e retired into the background. In spite of his
youth and inexperience, Jesse had the trick of
mastering the souls of his people. He was so in earnest
in everything he did and said that no one understood
him. He made everyone on the farm work as they had
never worked before and yet there was no joy in the
work. If things went well they went well for Jesse and
never for the people who were his dependents. Like a
thousand other strong men who have come into the world
here in America in these later times, Jesse was but
half strong. He could master others but he could not
master himself. The running of the farm as it had never
been run before was easy for him. When he came home
from Cleveland where he had been in school, he shut
himself off from all of his people and began to make
plans. He thought about the farm night and day and that
made him successful. Other men on the farms about him
worked too hard and were too fired to think, but to
think of the farm and to be everlastingly making plans
for its success was a relief to Jesse. It partially
satisfied something in his passionate nature.
Immediately after he came home he had a wing built on
to the old house and in a large room facing the west he
had windows that looked into the barnyard and other
windows that looked off across the fields. By the
window he sat down to think. Hour after hour and day
after day he sat and looked over the land and thought
out his new place in life. The passionate burning thing
in his nature flamed up and his eyes became hard. He
wanted to make the farm produce as no farm in his state
had ever produced before and then he wanted something
else. It was the indefinable hunger within that made
his eyes waver and that kept him always more and more
silent before people. He would have given much to
achieve peace and in him was a fear that peace was the
thing he could not achieve.

All over his body Jesse Bentley was alive. In his
small frame was gathered the force of a long line of
strong men. He had always been extraordinarily alive
when he was a small boy on the farm and later when he
was a young man in school. In the school he had studied
and thought of God and the Bible with his whole mind
and heart. As time passed and he grew to know people
better, he began to think of himself as an
extraordinary man, one set apart from his fellows. He
wanted terribly to make his life a thing of great
importance, and as he looked about at his fellow men