constantly to cure himself of the curse of indolence. When he awoke in the
morning he did not dare lie in bed for a moment for fear indolence 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. During the day there was not
much work to be done and he walked for hours up and down the station
platform. When he sat down he at once took up a book and put his mind to
work. When the pages of the book became indistinct before his eyes and he
felt within him the inclination to drift off into dreams, he again arose
and walked up and down the 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