The tall Missouri countryman sat down on a log near the edge of the cliff
and tried to see the water in the river below. Nothing was visible but a
bed of stars that danced and twinkled in the darkness. He had made his way
to a place far above the railroad bridge, but presently a through passenger
train from the West passed over it and the lights of the train looked also
like stars, stars that moved and beckoned and that seemed to fly like
flocks of birds out of the West into the East.

For several hours Hugh sat on the log in the darkness. He decided that it
was hopeless for him to find his way back to the hotel, and was glad of the
excuse for staying abroad. His body for the first time in his life felt
light and strong and his mind was feverishly awake. A buggy in which sat a
young man and woman went along the road at his back, and after the voices
had died away silence came, broken only at long intervals during the hours
when he sat thinking of his future by the barking of a dog in some distant
house or the churning of the paddle-wheels of a passing river boat.

All of the early formative years of Hugh McVey's life had been spent within
sound of the lapping of the waters of the Mississippi River. He had seen it
in the hot summer when the water receded and the mud lay baked and cracked
along the edge of the water; in the spring when the floods raged and the
water went whirling past, bearing tree logs and even parts of houses; in
the winter when the water looked deathly cold and ice floated past; and in
the fall when it was quiet and still and lovely, and seemed to have sucked
an almost human quality of warmth out of the red trees that lined its
shores. Hugh had spent hours and days sitting or lying in the grass beside
the river. The fishing shack in which he had lived with his father until he
was fourteen years old was within a half dozen long strides of the river's
edge, and the boy had often been left there alone for a week at a time.