Poor White | Page 9

For perhaps the first time in his life he arose
without conscious effort and walked up and down the station platform
out of an excess of energy. He thought he could not bear to wait until
the train came and brought the man who was to take his place. "Well,
I'm going away, I'm going away to be a man among men," he said to
himself over and over. The saying became a kind of refrain and he said
it unconsciously. As he repeated the words his heart beat high in
anticipation of the future he thought lay before him.

CHAPTER II
Hugh McVey left the town of Mudcat Landing in early September of
the year eighteen eighty-six. He was then twenty years old and was six
feet and four inches tall. The whole upper part of his body was
immensely strong but his long legs were ungainly and lifeless. He
secured a pass from the railroad company that had employed him, and
rode north along the river in the night train until he came to a large
town named Burlington in the State of Iowa. There a bridge went over
the river, and the railroad tracks joined those of a trunk line and ran
eastward toward Chicago; but Hugh did not continue his journey on
that night. Getting off the train he went to a nearby hotel and took a

room for the night.
It was a cool clear evening and Hugh was restless. The town of
Burlington, a prosperous place in the midst of a rich farming country,
overwhelmed him with its stir and bustle. For the first time he saw
brick-paved streets and streets lighted with lamps. Although it was
nearly ten o'clock at night when he arrived, people still walked about in
the streets and many stores were open.
The hotel where he had taken a room faced the railroad tracks and
stood at the corner of a brightly lighted street. When he had been
shown to his room Hugh sat for a half hour by an open window, and
then as he could not sleep, decided to go for a walk. For a time he
walked in the streets where the people stood about before the doors of
the stores but, as his tall figure attracted attention and he felt people
staring at him, he went presently into a side street.
In a few minutes he became utterly lost. He went through what seemed
to him miles of streets lined with frame and brick houses, and
occasionally passed people, but was too timid and embarrassed to ask
his way. The street climbed upward and after a time he got into open
country and followed a road that ran along a cliff overlooking the
Mississippi River. The night was clear and the sky brilliant with stars.
In the open, away from the multitude of houses, he no longer felt
awkward and afraid, and went cheerfully along. After a time he stopped
and stood facing the river. Standing on a high cliff and with a grove of
trees at his back, the stars seemed to have all gathered in the eastern sky.
Below him the water of the river reflected the stars. They seemed to be
making a pathway for him into the East.
The tall Missouri countryman sat down on a log near the edge of the
cliff and tried to see the water in the river below. Nothing was visible
but a bed of stars that danced and twinkled in the darkness. He had
made his way to a place far above the railroad bridge, but presently a
through passenger train from the West passed over it and the lights of
the train looked also like stars, stars that moved and beckoned and that
seemed to fly like flocks of birds out of the West into the East.

For several hours Hugh sat on the log in the darkness. He decided that
it was hopeless for him to find his way back to the hotel, and was glad
of the excuse for staying abroad. His body for the first time in his life
felt light and strong and his mind was feverishly awake. A buggy in
which sat a young man and woman went along the road at his back, and
after the voices had died away silence came, broken only at long
intervals during the hours when he sat thinking of his future by the
barking of a dog in some distant house or the churning of the
paddle-wheels of a passing river boat.
All of the early formative years of Hugh McVey's life had been spent
within sound of the lapping of the waters of the Mississippi River. He
had seen it in the hot summer when the water receded and the mud lay