He lived
in a house belonging to a Mrs. McCoy, the widow of a railroad section hand
killed in a railroad accident, who had a daughter. The daughter, Rose
McCoy, taught a country school and most of the year was away from home from
Monday morning until late on Friday afternoon. Hugh lay in bed thinking of
what his workmen had said of women and heard the old housekeeper moving
about down stairs. Sometimes he got out of bed to sit by an open window.
Because she was the woman whose life touched his most closely, he thought
often of the school teacher. The McCoy house, a small frame affair with a
picket fence separating it from Turner's Pike, stood with its back door
facing the Wheeling Railroad. The section hands on the railroad remembered
their former fellow workman, Mike McCoy, and wanted to be good to his
widow. They sometimes dumped half decayed railroad ties over the fence into
a potato patch back of the house. At night, when heavily loaded coal trains
rumbled past, the brakemen heaved large chunks of coal over the fence. The
widow awoke whenever a train passed. When one of the brakemen threw a chunk
of coal he shouted and his voice could be heard above the rumble of the
coal cars. "That's for Mike," he cried. Sometimes one of the chunks knocked
a picket out of the fence and the next day Hugh put it back again. When the
train had passed the widow got out of bed and brought the coal into the
house.
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