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

and gave the factory the air of a prison. Every evening before he went to
bed Steve walked to Pickleville. The sinister appearance of the building
at night gave him a peculiar satisfaction. "They'll find out what I'm up
to when I want 'em to," he said to himself. Allie Mulberry worked at the
factory during the day. Under Hugh's direction he whittled pieces of wood
into various shapes, but had no idea of what he was doing. No one but the
half-wit and Steve Hunter were admitted to the society of the telegraph
operator. When Allie Mulberry came into the Main Street at night, every
one stopped him and a thousand questions were asked, but he only shook his
head and smiled foolishly. On Sunday afternoons crowds of men and women
walked down Turner's Pike to Pickleville and stood looking at the deserted
building, but no one tried to enter. The bars were in place and window
shades were drawn over the windows. Above the door that faced the road
there was a large sign. "Keep Out. This Means You," the sign said.

The four men who met Steve in the bank knew vaguely that some sort of
invention was being perfected, but did not know what it was. They spoke
in an offhand way of the matter to their friends and that increased the
general curiosity. Every one tried to guess what was up. When Steve was not
about, John Clark and young Gordon Hart pretended to know everything but
gave the impression of men sworn to secrecy. The fact that Steve told them
nothing seemed to them a kind of insult. "The young upstart, I believe yet
he's a bluff," the banker declared to his friend, Tom Butterworth.

On Main Street the old and young men who stood about before the stores in
the evening tried also to make light of the jeweler's son and the air of
importance he constantly assumed. They also spoke of him as a young upstart
and a windbag, but after the beginning of his connection with Hugh McVey,
something of conviction went out of their voices. "I read in the paper that
a man in Toledo made thirty thousand dollars out of an invention. He got it
up in less than a day. He just thought of it. It's a new kind of way for
sealing fruit cans," a man in the crowd before Birdie Spink's drug store
absent-mindedly observed.

Inside the drug store by the empty stove, Judge Hanby talked persistently
of the time when factories would come. He seemed to those who listened a
sort of John the Baptist crying out of the coming of the new day. One
evening in May of that year, when a goodly crowd was assembled, Steve
Hunter came in and bought a cigar. Every one became silent. Birdie Spinks
was for some mysterious reason a little upset. In the store something
happened that, had there been some one there to record it, might later have
been remembered as the moment that marked the coming of the new age to
Bidwell. The druggist, after he had handed out the cigar, looked at the
young man whose name had so suddenly come upon every one's lips and whom he
had known from babyhood, and then addressed him as no young man of his age
had ever before been addressed by an older citizen of the town. "Well, good
evening, Mr. Hunter," he said respectfully. "And how do you find yourself
this evening?"

To the men who met him in the bank, Steve described the plant-setting