Release Brakes--Shift to Third

Milt had covered the first two years of high school by studying with the
priest, and been sent to the city of St. Cloud for the last two years.
His father had meant to send him to the state university. But Milt had
been born to a talent for machinery. At twelve he had made a telephone
that worked. At eighteen he was engineer in the tiny flour mill in
Schoenstrom. At twenty-five, when Claire Boltwood chose to come tearing
through his life in a Gomez-Dep, Milt was the owner, manager,
bookkeeper, wrecking crew, ignition expert, thoroughly competent
bill-collector, and all but one of the working force of the Red Trail
Garage.

There were two factions in Schoenstrom: the retired farmers who said
that German was a good enough language for anybody, and that taxes for
schools and sidewalks were yes something crazy; and the group who
stated that a pig-pen is a fine place, but only for pigs. To this
second, revolutionary wing belonged a few of the first generation, most
of the second, and all of the third; and its leader was Milt Daggett. He
did not talk much, normally, but when he thought things ought to be
done, he was as annoying as a machine-gun test in the lot next to a
Quaker meeting.

If there had been a war, Milt would probably have been in it--rather
casual, clearing his throat, reckoning and guessing that maybe his men
might try going over and taking that hill ... then taking it. But all of
this history concerns the year just before America spoke to Germany; and
in this town buried among the cornfields and the wheat, men still
thought more about the price of grain than about the souls of nations.