A long level of dull gray that further away became a faint blue, with
here and there darker patches that looked like water. At times an open
space, blackened and burnt in an irregular circle, with a shred of
newspaper, an old rag, or broken tin can lying in the ashes. Beyond
these always a low dark line that seemed to sink into the ground at
night, and rose again in the morning with the first light, but never
otherwise changed its height and distance. A sense of always moving with
some indefinite purpose, but of always returning at night to the same
place--with the same surroundings, the same people, the same bedclothes,
and the same awful black canopy dropped down from above. A chalky taste
of dust on the mouth and lips, a gritty sense of earth on the fingers,
and an all-pervading heat and smell of cattle.
This was “The Great Plains” as they seemed to two children from the
hooded depth of an emigrant wagon, above the swaying heads of toiling
oxen, in the summer of 1852.
It had appeared so to them for two weeks, always the same and always
without the least sense to them of wonder or monotony. When they viewed
it from the road, walking beside the wagon, there was only the team
itself added to the unvarying picture. One of the wagons bore on
its canvas hood the inscription, in large black letters, “Off to
California!” on the other “Root, Hog, or Die,” but neither of them
awoke in the minds of the children the faintest idea of playfulness or
jocularity. Perhaps it was difficult to connect the serious men, who
occasionally walked beside them and seemed to grow more taciturn and
depressed as the day wore on, with this past effusive pleasantry.
Yet the impressions of the two children differed slightly. The eldest, a
boy of eleven, was apparently new to the domestic habits and customs of
a life to which the younger, a girl of seven, was evidently native and
familiar. The food was coarse and less skillfully prepared than that to
which he had been accustomed. There was a certain freedom and roughness
in their intercourse, a simplicity that bordered almost on rudeness
in their domestic arrangements, and a speech that was at times almost
untranslatable to him. He slept in his clothes, wrapped up in blankets;
he was conscious that in the matter of cleanliness he was left to
himself to overcome the difficulties of finding water and towels. But it
is doubtful if in his youthfulness it affected him more than a novelty.
He ate and slept well, and found his life amusing. Only at times the
rudeness of his companions, or, worse, an indifference that made him
feel his dependency upon them, awoke a vague sense of some wrong that
had been done to him which while it was voiceless to all others and
even uneasily put aside by himself, was still always slumbering in his
childish consciousness.
To the party he was known as an orphan put on the train at “St. Jo” by
some relative of his stepmother, to be delivered to another relative at
Sacramento. As his stepmother had not even taken leave of him, but had
entrusted his departure to the relative with whom he had been lately
living, it was considered as an act of “riddance,” and accepted as such
by her party, and even vaguely acquiesced in by the boy himself. What
consideration had been offered for his passage he did not know; he only
remembered that he had been told “to make himself handy.” This he had
done cheerfully, if at times with the unskillfulness of a novice; but it
was not a peculiar or a menial task in a company where all took part in
manual labor, and where existence seemed to him to bear the charm of
a prolonged picnic. Neither was he subjected to any difference of
affection or treatment from Mrs. Silsbee, the mother of his little
companion, and the wife of the leader of the train. Prematurely old,
of ill-health, and harassed with cares, she had no time to waste in
discriminating maternal tenderness for her daughter, but treated the
children with equal and unbiased querulousness.
The rear wagon creaked, swayed, and rolled on slowly and heavily. The
hoofs of the draft-oxen, occasionally striking in the dust with a
dull report, sent little puffs like smoke on either side of the track.
Within, the children were playing “keeping store.” The little girl, as
an opulent and extravagant customer, was purchasing of the boy, who sat
behind a counter improvised from a nail-keg and the front seat, most of
the available contents of the wagon, either under their own names or an
imaginary one as the moment suggested, and paying for them in the easy
and liberal currency of dried beans and bits of paper. Change was given
by the expeditious method of tearing the paper into smaller fragments.
The diminution of stock was remedied by buying the same article over
again under a different name. Nevertheless, in spite of these favorable
commercial conditions, the market seemed dull.
“I can show you a fine quality of sheeting at four cents a yard, double
width,” said the boy, rising and leaning on his fingers on the counter
as he had seen the shopmen do. “All wool and will wash,” he added, with
easy gravity.
“I can buy it cheaper at Jackson's,” said the girl, with the intuitive
duplicity of her bargaining sex.
“Very well,” said the boy. “I won't play any more.”
“Who cares?” said the girl indifferently. The boy here promptly upset
the counter; the rolled-up blanket which had deceitfully represented the
desirable sheeting falling on the wagon floor. It apparently suggested
a new idea to the former salesman. “I say! let's play 'damaged stock.'
See, I'll tumble all the things down here right on top o' the others,
and sell 'em for less than cost.”
The girl looked up. The suggestion was bold, bad, and momentarily
attractive. But she only said “No,” apparently from habit, picked up her
doll, and the boy clambered to the front of the wagon. The incomplete
episode terminated at once with that perfect forgetfulness,
indifference, and irresponsibility common to all young animals. If
either could have flown away or bounded off finally at that moment, they
would have done so with no more concern for preliminary detail than a
bird or squirrel. The wagon rolled steadily on. The boy could see that
one of the teamsters had climbed up on the tail-board of the preceding
vehicle. The other seemed to be walking in a dusty sleep.
“Kla'uns,” said the girl.
The boy, without turning his head, responded, “Susy.”
“Wot are you going to be?” said the girl.
“Goin' to be?” repeated Clarence.
“When you is growed,” explained Susy.
Clarence hesitated. His settled determination had been to become a
pirate, merciless yet discriminating. But reading in a bethumbed “Guide
to the Plains” that morning of Fort Lamarie and Kit Carson, he had
decided upon the career of a “scout,” as being more accessible and
requiring less water. Yet, out of compassion for Susy's possible
ignorance, he said neither, and responded with the American boy's modest
conventionality, “President.” It was safe, required no embarrassing
description, and had been approved by benevolent old gentlemen with
their hands on his head.
“I'm goin' to be a parson's wife,” said Susy, “and keep hens, and
have things giv' to me. Baby clothes, and apples, and apple sass--and
melasses! and more baby clothes! and pork when you kill.”
She had thrown herself at the bottom of the wagon, with her back towards
him and her doll in her lap. He could see the curve of her curly head,
and beyond, her bare dimpled knees, which were raised, and over which
she was trying to fold the hem of her brief skirt.
“I wouldn't be a President's wife,” she said presently.
“You couldn't!”
“Could if I wanted to!”
“Couldn't!”
“Could now!”
“Couldn't!”
“Why?”
Finding it difficult to explain his convictions of her ineligibility,
Clarence thought it equally crushing not to give any. There was a long
silence. It was very hot and dusty. The wagon scarcely seemed to move.
Clarence gazed at the vignette of the track behind them formed by
the hood of the rear. Presently he rose and walked past her to the
tail-board. “Goin' to get down,” he said, putting his legs over.
“Maw says 'No,'” said Susy.
Clarence did not reply, but dropped to the ground beside the slowly
turning wheels. Without quickening his pace he could easily keep his
hand on the tail-board.
“Kla'uns.”
He looked up.
“Take me.”
She had already clapped on her sun-bonnet and was standing at the edge
of the tail-board, her little arms extended in such perfect confidence
of being caught that the boy could not resist. He caught her cleverly.
They halted a moment and let the lumbering vehicle move away from them,
as it swayed from side to side as if laboring in a heavy sea. They
remained motionless until it had reached nearly a hundred yards, and
then, with a sudden half-real, half-assumed, but altogether delightful
trepidation, ran forward and caught up with it again. This they repeated
two or three times until both themselves and the excitement were
exhausted, and they again plodded on hand in hand. Presently Clarence
uttered a cry.
“My! Susy--look there!”
The rear wagon had once more slipped away from them a considerable
distance. Between it and them, crossing its track, a most extraordinary
creature had halted.
At first glance it seemed a dog--a discomfited, shameless, ownerless
outcast of streets and byways, rather than an honest stray of some
drover's train. It was so gaunt, so dusty, so greasy, so slouching,
and so lazy! But as they looked at it more intently they saw that the
grayish hair of its back had a bristly ridge, and there were great
poisonous-looking dark blotches on its flanks, and that the slouch of
its haunches was a peculiarity of its figure, and not the cowering of
fear. As it lifted its suspicious head towards them they could see that
its thin lips, too short to cover its white teeth, were curled in a
perpetual sneer.
“Here, doggie!” said Clarence excitedly. “Good dog! Come.”
Susy burst into a triumphant laugh. “Et tain't no dog, silly; it's er
coyote.”
Clarence blushed. It wasn't the first time the pioneer's daughter had
shown her superior knowledge. He said quickly, to hide his discomfiture,
“I'll ketch him, any way; he's nothin' mor'n a ki yi.”
“Ye can't, tho,” said Susy, shaking her sun-bonnet. “He's faster nor a
hoss!”
Nevertheless, Clarence ran towards him, followed by Susy. When they had
come within twenty feet of him, the lazy creature, without apparently
the least effort, took two or three limping bounds to one side, and
remained at the same distance as before. They repeated this onset three
or four times with more or less excitement and hilarity, the animal
evading them to one side, but never actually retreating before them.
Finally, it occurred to them both that although they were not catching
him they were not driving him away. The consequences of that thought
were put into shape by Susy with round-eyed significance.
“Kla'uns, he bites.”
Clarence picked up a hard sun-baked clod, and, running forward, threw
it at the coyote. It was a clever shot, and struck him on his slouching
haunches. He snapped and gave a short snarling yelp, and vanished.
Clarence returned with a victorious air to his companion. But she was
gazing intently in the opposite direction, and for the first time he
discovered that the coyote had been leading them half round a circle.
“Kla'uns,” said Susy, with a hysterical little laugh.
“Well?”
“The wagon's gone.”
Clarence started. It was true. Not only their wagon, but the whole train
of oxen and teamsters had utterly disappeared, vanishing as completely
as if they had been caught up in a whirlwind or engulfed in the earth!
Even the low cloud of dust that usually marked their distant course by
day was nowhere to be seen. The long level plain stretched before them
to the setting sun, without a sign or trace of moving life or animation.
That great blue crystal bowl, filled with dust and fire by day, with
stars and darkness by night, which had always seemed to drop its rim
round them everywhere and shut them in, seemed to them now to have
been lifted to let the train pass out, and then closed down upon them
forever.