After the departure of Sarah and Henry Shepard Hugh continued to struggle
with his inclination to give way to dreams. It seemed to him a struggle
it was necessary to win in order that he might show his respect and
appreciation of the woman who had spent so many long hours laboring with
him. Although, under her tutelage, he had received a better education than
any other young man of the river town, he had lost none of his physical
desire to sit in the sun and do nothing. When he worked, every task had
to be consciously carried on from minute to minute. After the woman left,
there were days when he sat in the chair in the telegraph office and fought
a desperate battle with himself. A queer determined light shone in his
small gray eyes. He arose from the chair and walked up and down the station
platform. Each time as he lifted one of his long feet and set it slowly
down a special little effort had to be made. To move about at all was a
painful performance, something he did not want to do. All physical acts
were to him dull but necessary parts of his training for a vague and
glorious future that was to come to him some day in a brighter and more
beautiful land that lay in the direction thought of rather indefinitely as
the East. "If I do not move and keep moving I'll become like father, like
all of the people about here," Hugh said to himself. He thought of the man
who had bred him and whom he occasionally saw drifting aimlessly along
Main Street or sleeping away a drunken stupor on the river bank.
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