runk in her arms, hugging it as if it were a baby. There was an old
man, tall and stooped. Two half-grown boys and a girl stood holding
oil-cloth bundles, and a little girl clung to her mother's skirts.
Presently a man with a lantern approached them and began to talk, shouting
and exclaiming. I pricked up my ears, for it was positively the first time
I had ever heard a foreign tongue.

Another lantern came along. A bantering voice called out: "Hello, are you
Mr. Burden's folks? If you are, it's me you're looking for. I'm Otto
Fuchs. I'm Mr. Burden's hired man, and I'm to drive you out. Hello, Jimmy,
ain't you scared to come so far west?"

[Illustration: Immigrant family huddled together on the train platform]

I looked up with interest at the new face in the lantern light. He might
have stepped out of the pages of "Jesse James." He wore a sombrero hat,
with a wide leather band and a bright buckle, and the ends of his mustache
were twisted up stiffly, like little horns. He looked lively and
ferocious, I thought, and as if he had a history. A long scar ran across
one cheek and drew the corner of his mouth up in a sinister curl. The top
of his left ear was gone, and his skin was brown as an Indian's. Surely
this was the face of a desperado. As he walked about the platform in his
high-heeled boots, looking for our trunks, I saw that he was a rather
slight man, quick and wiry, and light on his feet. He told us we had a
long night drive ahead of us, and had better be on the hike. He led us to
a hitching-bar where two farm wagons were tied, and I saw the foreign
family crowding into one of them. The other was for us. Jake got on the
front seat with Otto Fuchs, and I rode on the straw in the bottom of the
wagon-box, covered up with a buffalo hide. The immigrants rumbled off into
the empty darkness, and we followed them.

I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon
began to ache all over. When the straw settled down I had a hard bed.
Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and
peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no
fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I
could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land:
not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
No, there was nothing but land--slightly undulating, I knew, because often
our wheels ground against the br