the streets and on the river bank and only awakened out of his habitual
stupor when, driven by hunger or the craving for drink, he went for a day's
work in some farmer's field at harvest time or joined a number of other
idlers for an adventurous trip down river on a lumber raft. The baby was
left shut up in the shack by the river or carried about wrapped in a soiled
blanket. Soon after he was old enough to walk he was compelled to find work
in order that he might eat. The boy of ten went listlessly about town at
the heels of his father. The two found work, which the boy did while the
man lay sleeping in the sun. They cleaned cisterns, swept out stores and
saloons and at night went with a wheelbarrow and a box to remove and dump
in the river the contents of out-houses. At fourteen Hugh was as tall as
his father and almost without education. He could read a little and could
write his own name, had picked up these accomplishments from other boys who
came to fish with him in the river, but he had never been to school. For
days sometimes he did nothing but lie half asleep in the shade of a bush on
the river bank. The fish he caught on his more industrious days he sold for
a few cents to some housewife, and thus got money to buy food for his big
growing indolent body. Like an animal that has come to its maturity he
turned away from his father, not because of resentment for his hard youth,
but because he thought it time to begin to go his own way.

In his fourteenth year and when the boy was on the point of sinking into
the sort of animal-like stupor in which his father had lived, something
happened to him. A railroad pushed its way down along the river to his town
and he got a job as man of all work for the station master. He swept out
the station, put trunks on trains, mowed the grass in the station yard and
helped in a hundred odd ways the man who held the combined jobs of ticket
seller, baggage master and telegraph operator at the little out-of-the-way
place.