him money to bury the dead man. Then he wired to the headquarters of the
railroad company 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
bought himself a handbag and packed his few belongings. Then he sat down
alone on the steps of the railroad station to wait for the evening train
that would bring the man who was to replace him and that would at the same
time take him away. He did not know where he intended to go, but knew that
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 summer evenings in the
river town when the station master slept and his wife talked. The boy who
listened had wanted to sleep also, but with the eyes of Sarah Shepard fixed
on him, had not dared to do so. The woman had talked of a land dotted with
towns where the houses were all painted in bright colors, where young girls
dressed in white dresses went about in the evening, walking under trees
beside streets paved with bricks, where there was no dust or mud, where
stores were gay bright places filled with beautiful wares that the people
had money to buy in abundance and where every one was alive and doing
things worth while and none was slothful and lazy. The boy who had now
become a man wanted to go to such a place. His work in the railroad station
had given him some idea of the geography of the country and, although he
could not have told whether the woman who had talked so enticingly had in
mind her childhood in New England or her girlhood in Michigan, he knew in
a general way that to reach the land and the people who were to show him
by their lives the better way to form his own life, he must go east. He
decided that the further east he went the more beautiful life would become,
and that he had better not try going too far in the beginning. "I'll go
into the northern part of Indiana or Ohio," he told himself. "There must be
beautiful towns in those places."

Hugh was boyishly eager to get on his way and to become at once a part of