Breakfast was a farce; nobody's fire would burn and the
women were wet through before they had the coffee pots out. One or two
provident parties had stoves fitted up in their wagons with a joint of
pipe coming out through holes in the canvas. From these, wafts of
smoke issued with jaunty assurance, to be beaten down by the rain,
which swept them fiercely out of the landscape.
There was no perspective, the distance invisible, nearer outlines
blurred. The world was a uniform tint, walls of gray marching in a
slant across a foreground embroidered with pools. Water ran, or
dripped, or stood everywhere. The river, its surface roughened by the
spit of angry drops, ran swollen among its islands, plumed shapes seen
mistily through the veil. The road emerged in oases of mud from long,
inundated spaces. Down the gullies in the hills, following the beaten
buffalo tracks, streams percolated through the grass of the bottom,
feeling their way to the river.
Notwithstanding the weather a goodly company of mounted men rode at the
head of the train. They were wet to the skin and quite indifferent to
it.
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