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