Next I was aware of ceaseless movement. All that was about me lurched
and oscillated. There was jolt and jar, and I heard what I knew as a
matter of course to be the grind of wheels on axles and the grate and
clash of iron tyres against rock and sand. And there came to me the
jaded voices of men, in curse and snarl of slow-plodding, jaded animals.

I opened my eyes, that were inflamed with dust, and immediately fresh
dust bit into them. On the coarse blankets on which I lay the dust was
half an inch thick. Above me, through sifting dust, I saw an arched roof
of lurching, swaying canvas, and myriads of dust motes descended heavily
in the shafts of sunshine that entered through holes in the canvas.

I was a child, a boy of eight or nine, and I was weary, as was the woman,
dusty-visaged and haggard, who sat up beside me and soothed a crying babe
in her arms. She was my mother; that I knew as a matter of course, just
as I knew, when I glanced along the canvas tunnel of the wagon-top, that
the shoulders of the man on the driver's seat were the shoulders of my
father.

When I started to crawl along the packed gear with which the wagon was
laden my mother said in a tired and querulous voice, "Can't you ever be
still a minute, Jesse?"

That was my name, Jesse. I did not know my surname, though I heard my
mother call my father John. I have a dim recollection of hearing, at one
time or another, the other men address my father as Captain. I knew that
he was the leader of this company, and that his orders were obeyed by
all.

I crawled out through the opening in the canvas and sat down beside my
father on the seat. The air was stifling with the dust that rose from
the wagons and the many hoofs of the animals. So thick was the dust that
it was like mist or fog in the air, and the low sun shone through it
dimly and with a bloody light.

Not alone was the light of this setting sun ominous, but everything about
me seemed ominous--the landscape, my father's face, the fret of the babe
in my mother's arms that she could not still, the six horses my father
drove that had continually to be urged and that were without any sign of
colour, so heavily had the dust settled on them.

The landscape was an aching, eye-hurting desolation. Low hills stretched
endlessly away on every hand. Here and there only on their slopes were
occasional scrub growths of heat-parched brush. For the most part the
surface of the hills was naked-