And all over the country, in the towns, the farm houses, and the growing
cities of the new country, people stirred and awakened. Thought and
poetry died or passed as a heritage to feeble fawning men who also
became servants of the new order. Serious young men in Bidwell and in
other American towns, whose fathers had walked together on moonlight
nights along Turner's Pike to talk of God, went away to technical
schools. Their fathers had walked and talked and thoughts had grown
up in them. The impulse had reached back to their father's fathers on
moonlit roads of England, Germany, Ireland, France, and Italy, and
back of these to the moonlit hills of Judea where shepherds talked and
serious young men, John and Matthew and Jesus, caught the drift of the
talk and made poetry of it; but the serious-minded sons of these men in
the new land were swept away from thinking and dreaming. From all sides
the voice of the new age that was to do definite things shouted at them.
Eagerly they took up the cry and ran with it. Millions of voices arose.
The clamor became terrible, and confused the minds of all men. In making
way for the newer, broader brotherhood into which men are some day to
emerge, in extending the invisible roofs of the towns and cities to
cover the world, men cut and crushed their way through the bodies of
men.
And while the voices became louder and more excited and the new giant
walked about making a preliminary survey of the land, Hugh spent his
days at the quiet, sleepy railroad station at Pickleville and tried to
adjust his mind to the realization of the fact that he was not to be
accepted as fellow by the citizens of the new place to which he had
come. During the day he sat in the tiny telegraph office or, pulling an
express truck to the open window near his telegraph instrument, lay on
his back with a sheet of paper propped on his bony knees and did sums.
Farmers driving past on Turner's Pike saw him there and talked of him
in the stores in town. “He's a queer silent fellow,” they said. “What do
you suppose he's up to?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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