Poor White | Page 8

platform. Having accepted the New England woman's opinion of his
own people and not wanting to associate with them, his life became
utterly lonely and his loneliness also drove him to labor.
Something happened to him. Although his body would not and never
did become active, his mind began suddenly to work with feverish
eagerness. The vague thoughts and feelings that had always been a part
of him but that had been indefinite, ill-defined things, like clouds
floating far away in a hazy sky, began to grow definite. In the evening
after his work was done and he had locked the station for the night, he
did not go to the town hotel where he had taken a room and where he

ate his meals, but wandered about town and along the road that ran
south beside the great mysterious river. A hundred new and definite
desires and hungers awoke in him. He began to want to talk with
people, to know men and most of all to know women, but the disgust
for his fellows in the town, engendered in him by Sarah Shepard's
words and most of all by the things in his nature that were like their
natures, made him draw back. When in the fall at the end of the year
after the Shepards had left and he began living alone, his father was
killed in a senseless quarrel with a drunken river man over the
ownership of a dog, a sudden, and what seemed to him at the moment
heroic resolution came to him. He went early one morning to one of the
town's two saloon keepers, a man who had been his father's' nearest
approach to a friend and companion, and gave him money to bury the
dead man. Then he wired to the headquarters of the railroad company
telling them to send a man to Mudcat Landing to take his place. On the
afternoon of the day on which his father was buried, he bought himself
a handbag and packed his few belongings. Then he sat down alone on
the steps of the railroad station to wait for the evening train that would
bring the man who was to replace him and that would at the same time
take him away. He did not know where he intended to go, but knew
that he wanted to push out into a new land and get among new people.
He thought he would go east and north. He remembered the long
summer evenings in the river town when the station master slept and
his wife talked. The boy who listened had wanted to sleep also, but
with the eyes of Sarah Shepard fixed on him, had not dared to do so.
The woman had talked of a land dotted with towns where the houses
were all painted in bright colors, where young girls dressed in white
dresses went about in the evening, walking under trees beside streets
paved with bricks, where there was no dust or mud, where stores were
gay bright places filled with beautiful wares that the people had money
to buy in abundance and where every one was alive and doing things
worth while and none was slothful and lazy. The boy who had now
become a man wanted to go to such a place. His work in the railroad
station had given him some idea of the geography of the country and,
although he could not have told whether the woman who had talked so
enticingly had in mind her childhood in New England or her girlhood
in Michigan, he knew in a general way that to reach the land and the

people who were to show him by their lives the better way to form his
own life, he must go east. He decided that the further east he went the
more beautiful life would become, and that he had better not try going
too far in the beginning. "I'll go into the northern part of Indiana or
Ohio," he told himself. "There must be beautiful towns in those places."
Hugh was boyishly eager to get on his way and to become at once a
part of the life in a new place. The gradual awakening of his mind had
given him courage, and he thought of himself as armed and ready for
association with men. He wanted to become acquainted with and be the
friend of people whose lives were beautifully lived and who were
themselves beautiful and full of significance. As he sat on the steps of
the railroad station in the poor little Missouri town with his bag beside
him, and thought of all the things he wanted to do in life, his mind
became so eager and restless that some of its restlessness was
transmitted to his body.