be handed over to her, but it did no good. Steve occasionally spoke to an
acquaintance of his difficulty with her. "I am more sorry for the woman