South their fathers, having no money to buy slaves of their own and being
unwilling to compete with slave labor, had tried to live without labor. For
the most part they lived in the mountains and the hill country of Kentucky
and Tennessee, on land too poor and unproductive to be thought worth
cultivating by their rich slave-owning neighbors of the valleys and plains.
Their food was meager and of an enervating sameness and their bodies
degenerate. Children grew up long and gaunt and yellow like badly nourished
plants. Vague indefinite hungers took hold of them and they gave themselves
over to dreams. The more energetic among them, sensing dimly the unfairness
of their position in life, became vicious and dangerous. Feuds started
among them and they killed each other to express their hatred of life.
When, in the years preceding the Civil War, a few of them pushed north
along the rivers and settled in Southern Indiana and Illinois and in
Eastern Missouri and Arkansas, they seemed to have exhausted their energy
in making the voyage and slipped quickly back into their old slothful way
of life. Their impulse to emigrate did not carry them far and but a few of
them ever reached the rich corn lands of central Indiana, Illinois or Iowa
or the equally rich land back from the river in Missouri or Arkansas. In
Southern Indiana and Illinois they were merged into the life 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, the pioneers. In many of the Missouri and
Arkansas river towns they have changed but little. A visitor to these parts
may see them there to-day, long, gaunt, and lazy, sleeping their lives away
and awakening out of their 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 people for
a year after the departure of the man and woman who had been father and
mother to him, and then he also departed. All through the year he worked