They were nearing the Forks of the Platte where the air was dryly
transparent and sound carried far. While yet the encamped train was a
congeries of broken white dots on the river's edge, they could hear the
bark of a dog and then singing, a thin thread of melody sent aloft by a
woman's voice.
It was like a handclasp across space. Drawing nearer the sounds of men
and life reached forward to meet them--laughter, the neighing of
horses, the high, broken cry of a child. They felt as if they were
returning to a home they had left and that sometimes, in the stillness
of the night or when vision lost itself in the vague distances, they
still longed for.
The train had shaped itself into its night form, the circular coil in
which it slept, like a thick, pale serpent resting after the day's
labors. The white arched prairie schooners were drawn up in a ring,
the defensive bulwark of the plains. The wheels, linked together by
the yoke chains, formed a barrier against Indian attacks. Outside this
interlocked rampart was a girdle of fires, that gleamed through the
twilight like a chain of jewels flung round the night's bivouac.
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