When Hugh stepped into the moonlight around the corner of the house, Clara ran down the steps to meet him, and taking his arm, led him past the barns and over the bridge where as a child she had seen the figures of her fancy advancing towards her. Sensing his troubled state her mother spirit was aroused. He was unfilled by the life he led. She understood that. It was so with her. By a lane they went to a fence where nothing but open fields lay between the farm and the town far below. Although she sensed his troubled state, Clara was not thinking of Hugh’s trip to Pittsburgh nor of the problems connected with the completion of the hay-loading machine. It may be that like her father she had dismissed from her mind all thoughts of him as one who would continue to help solve the mechanical problems of his age. Thoughts of his continued success had never meant much to her, but during the evening something had happened to Clara and she wanted to tell him about it, to take him into the joy of it. Their first child had been a girl and she was sure the next would be a man child. “I felt him to-night,” she said, when they had got to the place by the fence and saw below the lights of the town. “I felt him to-night,” she said again, “and oh, he was strong! He kicked like anything. I am sure this time it’s a boy.”

For perhaps ten minutes Clara and Hugh stood by the fence. The disease of thinking that was making Hugh useless for the work of his age had swept away many old things within him and he was not self-conscious in the presence of his woman. When she told him of the struggle of the man of another generation, striving to be born he put his arm about her and held her close against his long body. For a time they stood in silence, and then started to return to the house and sleep. As they went past the barns and the bunkhouse where several men now slept they heard, as though coming out of the past, the loud snoring of the rapidly ageing farm hand, Jim Priest, and then above that sound and above the sound of the animals stirring in the barns arose another sound, a sound shrill and intense, greetings perhaps to an unborn Hugh McVey. For some reason, perhaps to announce a shift in crews, the factories of Bidwell that were engaged in night work set up a great whistling and screaming. The sound ran up the hillside and rang in the ears of Hugh as, with his arm about Clara’s shoulders, he went up the steps and in at the farmhouse door.

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Poor White

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