Poor White | Page 5

woman, Hugh fought to
overcome his inclination to give himself up to vaporous dreams. He
became convinced that his own people were really of inferior stock,
that they were to be kept away from and not to be taken into account.
During the first year after he came to live with the Shepards, he
sometimes gave way to a desire to return to his old lazy life with his
father in the shack by the river. People got off steamboats at the town
and took the train to other towns lying back from the river. He earned a
little money by carrying trunks filled with clothes or traveling men's
samples up an incline from the steamboat landing to the railroad station.
Even at fourteen the strength in his long gaunt body was so great that
he could out-lift any man in town, and he put one of the trunks on his
shoulder and walked slowly and stolidly away with it as a farm horse
might have walked along a country road with a boy of six perched on
his back.
The money earned in this way Hugh for a time gave to his father, and
when the man had become stupid with drink he grew quarrelsome and
demanded that the boy return to live with him. Hugh had not the spirit
to refuse and sometimes did not want to refuse. When neither the
station master nor his wife was about he slipped away and went with
his father to sit for a half day with his back against the wall of the
fishing shack, his soul at peace. In the sunlight he sat and stretched
forth his long legs. His small sleepy eyes stared out over the river. A
delicious feeling crept over him and for the moment he thought of
himself as completely happy and made up his mind that he did not want

to return again to the railroad station and to the woman who was so
determined to arouse him and make of him a man of her own people.
Hugh looked at his father asleep and snoring in the long grass on the
river bank. An odd feeling of disloyalty crept over him and he became
uncomfortable. The man's mouth was open and he snored lustily. From
his greasy and threadbare clothing arose the smell of fish. Flies
gathered in swarms and alighted on his face. Disgust took possession of
Hugh. A flickering but ever recurring light came into his eyes. With all
the strength of his awakening soul he struggled against the desire to
give way to the inclination to stretch himself out beside the man and
sleep. The words of the New England woman, who was, he knew,
striving to lift him out of slothfulness and ugliness into some brighter
and better way of life, echoed dimly in his mind. When he arose and
went back along the street to the station master's house and when the
woman there looked at him reproachfully and muttered words about the
poor white trash of the town, he was ashamed and looked at the floor.
Hugh began to hate his own father and his own people. He connected
the man who had bred him with the dreaded inclination toward sloth in
himself. When the farmhand came to the station and demanded the
money he had earned by carrying trunks, he turned away and went
across a dusty road to the Shepard's house. After a year or two he paid
no more attention to the dissolute farmhand who came occasionally to
the station to mutter and swear at him; and, when he had earned a little
money, gave it to the woman to keep for him. "Well," he said, speaking
slowly and with the hesitating drawl characteristic of his people, "if you
give me time I'll learn. I want to be what you want me to be. If you
stick to me I'll try to make a man of myself."
* * * * *
Hugh McVey lived in the Missouri town under the tutelage of Sarah
Shepard until he was nineteen years old. Then the station master gave
up railroading and went back to Michigan. Sarah Shepard's father had
died after having cleared one hundred and twenty acres of the cut-over
timber land and it had been left to her. The dream that had for years
lurked in the back of the little woman's mind and in which she saw

bald-headed, good-natured Henry Shepard become a power in the
railroad world had begun to fade. In newspapers and magazines she
read constantly of other men who, starting from a humble position in
the railroad service, soon became rich and powerful, but nothing of the
kind seemed likely to happen to her husband. Under her watchful eye
he did his