He was
disgusted with him and had come to share the opinion the station master's
wife had always held concerning the people of the Missouri village.
"They're a lot of miserable lazy louts," she had declared a thousand times,
and Hugh, agreed with her, but sometimes wondered if in the end he might
not also become a lazy lout. That possibility he knew was in him and for
the sake of the woman as well as for his own sake he was determined it
should not be so.
The truth is that the people of Mudcat Landing were totally unlike any of
the people Sarah Shepard had ever known and unlike the people Hugh was to
know during his mature life. He who had come from a people not smart was to
live among smart energetic men and women and be called a big man by them
without in the least understanding what they were talking about.
Practically all of the people of Hugh's home town were of Southern origin.
Living originally in a land where all physical labor was performed by
slaves, they had come to have a deep aversion to physical labor. In the
South their fathers, having no money to buy slaves of their own and being
unwilling to compete with slave labor, had tried to live without labor. For
the most part they lived in the mountains and the hill country of Kentucky
and Tennessee, on land too poor and unproductive to be thought worth
cultivating by their rich slave-owning neighbors of the valleys and plains.
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