As
they lay on the burned grass in the warm sunlight they talked and the boy
who lay half asleep nearby listened. The voices came to him as though out
of the clouds or up out of the lazy waters of the great river and the talk
of women awoke his boyhood lusts. One of the men, a tall young fellow with
a mustache and with dark rings under his eyes, told in a lazy, drawling
voice the tale of an adventure had with a woman one night when a raft on
which he was employed had tied up near the city of St. Louis, and Hugh
listened enviously. As he told the tale the young man a little awoke from
his stupor, and when he laughed the other men lying about laughed with him.
"I got the best of her after all," he boasted. "After it was all over we
went into a little room at the back of a saloon. I watched my chance and
when she went to sleep sitting in a chair I took eight dollars out of her
stocking."
That night in the buggy beside Clara, Hugh thought of himself lying by the
river bank on the summer days. Dreams had come to him there, sometimes
gigantic dreams; but there had also come ugly thoughts and desires. By his
father's shack there was always the sharp rancid smell of decaying fish and
swarms of flies filled the air. Out in the clean Ohio country, in the hills
south of Bidwell, it seemed to him that the smell of decaying fish came
back, that it was in his clothes, that it had in some way worked its way
into his nature.
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