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 opule