neath her feet, and behind her the Lares and Penates of their migration; the bed and chairs and table bought at secondhand, the box of provisions, the two Indian rugs which had been her sole concession to luxury. She had already traveled a long road from her old protected life, and she was still on the way.
The storm had settled into a steady cold rain, the wagon rocked and slewed, steam rose from the broad backs of the horses, Tom's new work team. As slow mile on mile was covered the motion became, first tiring, then painful, and at last an unendurable agony. Tom had brought out his old slicker from the back of the wagon and insisted on her wearing it, but in spite of it rain dropped from the brim of her small hat and ran down her neck. The slicker smelled of oil and horses; it began to nauseate her. Wire fences, sage brush, vast empty stretches of sodden country, ditches filled with little green frogs, a gray haze to the left that must be the mountains, and always the road going on and on, seeming to drift aimlessly, to get nowhere.
"Look! There's a chicken!"
"I don't see any chicken."
"A prairie chicken! Right good eating in the spring; not now."
He saw everything; he knew the birds, the wild flowers. To him the journey was one through beloved country among dear familiar things. He had the sense of home; better than that, of home-coming. He sang and whistled and talked. Now and then he reached over and tucked the slicker in about her, but if he noticed the lethargy of misery about her he said nothing. Occasionally he turned an anxious possessive eye to the rear and the load. He had an enormous pride in that new "gear" of theirs; he had had so little for so long.
"Funny, when you think about it," he said, "this is the way the old boys came out—the pioneers, you know. Everything they had piled up behind them."
He talked about them. There over that rise had gone the earliest trail of the covered wagons, often with soldiers from the last fort to escort them for part of the way; there
