He wondered if some twist of life might not have made him one.
Thinking of the Iowa man, Hugh began to think of other men. He thought of
his father and of himself. When he was striving to come out of the filth,
the flies, the poverty, the fishy smells, the shadowy dreams of his life
by the river, his father had often tried to draw him back into that life.
In imagination he saw before him the dissolute man who had bred him. On
afternoons of summer days in the river town, when Henry Shepard was not
about, his father sometimes came to the station where he was employed. He
had begun to earn a little money and his father wanted it to buy drinks.
Why?
There was a problem for Hugh's mind, a problem that could not be solved in
wood and steel. He walked and thought about it when he should have been
making new parts for the hay-loading apparatus. He had lived but little in
the life of the imagination, had been afraid to live that life, had been
warned and re-warned against living it. The shadowy figure of the unknown
inventor in the state of Iowa, who had been brother to himself, who had
worked on the same problems and had come to the same conclusions, slipped
away, followed by the almost equally shadowy figure of his father. Hugh
tried to think of himself and his own life.
For a time that seemed a simple and easy way out of the new and intricate
task he had set for his mind.
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