The Covered Wagon by Emerson Hough
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page 8 of 348 (02%)
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It was a great picture, a stirring panorama of an earlier day, which now
unfolded. Slow, swaying, stately, the ox teams came on, as though impelled by and not compelling the fleet of white canvas sails. The teams did not hasten, did not abate their speed, but moved in an unagitated advance that gave the massed column something irresistibly epochal in look. The train, foreshortened to the watchers at the rendezvous, had a well-spaced formation--twenty wagons, thirty, forty, forty-seven--as Jesse Wingate mentally counted them. There were outriders; there were clumps of driven cattle. Along the flanks walked tall men, who flung over the low-headed cattle an admonitory lash whose keen report presently could be heard, still faint and far off. A dull dust cloud arose, softening the outlines of the prairie ships. The broad gestures of arm and trunk, the monotonous soothing of commands to the sophisticated kine as yet remained vague, so that still it was properly a picture done on a vast canvas--that of the frontier in '48; a picture of might, of inevitableness. Even the sober souls of these waiters rose to it, felt some thrill they themselves had never analyzed. A boy of twenty, tall, blond, tousled, rode up from the grove back of the encampment of the Wingate family. "You, Jed?" said his father. "Ride on out and see if Molly's there." "Sure she is!" commented the youth, finding a plug in the pocket of his jeans. "That's her. Two fellers, like usual." "Sam Woodhull, of course," said the mother, still hand over eye. "He hung around all winter, telling how him and Colonel Doniphan whipped all |
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