"I don't want to give the boys away by leaving it lying around
in the daylight," she explained to Hugh. On Sunday mornings Hugh took a
crosscut saw and cut the railroad ties into lengths that would go into the
kitchen stove. Slowly his place in the McCoy household had become fixed,
and when he received the hundred thousand dollars and everybody, even the
mother and daughter, expected him to move, he did not do so. He tried
unsuccessfully to get the widow to take more money for his board and when
that effort failed, life in the McCoy household went as it had when he was
a telegraph operator receiving forty dollars a month.
In the spring or fall, as he sat by his window at night, and when the moon
came up and the dust in Turner's Pike was silvery white, Hugh thought of
Rose McCoy, sleeping in some farmer's house. It did not occur to him that
she might also be awake and thinking. He imagined her lying very still in
bed. The section hand's daughter was a slender woman of thirty with tired
blue eyes and red hair. Her skin had been heavily freckled in her youth and
her nose was still freckled. Although Hugh did not know it, she had once
been in love with George Pike, the Wheeling station agent, and a day had
been set for the marriage. Then a difficulty arose in regard to religious
beliefs and George Pike married another woman. It was then she became a
school teacher.
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