Poor White | Page 3

that if he sat down he would fall
into the odd detached kind of stupor in which he had spent so large a
part of his life, he continued to sweep for two or three hours. The
station platform was built of rough boards and Hugh's arms were very
powerful. The broom he was using began to go to pieces. Bits of it flew
about and after an hour's work the platform looked more uncleanly than
when he began. Sarah Shepard came to the door of her house and stood
watching. She was about to call to him and to scold him again for his
stupidity when a new impulse came to her. She saw the serious
determined look on the boy's long gaunt face and a flash of
understanding came to her. Tears came into her eyes and her arms
ached to take the great boy and hold him tightly against her breast.
With all her mother's soul she wanted to protect Hugh from a world she

was sure would treat him always as a beast of burden and would take
no account of what she thought of as the handicap of his birth. Her
morning's work was done and without saying anything to Hugh, who
continued to go up and down the platform laboriously sweeping, she
went out at the front door of the house and to one of the town stores.
There she bought a half dozen books, a geography, an arithmetic, a
speller and two or three readers. She had made up her mind to become
Hugh McVey's school teacher and with characteristic energy did not
put the matter off, but went about it at once. When she got back to her
house and saw the boy still going doggedly up and down the platform,
she did not scold but spoke to him with a new gentleness in her manner.
"Well, my boy, you may put the broom away now and come to the
house," she suggested. "I've made up my mind to take you for my own
boy and I don't want to be ashamed of you. If you're going to live with
me I can't have you growing up to be a lazy good-for-nothing like your
father and the other men in this hole of a place. You'll have to learn
things and I suppose I'll have to be your teacher.
"Come on over to the house at once," she added sharply, making a
quick motion with her hand to the boy who with the broom in his hands
stood stupidly staring. "When a job is to be done there's no use putting
it off. It's going to be hard work to make an educated man of you, but it
has to be done. We might as well begin on your lessons at once."
* * * * *
Hugh McVey lived with Henry Shepard and his wife until he became a
grown man. After Sarah Shepard became his school teacher things
began to go better for him. The scolding of the New England woman,
that had but accentuated his awkwardness and stupidity, came to an end
and life in his adopted home became so quiet and peaceful that the boy
thought of himself as one who had come into a kind of paradise. For a
time the two older people talked of sending him to the town school, but
the woman objected. She had begun to feel so close to Hugh that he
seemed a part of her own flesh and blood and the thought of him, so
huge and ungainly, sitting in a school room with the children of the
town, annoyed and irritated her. In imagination she saw him being

laughed at by other boys and could not bear the thought. She did not
like the people of the town and did not want Hugh to associate with
them.
Sarah Shepard had come from a people and a country quite different in
its aspect from that in which she now lived. Her own people, frugal
New Englanders, had come West in the year after the Civil War to take
up cut-over timber land in the southern end of the state of Michigan.
The daughter was a grown girl when her father and mother took up the
westward journey, and after they arrived at the new home, had worked
with her father in the fields. The land was covered with huge stumps
and was difficult to farm but the New Englanders were accustomed to
difficulties and were not discouraged. The land was deep and rich and
the people who had settled upon it were poor but hopeful. They felt that
every day of hard work done in clearing the land was like laying up
treasure against the future. In New England they had fought