MARUJA

by BRET HARTE




MARUJA


CHAPTER I


Morning was breaking on the high road to San Jose. The long lines
of dusty, level track were beginning to extend their vanishing
point in the growing light; on either side the awakening fields of
wheat and oats were stretching out and broadening to the sky. In
the east and south the stars were receding before the coming day;
in the west a few still glimmered, caught among the bosky hills of
the canada del Raimundo, where night seemed to linger. Thither
some obscure, low-flying birds were slowly winging; thither a gray
coyote, overtaken by the morning, was awkwardly limping. And
thither a tramping wayfarer turned, plowing through the dust of the
highway still unslaked by the dewless night, to climb the fence and
likewise seek the distant cover.

For some moments man and beast kept an equal pace and gait with a
strange similarity of appearance and expression; the coyote bearing
that resemblance to his more civilized and harmless congener, the
dog, which the tramp bore to the ordinary pedestrians, but both