The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Waif of the Plains, by Bret Harte

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Title: A Waif of the Plains

Author: Bret Harte

Release Date: May 13, 2006 [EBook #2279]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A WAIF OF THE PLAINS ***

Produced by Donald Lainson

A WAIF OF THE PLAINS

by Bret Harte

CHAPTER I

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