Poor White: A Novel

  Produced by Eric Eldred, William Flis and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team

  POOR WHITE

  A NOVEL BY

  SHERWOOD ANDERSON

  AUTHOR OF

  WINESBURG, OHIO

  TO

  TENNESSEE MITCHELL ANDERSON

  [Note: The evident misprint of Book Six for Book Five in the original ispreserved here.]

  BOOK I

  CHAPTER I

  Hugh McVey was born in a little hole of a town stuck on a mud bank onthe western shore of the Mississippi River in the State of Missouri.It was a miserable place in which to be born. With the exception of anarrow strip of black mud along the river, the land for ten miles backfrom the town--called in derision by river men "Mudcat Landing"--wasalmost entirely worthless and unproductive. The soil, yellow, shallowand stony, was tilled, in Hugh's time, by a race of long gaunt men whoseemed as exhausted and no-account as the land on which they lived. Theywere chronically discouraged, and the merchants and artisans of thetown were in the same state. The merchants, who ran their stores--poortumble-down ramshackle affairs--on the credit system, could not get payfor the goods they handed out over their counters and the artisans, theshoemakers, carpenters and harnessmakers, could not get pay for the workthey did. Only the town's two saloons prospered. The saloon keepers soldtheir wares for cash and, as the men of the town and the farmers whodrove into town felt that without drink life was unbearable, cash alwayscould be found for the purpose of getting drunk.

  Hugh McVey's father, John McVey, had been a farm hand in his youthbut before Hugh was born had moved into town to find employment in atannery. The tannery ran for a year or two and then failed, but JohnMcVey stayed in town. He also became a drunkard. It was the easy obviousthing for him to do. During the time of his employment in the tannery hehad been married and his son had been born. Then his wife died and theidle workman took his child and went to live in a tiny fishing shackby the river. How the boy lived through the next few years no one everknew. John McVey loitered in the streets and on the river bank andonly awakened out of his habitual stupor when, driven by hunger or thecraving for drink, he went for a day's work in some farmer's field atharvest time or joined a number of other idlers for an adventurous tripdown river on a lumber raft. The baby was left shut up in the shack bythe river or carried about wrapped in a soiled blanket. Soon after hewas old enough to walk he was compelled to find work in order that hemight eat. The boy of ten went listlessly about town at the heels of hisfather. The two found work, which the boy did while the man lay sleepingin the sun. They cleaned cisterns, swept out stores and saloons and atnight went with a wheelbarrow and a box to remove and dump in the riverthe contents of out-houses. At fourteen Hugh was as tall as his fatherand almost without education. He could read a little and could write hisown name, had picked up these accomplishments from other boys who cameto fish with him in the river, but he had never been to school. For dayssometimes he did nothing but lie half asleep in the shade of a bush onthe river bank. The fish he caught on his more industrious days he soldfor a few cents to some housewife, and thus got money to buy food forhis big growing indolent body. Like an animal that has come to itsmaturity he turned away from his father, not because of resentment forhis hard youth, but because he thought it time to begin to go his ownway.

  In his fourteenth year and when the boy was on the point of sinking intothe sort of animal-like stupor in which his father had lived, somethinghappened to him. A railroad pushed its way down along the river to histown and he got a job as man of all work for the station master. Heswept out the station, put trunks on trains, mowed the grass in thestation yard and helped in a hundred odd ways the man who held thecombined jobs of ticket seller, baggage master and telegraph operator atthe little out-of-the-way place.

  Hugh began a little to awaken. He lived with his employer, HenryShepard, and his wife, Sarah Shepard, and for the first time in his lifesat down regularly at table. His life, lying on the river bank throughlong summer afternoons or sitting perfectly still for endless hours ina boat, had bred in him a dreamy detached outlook on life. He found ithard to be definite and to do definite things, but for all his stupiditythe boy had a great store of patience, a heritage perhaps from hismother. In his new place the station master's wife, Sarah Shepard, asharp-tongued, good-natured woman, who hated the town and the peopleamong whom fate had thrown her, scolded at him all day long. She treatedhim like a child of six, told him how to sit at table, how to hold hisfork when he ate, how to address people who came to the house or tothe station. The mother in her was aroused by Hugh's helplessness and,having no children of her own, she began to take the tall awkward boyto her heart. She was a small woman and when she stood in the housescolding the great stupid boy who stared down at her with his smallperplexed eyes, the two made a picture that afforded endless amusementto her husband, a short fat bald-headed man who went about clad in blueoveralls and a blue cotton shirt. Coming to the back door of his house,that was within a stone's throw of the station, Henry Shepard stood withhis hand on the door-jamb and watched the woman and the boy. Above thescolding voice of the woman his own voice arose. "Look out, Hugh," hecalled. "Be on the jump, lad! Perk yourself up. She'll be biting you ifyou don't go mighty careful in there."

  Hugh got little money for his work at the railroad station but for thefirst time in his life he began to fare well. Henry Shepard boughtthe boy clothes, and his wife, Sarah, who was a master of the art ofcooking, loaded the table with good things to eat. Hugh ate until boththe man and woman declared he would burst if he did not stop. Then whenthey were not looking he went into the station yard and crawling undera bush went to sleep. The station master came to look for him. He cut aswitch from the bush and began to beat the boy's bare feet. Hugh awokeand was overcome with confusion. He got to his feet and stood trembling,half afraid he was to be driven away from his new home. The man and theconfused blushing boy confronted each other for a moment and then theman adopted the method of his wife and began to scold. He was annoyed atwhat he thought the boy's indolence and found a hundred little tasksfor him to do. He devoted himself to finding tasks for Hugh, and when hecould think of no new ones, invented them. "We will have to keep the biglazy fellow on the jump. That's the secret of things," he said to hiswife.

  The boy learned to keep his naturally indolent body moving and hisclouded sleepy mind fixed on definite things. For hours he ploddedstraight ahead, doing over and over some appointed task. He forgot thepurpose of the job he had been given to do and did it because it wasa job and would keep him awake. One morning he was told to sweep thestation platform and as his employer had gone away without giving himadditional tasks and as he was afraid that if he sat down he would fallinto the odd detached kind of stupor in which he had spent so largea part of his life, he continued to sweep for two or three hours. Thestation platform was built of rough boards and Hugh's arms were verypowerful. The broom he was using began to go to pieces. Bits of it flewabout and after an hour's work the platform looked more uncleanly thanwhen he began. Sarah Shepard came to the door of her house and stoodwatching. She was about to call to him and to scold him again for hisstupidity when a new impulse came to her. She saw the serious determinedlook on the boy's long gaunt face and a flash of understanding came toher. Tears came into her eyes and her arms ached to take the great boyand hold him tightly against her breast. With all her mother's soul shewanted to protect Hugh from a world she was sure would treat him alwaysas a beast of burden and would take no account of what she thought ofas the handicap of his birth. Her morning's work was done and withoutsaying anything to Hugh, who cont
inued to go up and down the platformlaboriously sweeping, she went out at the front door of the house andto one of the town stores. There she bought a half dozen books, ageography, an arithmetic, a speller and two or three readers. Shehad made up her mind to become Hugh McVey's school teacher and withcharacteristic energy did not put the matter off, but went about itat once. When she got back to her house and saw the boy still goingdoggedly up and down the platform, she did not scold but spoke to himwith a new gentleness in her manner. "Well, my boy, you may put thebroom away now and come to the house," she suggested. "I've made up mymind 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 lazygood-for-nothing like your father and the other men in this hole of aplace. You'll have to learn things and I suppose I'll have to be yourteacher.

  "Come on over to the house at once," she added sharply, making a quickmotion with her hand to the boy who with the broom in his hands stoodstupidly staring. "When a job is to be done there's no use putting itoff. It's going to be hard work to make an educated man of you, but ithas 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 grownman. After Sarah Shepard became his school teacher things began to gobetter for him. The scolding of the New England woman, that had butaccentuated his awkwardness and stupidity, came to an end and life inhis adopted home became so quiet and peaceful that the boy thought ofhimself as one who had come into a kind of paradise. For a time the twoolder people talked of sending him to the town school, but the womanobjected. She had begun to feel so close to Hugh that he seemed a partof 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 andirritated her. In imagination she saw him being laughed at by other boysand could not bear the thought. She did not like the people of the townand did not want Hugh to associate with them.

  Sarah Shepard had come from a people and a country quite different inits aspect from that in which she now lived. Her own people, frugal NewEnglanders, had come West in the year after the Civil War to take upcut-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 thewestward journey, and after they arrived at the new home, had workedwith her father in the fields. The land was covered with huge stumpsand was difficult to farm but the New Englanders were accustomed todifficulties and were not discouraged. The land was deep and rich andthe people who had settled upon it were poor but hopeful. They feltthat every day of hard work done in clearing the land was like layingup treasure against the future. In New England they had fought againsta hard climate and had managed to find a living on stony unproductivesoil. The milder climate and the rich deep soil of Michigan was, theyfelt, full of promise. Sarah's father like most of his neighbors hadgone into debt for his land and for tools with which to clear and workit and every year spent most of his earnings in paying interest on amortgage held by a banker in a nearby town, but that did not discouragehim. He whistled as he went about his work and spoke often of a futureof ease and plenty. "In a few years and when the land is cleared we'llmake money hand over fist," he declared.

  When Sarah grew into young womanhood and went about among the youngpeople in the new country, she heard much talk of mortgages and ofthe difficulty of making ends meet, but every one spoke of the hardconditions as temporary. In every mind the future was bright withpromise. Throughout the whole Mid-American country, in Ohio, NorthernIndiana and Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa a hopeful spirit prevailed.In every breast hope fought a successful war with poverty anddiscouragement. Optimism got into the blood of the children and laterled to the same kind of hopeful courageous development of the wholewestern country. The sons and daughters of these hardy people no doubthad their minds too steadily fixed on the problem of the paying off ofmortgages and getting on in the world, but there was courage in them. Ifthey, with the frugal and sometimes niggardly New Englanders from whomthey were sprung, have given modern American life a too materialflavor, they have at least created a land in which a less determinedlymaterialistic people may in their turn live in comfort.

  In the midst of the little hopeless community of beaten men and yellowdefeated women on the bank of the Mississippi River, the woman who hadbecome Hugh McVey's second mother and in whose veins flowed the bloodof the pioneers, felt herself undefeated and unbeatable. She and herhusband would, she felt, stay in the Missouri town for a while and thenmove on to a larger town and a better position in life. They wouldmove on and up until the little fat man was a railroad president or amillionaire. It was the way things were done. She had no doubt of thefuture. "Do everything well," she said to her husband, who was perfectlysatisfied with his position in life and had no exalted notions as to hisfuture. "Remember to make your reports out neatly and clearly. Show themyou can do perfectly the task given you to do, and you will be givena chance at a larger task. Some day when you least expect it somethingwill happen. You will be called up into a position of power. We won't becompelled to stay in this hole of a place very long."

  The ambitious energetic little woman, who had taken the son of theindolent farm hand to her heart, constantly talked to him of her ownpeople. Every afternoon when her housework was done she took the boyinto the front room of the house and spent hours laboring with him overhis lessons. She worked upon the problem of rooting the stupidity anddullness out of his mind as her father had worked at the problem ofrooting the stumps out of the Michigan land. After the lesson for theday had been gone over and over until Hugh was in a stupor of mentalweariness, she put the books aside and talked to him. With glowingfervor she made for him a picture of her own youth and the people andplaces where she had lived. In the picture she represented the NewEnglanders of the Michigan farming community as a strong god-like race,always honest, always frugal, and always pushing ahead. His own peopleshe utterly condemned. She pitied him for the blood in his veins. Theboy had then and all his life certain physical difficulties she couldnever understand. The blood did not flow freely through his long body.His feet and hands were always cold and there was for him an almostsensual satisfaction to be had from just lying perfectly still in thestation yard and letting the hot sun beat down on him.

  Sarah Shepard looked upon what she called Hugh's laziness as a thing ofthe spirit. "You have got to get over it," she declared. "Look at yourown people--poor white trash--how lazy and shiftless they are. You can'tbe like them. It's a sin to be so dreamy and worthless."

  Swept along by the energetic spirit of the woman, Hugh fought toovercome his inclination to give himself up to vaporous dreams. Hebecame convinced that his own people were really of inferior stock, thatthey were to be kept away from and not to be taken into account. Duringthe first year after he came to live with the Shepards, he sometimesgave way to a desire to return to his old lazy life with his father inthe shack by the river. People got off steamboats at the town and tookthe train to other towns lying back from the river. He earned a littlemoney by carrying trunks filled with clothes or traveling men's samplesup an incline from the steamboat landing to the railroad station. Evenat fourteen the strength in his long gaunt body was so great that hecould out-lift any man in town, and he put one of the trunks on hisshoulder and walked slowly and stolidly away with it as a farm horsemight have walked along a country road with a boy of six perched on hisback.

  The money earned in this way Hugh for a time gave to his father, andwhen the man had become stupid with drink he grew quarrelsome anddemanded that the boy return to live with him. Hugh had not the spiritto refuse and sometimes did not want to refuse. When neither the stationmaster nor his wife was about he slipped away and went with his fatherto sit for a half day with his back against the wall of the fishingshack, his soul at peace. In the sunlight he sat and stretched forth hislong legs. His small sleepy eyes stared out over the river. A deliciousfeeling c
rept over him and for the moment he thought of himself ascompletely happy and made up his mind that he did not want to returnagain to the railroad station and to the woman who was so determined toarouse him and make of him a man of her own people.

  Hugh looked at his father asleep and snoring in the long grass on theriver bank. An odd feeling of disloyalty crept over him and he becameuncomfortable. The man's mouth was open and he snored lustily. From hisgreasy and threadbare clothing arose the smell of fish. Flies gatheredin swarms and alighted on his face. Disgust took possession of Hugh.A flickering but ever recurring light came into his eyes. With all thestrength of his awakening soul he struggled against the desire to giveway 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 lifthim out of slothfulness and ugliness into some brighter and better wayof life, echoed dimly in his mind. When he arose and went back along thestreet to the station master's house and when the woman there looked athim reproachfully and muttered words about the poor white trash of thetown, he was ashamed and looked at the floor.

  Hugh began to hate his own father and his own people. He connectedthe man who had bred him with the dreaded inclination toward sloth inhimself. When the farmhand came to the station and demanded the moneyhe had earned by carrying trunks, he turned away and went across adusty road to the Shepard's house. After a year or two he paid no moreattention to the dissolute farmhand who came occasionally to the stationto mutter and swear at him; and, when he had earned a little money, gaveit to the woman to keep for him. "Well," he said, speaking slowly andwith the hesitating drawl characteristic of his people, "if you give metime I'll learn. I want to be what you want me to be. If you stick to meI'll try to make a man of myself."

  * * * * *

  Hugh McVey lived in the Missouri town under the tutelage of SarahShepard until he was nineteen years old. Then the station master gave uprailroading and went back to Michigan. Sarah Shepard's father had diedafter having cleared one hundred and twenty acres of the cut-over timberland and it had been left to her. The dream that had for years lurkedin 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 hadbegun to fade. In newspapers and magazines she read constantly of othermen who, starting from a humble position in the railroad service, soonbecame rich and powerful, but nothing of the kind seemed likely tohappen to her husband. Under her watchful eye he did his work well andcarefully but nothing came of it. Officials of the railroad sometimespassed through the town riding in private cars hitched to the end of oneof the through trains, but the trains did not stop and the officialsdid not alight and, calling Henry out of the station, reward hisfaithfulness by piling new responsibilities upon him, as railroadofficials did in such cases in the stories she read. When her fatherdied and she saw a chance to again turn her face eastward and to liveagain among her own people, she told her husband to resign his positionwith the air of one accepting an undeserved defeat. The station mastermanaged to get Hugh appointed in his place, and the two people wentaway one gray morning in October, leaving the tall ungainly young man incharge of affairs. He had books to keep, freight waybills to make out,messages to receive, dozens of definite things to do. Early in themorning before the train that was to take her away, came to the station,Sarah Shepard called the young man to her and repeated the instructionsshe had so often given her husband. "Do everything neatly andcarefully," she said. "Show yourself worthy of the trust that has beengiven you."

  The New England woman wanted to assure the boy, as she had so oftenassured her husband, that if he would but work hard and faithfullypromotion would inevitably come; but in the face of the fact that HenryShepard had for years done without criticism the work Hugh was to do andhad received neither praise nor blame from those above him, she foundit impossible to say the words that arose to her lips. The woman andthe son of the people among whom she had lived for five years and hadso often condemned, stood beside each other in embarrassed silence.Stripped of her assurance as to the purpose of life and unable to repeather accustomed formula, Sarah Shepard had nothing to say. Hugh's tallfigure, leaning against the post that supported the roof of the frontporch of the little house where she had taught him his lessons day afterday, seemed to her suddenly old and she thought his long solemn facesuggested a wisdom older and more mature than her own. An odd revulsionof feeling swept over her. For the moment she began to doubt theadvisability of trying to be smart and to get on in life. If Hugh hadbeen somewhat smaller of frame so that her mind could have taken hold ofthe fact of his youth and immaturity, she would no doubt have takenhim into her arms and said words regarding her doubts. Instead shealso became silent and the minutes slipped away as the two people stoodbefore each other and stared at the floor of the porch. When the trainon which she was to leave blew a warning whistle, and Henry Shepardcalled to her from the station platform, she put a hand on the lapel ofHugh's coat and drawing his face down, for the first time kissed him onthe cheek. Tears came into her eyes and into the eyes of the young man.When he stepped across the porch to get her bag Hugh stumbled awkwardlyagainst a chair. "Well, you do the best you can here," Sarah Shepardsaid quickly and then out of long habit and half unconsciously didrepeat her formula. "Do little things well and big opportunities arebound to come," she declared as she walked briskly along beside Hughacross the narrow road and to the station and the train that was to bearher away.

  After the departure of Sarah and Henry Shepard Hugh continued tostruggle with his inclination to give way to dreams. It seemed to him astruggle it was necessary to win in order that he might show his respectand appreciation of the woman who had spent so many long hours laboringwith him. Although, under her tutelage, he had received a bettereducation than any other young man of the river town, he had lost noneof his physical desire to sit in the sun and do nothing. When he worked,every task had to be consciously carried on from minute to minute.After the woman left, there were days when he sat in the chair in thetelegraph office and fought a desperate battle with himself. A queerdetermined light shone in his small gray eyes. He arose from the chairand walked up and down the station platform. Each time as he lifted oneof his long feet and set it slowly down a special little effort had tobe made. To move about at all was a painful performance, something hedid not want to do. All physical acts were to him dull but necessaryparts of his training for a vague and glorious future that was to cometo him some day in a brighter and more beautiful land that lay in thedirection thought of rather indefinitely as the East. "If I do not moveand keep moving I'll become like father, like all of the people abouthere," Hugh said to himself. He thought of the man who had bred himand whom he occasionally saw drifting aimlessly along Main Street orsleeping away a drunken stupor on the river bank. He was disgusted withhim and had come to share the opinion the station master's wife hadalways held concerning the people of the Missouri village. "They're alot of miserable lazy louts," she had declared a thousand times, andHugh, agreed with her, but sometimes wondered if in the end he might notalso become a lazy lout. That possibility he knew was in him and forthe sake of the woman as well as for his own sake he was determined itshould not be so.

  The truth is that the people of Mudcat Landing were totally unlike anyof the people Sarah Shepard had ever known and unlike the people Hughwas to know during his mature life. He who had come from a people notsmart was to live among smart energetic men and women and be calleda big man by them without in the least understanding what they weretalking about.

  Practically all of the people of Hugh's home town were of Southernorigin. Living originally in a land where all physical labor wasperformed by slaves, they had come to have a deep aversion to physicallabor. In the South their fathers, having no money to buy slaves oftheir own and being unwilling to compete with slave labor, had tried tolive without labor. For the most part they lived in the mountainsand the hill country of Kentucky and Tennessee, on land too poor a
ndunproductive to be thought worth cultivating by their rich slave-owningneighbors of the valleys and plains. Their food was meager and of anenervating sameness and their bodies degenerate. Children grew up longand gaunt and yellow like badly nourished plants. Vague indefinitehungers took hold of them and they gave themselves over to dreams.The more energetic among them, sensing dimly the unfairness of theirposition in life, became vicious and dangerous. Feuds started among themand they killed each other to express their hatred of life. When, inthe years preceding the Civil War, a few of them pushed north alongthe rivers and settled in Southern Indiana and Illinois and in EasternMissouri and Arkansas, they seemed to have exhausted their energy inmaking the voyage and slipped quickly back into their old slothful wayof life. Their impulse to emigrate did not carry them far and but a fewof them ever reached the rich corn lands of central Indiana, Illinoisor Iowa or the equally rich land back from the river in Missouri orArkansas. In Southern Indiana and Illinois they were merged into thelife about them and with the infusion of new blood they a little awoke.They have tempered the quality of the peoples of those regions,made them perhaps less harshly energetic than their forefathers, thepioneers. In many of the Missouri and Arkansas river towns they havechanged but little. A visitor to these parts may see them there to-day,long, gaunt, and lazy, sleeping their lives away and awakening out oftheir stupor only at long intervals and at the call of hunger.

  As for Hugh McVey, he stayed in his home town and among his own peoplefor a year after the departure of the man and woman who had been fatherand mother to him, and then he also departed. All through the year heworked constantly to cure himself of the curse of indolence. When heawoke in the morning he did not dare lie in bed for a moment for fearindolence would overcome him and he would not be able to arise at all.Getting out of bed at once he dressed and went to the station. Duringthe day there was not much work to be done and he walked for hours upand down the station platform. When he sat down he at once took upa book and put his mind to work. When the pages of the book becameindistinct before his eyes and he felt within him the inclinationto drift off into dreams, he again arose and walked up and down theplatform. Having accepted the New England woman's opinion of his ownpeople and not wanting to associate with them, his life became utterlylonely and his loneliness also drove him to labor.

  Something happened to him. Although his body would not and never didbecome active, his mind began suddenly to work with feverish eagerness.The vague thoughts and feelings that had always been a part of him butthat had been indefinite, ill-defined things, like clouds floating faraway in a hazy sky, began to grow definite. In the evening after hiswork was done and he had locked the station for the night, he did not goto 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 thegreat mysterious river. A hundred new and definite desires and hungersawoke in him. He began to want to talk with people, to know men andmost 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 thingsin his nature that were like their natures, made him draw back. When inthe fall at the end of the year after the Shepards had left and hebegan living alone, his father was killed in a senseless quarrel with adrunken river man over the ownership of a dog, a sudden, and what seemedto him at the moment heroic resolution came to him. He went early onemorning to one of the town's two saloon keepers, a man who had been hisfather's' nearest approach to a friend and companion, and gave him moneyto bury the dead man. Then he wired to the headquarters of the railroadcompany 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 boughthimself a handbag and packed his few belongings. Then he sat down aloneon the steps of the railroad station to wait for the evening train thatwould bring the man who was to replace him and that would at the sametime take him away. He did not know where he intended to go, but knewthat 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 summerevenings in the river town when the station master slept and his wifetalked. The boy who listened had wanted to sleep also, but with the eyesof Sarah Shepard fixed on him, had not dared to do so. The woman hadtalked of a land dotted with towns where the houses were all painted inbright colors, where young girls dressed in white dresses went about inthe evening, walking under trees beside streets paved with bricks, wherethere was no dust or mud, where stores were gay bright places filledwith beautiful wares that the people had money to buy in abundance andwhere every one was alive and doing things worth while and none wasslothful and lazy. The boy who had now become a man wanted to go to sucha place. His work in the railroad station had given him some idea of thegeography of the country and, although he could not have told whetherthe woman who had talked so enticingly had in mind her childhood in NewEngland or her girlhood in Michigan, he knew in a general way that toreach the land and the people who were to show him by their lives thebetter way to form his own life, he must go east. He decided that thefurther east he went the more beautiful life would become, and that hehad better not try going too far in the beginning. "I'll go into thenorthern part of Indiana or Ohio," he told himself. "There must bebeautiful towns in those places."

  Hugh was boyishly eager to get on his way and to become at once a partof the life in a new place. The gradual awakening of his mind hadgiven him courage, and he thought of himself as armed and ready forassociation with men. He wanted to become acquainted with and bethe friend of people whose lives were beautifully lived and who werethemselves beautiful and full of significance. As he sat on the stepsof the railroad station in the poor little Missouri town with his bagbeside him, and thought of all the things he wanted to do in life, hismind became so eager and restless that some of its restlessness wastransmitted to his body. For perhaps the first time in his life he arosewithout conscious effort and walked up and down the station platform outof an excess of energy. He thought he could not bear to wait until thetrain came and brought the man who was to take his place. "Well, I'mgoing away, I'm going away to be a man among men," he said to himselfover and over. The saying became a kind of refrain and he saidit unconsciously. As he repeated the words his heart beat high inanticipation of the future he thought lay before him.