there were days when he sat in the chair in the telegraph office and fought
a desperate battle with himself. A queer determined light shone in his
small gray eyes. He arose from the chair and walked up and down the station
platform. Each time as he lifted one of his long feet and set it slowly
down a special little effort had to be made. To move about at all was a
painful performance, something he did not want to do. All physical acts
were to him dull but necessary parts of his training for a vague and
glorious future that was to come to him some day in a brighter and more
beautiful land that lay in the direction thought of rather indefinitely as
the East. "If I do not move and keep moving I'll become like father, like
all of the people about here," Hugh said to himself. He thought of the man
who had bred him and whom he occasionally saw drifting aimlessly along
Main Street or sleeping away a drunken stupor on the river bank. He was
disgusted with him and had come to share the opinion the station master's
wife had always held concerning the people of the Missouri village.
"They're a lot of miserable lazy louts," she had declared a thousand times,
and Hugh, agreed with her, but sometimes wondered if in the end he might
not also become a lazy lout. That possibility he knew was in him and for
the sake of the woman as well as for his own sake he was determined it
should not be so.

The truth is that the people of Mudcat Landing were totally unlike any of
the people Sarah Shepard had ever known and unlike the people Hugh was to
know during his mature life. He who had come from a people not smart was to
live among smart energetic men and women and be called a big man by them
without in the least understanding what they were talking about.

Practically all of the people of Hugh's home town were of Southern origin.
Living originally in a land where all physical labor was performed by
slaves, they had come to have a deep aversion to physical labor. In the