s 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 brake as we went
down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side. I had the
feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of
it, and were outside man's jurisdiction. I had never before looked up
at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But
this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it. I did not
believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there;
they would still be looking for me at the sheep-fold down by the creek,
or along the white road that led to the mountain pastures. I had left
even their spirits behind me. The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew
not whither. I don't think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere,
it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased,
blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what
would be would be.

II

I DO NOT REMEMBER our arrival at my grandfather's farm sometime before
daybreak, after a drive of nearly twenty miles with heavy work-horses.